The New Room

In an earlier post I wrote of the treasure hunt I set up for Gwendolyn on Christmas. Here is the promised post about the gift at the end of the trail.

Way back in 2008 I painted the room which would, for the first three years of her life, belong to Gwendolyn.  The arrival of our second child made us decide to convert the other half of that room (it's really a single room divided in two by a partition) into a new bedroom for Gwendolyn and hand down the orange-and-green room to Micah.

Seeing this change as an opportunity for artistic expression, I decided on a scheme for painting the walls in Gwendolyn's New Room. Rather than the circles and curves of the nursery, I preferred lines and polygons this time. For some reason which still mystifies me, Sara agreed to my proposal for bright yellow and purple.

After some brief work with ruler, pencil, and square, the painting began:

Because the project was a surprise, and because Gwendolyn's schedule and mine rarely lined up during the day, most of the painting was done at night, after she had gone to bed. I had to sneak through her room to get to the New Room. Because it was winter, the windows had to stay shut. Which means I'm in for it when they discover, twenty years from now, all the horrible effects of inhaling the off-gases from vinyl paint.

Below you can see that the former coffee table is getting its second life:

 What would a New Room be without the assembly of a piece of Ikea furniture? Nothing, I say! We got Gwendolyn a trundle bed which ought to last her until she graduates high school. Here's my lovely wife and brother doing the hard work while I wield the camera:

Et voila! The finished New Room, with new bed and linens bought for the occasion. (Note that the purple and yellow on the walls match the same colors on the comforter:)

Plus Gwendolyn gets Sara's heirloom dresser and mirror:

 I had to keep the New Room locked until Christmas day, even though Gwendolyn knew that something for her was going on behind the door. I suspect that even before she started her Christmas morning treasure hunt she knew where it ended. Here she is discovering one of the clues in her hunt (note the pink outfit given to her by her Best Friend Kerri):

 She was so excited that she almost literally bounced off the walls. This process was aided by the fact that her first move was to test out the spring in her new mattress:

 As an added bonus, the placement of her bed affords her a view over the driveway and front of the house. When she's old enough, she'll discover that it's safe to climb out her window onto the front roof, from which she can jump to the ground without hurting herself. (I discovered this about our bathroom window at my dad's house in high school.) Here's hoping she'll never need to use it that way.

 All of January, whenever someone came to visit the house, Gwendolyn would exclaim, "Let me show you my New Room!" That made all the vinyl paint fumes I huffed worth it.

I just hope she doesn't expect a New Room every Christmas now.

~ emrys

Circle Marks the Spot

 In our early years, our parents used to offer variations on the process of opening gifts at Christmas. One was the "Russian nesting doll" variation: We opened a huge box found under the tree only to reveal a slightly smaller box inside, followed by a slightly smaller box inside that, and so on.

 Sometimes the core of the nesting boxes had a small gift inside. Other times, the smallest box contained a clue as to where the actual gift, which might be as large as a bicycle, lay.

 My favorite variation, however, was the treasure hunt. The initial gift (or envelope) contained a hint leading us to the next clue, found somewhere in the house.

 As we got older, the hints became little riddles in themselves. We had to work out where the next clue was, which process sometimes took some trial and error.

 (My apologies for the sideways photos here; Blogger is messing up my formatting.)

 This year Gwendolyn's main gift from me came at the end of a treasure hunt. Since she's not adept at reading yet, Sara had the brilliant idea of making it a visual hunt. On the reverse of every colored circle was a photograph of the next colored circle at its location in the house. When Gwendolyn identified where the picture was taken, she could easily find the next circle.

What fun to follow an excited three-and-a-half-almost-four-year-old around the house as she found the clues! It was certainly worth staying up late to put the construction paper circles in place.

Next post: what was behind the orange and green doors . . .

~ emrys

Christ's Bounty

Four or five years ago, one of the departed saints of Nineveh, Doris White, began a program that she called Christmas Town. It has since come to be called Christ's Bounty, but the content is mostly the same: a winter giveaway of food, clothing, and toys to local families in need. For the first week in December, the sanctuary fills up with boxes of food. It turns out that the pews are the best staging area for the boxes before they're given away on a Saturday morning.

 Christ's Bounty is probably one of the top two or three programs done by Nineveh Presbyterian Church in terms of participation (not counting Sunday morning worship). And it is one of our actions that comes closest to James' description of "true religion" for the early Church (James chapter 1); for this I am proud of our little congregation of saints. God certainly does good work through them.

There are corollary benefits, as well. You may be able to make out my son Micah being carried on his mother's belly as she works amidst the other box-loaders. Gwendolyn, too, loves to be a part of the set up for Christ's Bounty, in no small measure because she likes to ride on whatever cart is currently carrying goods from here to there. But in the meanwhile, they are being exposed to a central mission of the Church: to  care for the poor, the widows, and the orphans.

It is my hope and prayer that this work will become a core part of their Christian spirituality as adults. Christ's Bounty, I think, gets them off to a good start.

~ emrys

The Spirit of Christmas I

Today we visited a fundraising event put on by the Bektash Shriners of Concord, New Hampshire, called the "Fez"tival of Trees. Every year one hundred and fifty persons, businesses, and organizations decorate Christmas trees and place them in the large Shriners' hall. Patrons purchase tickets (the price of which will go to the Shriners' charity work), and with their tickets can bid on their favorite trees. At the conclusion of the event, tickets are drawn as a raffle and the decorated trees go home with the winning patrons.

