Took Josiah out running today.

He's been at me every time I go running with friends to come with us, and I've tried over and over again to explain to him that he's just not going to be able to keep up and that it would result in no exercise for me and no fun for him. But he has persisted til I decided to take him out on a run to show him what I mean.

So we went on a run down to Discovery Park, which is about a quarter mile from our house. I kept a slow pace so we would stay together, just enough so he would be running at a speed proportionate to my normal running speed. I expected him to putter out after the first couple blocks, but he didn't.

Then I expected him to ask if we could stop when we hit the big hill that leads up into the park, and he didn't. He made it all the way up into the park, and around one of the wooded trails without stopping once.

When we'd been gone for about 20 minutes, I asked if he was ready to head back, he said once more around the trail, so around we went. Then he said he was ready to go back home. About an eighth of a mile from the house he got a couple cramps but ran through them, and sprinted with me up the hill and into the house.

I was very impressed, & told him so. He looked up at me with his tomato-red face and beamed a big smile, and said he was impressed too.

He's still not running with me when I'm going for exercise, but I'm definitely going to keep taking him out after this.

This is the Universe. Liberally daubed with chocolate. Apparently Josiah got it in his head that he wanted to paint the Universe, and this is what came out.

I think that's pretty neat for a five year old.
Enoch just turned three, but for me their growings are so gradual I don't notice any difference. It takes a Iphoto trip down memory lane to remember when Enoch was still crawling, & when Josiah and Jaelle were the only ones talking.

Just finished finals. Can't believe I got a B- on the European Art History final, but I guess that's what happens when you don't study. Sure I did well on stats, and in West & The World, pretty sure about Greek but then again there are those two homework assignments I never turned in. Not really worried about it.

Climbing Mt. Si tomorrow, Lord willing, that should be fun.
I took a week off of work so we should be able to find some fun things to do with our family time. I also intend to go back over all my Greek work to make sure it all settles in the Cerebrum where it belongs. Since one of the main reasons for going to school for Classics was to gain the ability to read the NT in Greek, I hope to make it more than just a class.

Wierd dreams the past couple of nights. Last night I led a group of people to a new planet after earth was destroyed, and the night before that I was walking from a futuristic Seattle to Centralia and stumbled across my friend from 3rd grade Benjamin Clary's family farm, which was also futuristic. He was my age (which makes sense) and had red curly hair (which doesn't, he had dark hair like me back in 3rd grade) but I spent the night at his family's place and ate a big farm breakfast before heading back out on foot. And there were Lions in the Lewis County woods.

Dreams are inexplicable. But then again, we live in a crazy-looking universe with liberal chocolate smears.

Josiah's sense of fashion has failed him.
(Those are camo pants.)

Different Motives for Being Born Again.

Also, just the other day, Josiah and I were sitting on the couch after a Nerf Gunfight, and I noticed he was gazing very intently at the photo montage of himself as a baby. He turned to me and asked if he could be a baby again, I told him no, we only get one shot at that, but at the Resurrection we'll have all the good things about being a baby, like the newness and excitement of discovery. He kept looking at the picture and after a couple more seconds said, "I want to be a baby again". I asked him why, expecting some answer about the joys and carefree life of babyhood - but instead he turned to me and replied "Because I want to wear that shirt again. I really like that shirt. (pointing to the shirt he was wearing in the baby picture). I started laughing, and he explained to me that he used to really like his skateboard shirt, which he showed to me in the dirty laundry, but now he really likes "This shirt" (gesturing at the longsleeve camo shirt he was wearing) I told him I already knew he must really like that shirt because he's been wearing it three days in a row.

A Day in the Life of Me.

Today, I counted to 1,000 for Josiah. Well, now that I think of it, it was 1,020. I can't remember why we got on the subject, but he asked me how you counted to 1,000, and I told him it's like counting to 100 ten times. Then he asked me to show him. I started, expecting him to get bored at about two hundred, but no - he sat there watching me, sucking his thumb on and off, for the whole ten minutes or however long it took. Then I counted to 20, to make sure he knew that 1000 wasn't as high as I could count. Which doesn't really make sense, but it made him happy. For most of the time Jaelle was annoyed because the sound of me counting was interfering with her watching the "Planet Earth" DVD. But it ended when I hit about 700 so she went into the bedroom to look at books. (She can't read yet, but she'll just sit and look at books)
After counting to 1,020, Josiah wanted to gunfight. So we did, with these Nerf guns we got him for his birthday. He's a really good shot, he shot me just as much as I shot him - I guess I'm a larger target, but still, that's pretty good. But that's also what he spends most of his time doing, shooting. He got to be a really good shot with his little toy bow too.
Then Brandy came home, and after stuffing the kids with sandwiches and me watching a few gunfighting scenes from westerns or john woo movies with Josiah at his request. The last one was from a movie I've never seen in Chinese with Chow Yun Fat, and I got really into it but then it cut out at the crucial moment. Then the kids took a nap after getting me to pray for them, and Brandy and I sat down to watch the third disk of "Lost" with some cheesy bean dip, chips, and a couple glasses of wine, but not before Brandy sent off the application for the apartment in Queen Ann that we're going for. Then I took my one and a half hour nap, & Brandy was able to snuggle with me for the first five minutes which was nice. Then I woke up to go to work, listening to "Enter the Worship Circle" #2 and thinking again that I should really start picking up the guitar again. And also thinking and praying that I really want to feel what I'm singing and wondering why I don't always and in what areas my relationship to Jesus Christ and the Father is deficient - and wondering about the nature of faith and how C.S. Lewis said that what pleases God most is when a man feels utterly abandoned by God but keeps on believing and obeying, and how O. Chambers says (over and over again) that we aren't meant to live in the "mountaintop experience" but to live in the light of it in the valley, where we spend most of our time. Then I thought about that song I love by Derek Webb "Wedding Dress", and thought about the most recent music by him, how he's become a little too cool for me, all anti-war pro-gay and S-word saying. Then I wondered about Martin Luther and the lawfulness of saying such words, and Then I thought about that mini-sermon "Others May, You Cannot" thing and about my conversation with Nate Musson the other day.
And now, I'm at dispatch refreshing my memorization of Titus amidst incoming calls and manning the reception desk.

I had to explain to Josiah the other day what a transvestite is.

We were taking a family outing to the mall, and as Josiah and I were walking apart for a bit, I stopped for some reason or other and knelt down, as I did a transvestite came walking past, and I saw josiah do a double take, and stretch his neck out like he does when he's trying to get a better look at something unusual. The poor misguided thing walked past, and josiah watched it go with his little eyebrows scrunched up. Then he patted me on the back and said, "Dad, dad - that guy was wearing girl clothes!" So I said yes, he was, and explained that a small percentage of the population is messed up in the head, and because they don't know Jesus, and they don't know God, they don't know up from down either and want to be girls and want guys to like them so they dress like girls 'cause they think that will help. Josiah shook his head, with a half smirk and raised eyebrows, and laughed again at the silliness of the idea, and said - "ha!, a guy! wearing girl clothes! that's just wierd." Then he asked why the guy didn't believe in Jesus and I told him I wasn't sure, but that there are a lot of weird things like that in this world because lots of people don't know Jesus. Then we re-joined Brandy & the other two kids and headed for the gumball machine.