Gwendolyn and her grandparents had a ball taking in the lights, colors, and shapes adorning the trees. The Shriners put together a scavenger hunt for kids that Grandad and Gwendolyn completed before we put up our feet with hot chocolate and cider. To a three-and-a-half-almost-four-year-old the event was better than an amusement park.

I strolled around the hall, my infant son in his seat ogling quietly at the lights and colors. We passed trees decorated in snowman themes, others trimmed as shameless business promotions (an office of dentistry decked its tree with toothbrushes and toothpaste), and at least four streamed with red, white, and blue in patriotic fervor. One tree hosted a pile of tools beneath its boughs, the crown of which was a DeWalt chopsaw; next to that tree was a puddle of drool from all the men whose raffled tickets had gone into its pot. Some trees were gaudy, others garish, and many gorgeous.

None of them was Christian.

I noticed early a lack of images derived from the original meaning of the term "Christmas" ("Christ's Mass"). The sole icon of Christianity I saw was a four-by-three-inch creche ornament hung on a tree labelled "Classic Christmas Tree"; the same tree's branches held CDs of Beethoven and a boxed set of VHS "Lord of the Rings" films.

I should not be surprised. Yet by sheer probability (there were one hundred and fifty trees, remember) I anticipated a few that would honor the definition of Christmas as the arrival of Jesus the Christ into the world. But there was not a one.

I try to avoid the tired lament I hear too often in churchy circles about "putting Christ back in Christmas." It seems to me that this cry can hide a misguided desire to get mainstream culture to validate our faith by civil subscription. But I found the sentiment rising up in me out of this vast tide of Christmas-like decor and nearly finding its way to my lips. The bait-and-switch character of the "holidays" to which we are exposed around every winter solstice has begun to impress itself upon me. The dissonance has begun to make the teeth of my soul grind.

The solution? I am suspicious that shouting "Christ!" ever more loudly into the cacophony of holiday Masses may do nothing but irritate further everyone involved. Silence makes for a better resolution to dissonance.

Perhaps it is time for the Church to reclaim her story by the silence she knew for the first millennium of her existence. Perhaps it is time for us again to abstain completely from Christmas.

~ emrys

Merry Christmas!

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Dear Friends and Family:

Merry Christmas!  We hope that you are able to fully appreciate the joy and wonder of this season.  If you need a little help, take a 2-(almost 3)-year-old out to look at Christmas lights!

Gwendolyn is everything you would expect from an active two year old.  She will very proudly tell you that she’s “Two and a haff be tree” (translation: “I’m 2 1/2 and will be 3”) since she’s recently figured out she has a birthday coming up!  Christmas trees and lights are a thing of wonder and so much fun to enjoy with her! 

2011 was fast and full.  Highlights this year include  Emrys’ 5 year anniversary at Nineveh Presbyterian Church, Sara’s 6 years of remission and our 10th wedding anniversary. We are also celebrating the new little one that will be joining our family in June 2012.   Our area was hit with record-breaking flooding in September, and amidst the devastation it was amazing to watch a local community, and a larger faith community, come together to help out. 

Our lives are full, we are blessed, and the guest bed’s made up—we’d love to have you visit!

Love,   Emrys, Sara & Gwendolyn 

P.S. Our home phone number will be changing on January 1st so if you need the new number, please email us.

The U2 Experience

On 20 July Sara and I went to the long-awaited fulfillment of my 2009 Christmas gift: the U2 360 concert at the Meadowlands. The show, billed to start at 7:00, opened at 7:45 with a mediocre heavy rock/metal band called "Interpol." Then the two-thirds-full arena entertained itself for half an hour while, we presume, the star act made itself ready. Finally, at 9:15, the Irish four took the stage to open with some of the classics from Achtung Baby.

Since the Zoo Station tour of the late '90s, U2 has combined good showmanship with technology and videography at their concerts. Perhaps emboldened by the fact that in an 80,000-person stadium the nosebleed seats can't see a lead singer, U2 has put cameras and oversized screens to good use. They amplify both sound and light to make a larger-than-life impact on the masses. The performance was as stunning as I'd hoped; what surprised and intrigued me was less the band and more the audience.

We used public transit to get to the stadium, which involved standing on the train platform for about an hour waiting for rerouted trains to get in order. As the platform filled up with fans ready for U2 action, I watched the restless throngs. I saw middle-aged couples with wedding bands; I saw college frat boys; I saw Baby Boomers who looked to be enjoying the first fruits of retirement, preppy high school kids, washed-up hippies, and dapper dressed professionals. I even saw a six-year-old girl with black ug-boots, tutu, jacket, and purple streaks in her blonde hair; she could have been a fast-forward version of my own daughter. The U2 age demographic would make most Church congregations jealous. Only skin color was uniform; my rough estimation, from observations made until the lights went down for the main event, is that the crowd was ninety-five percent white, two percent Asian, two percent Latino, and one percent (or less) African-American.

The repertoire for the concert revealed what I saw at the Pop Mart concert in 1998: as a whole, U2 fans connect more with the old classic songs than the new ones. The songs from the early '90s elicited more clapping, dancing, and singing along than those from the last four albums. When the band played I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For, all eighty thousand fans were on their feet, singing, clapping, and swaying. All around us were closed eyes, raised hands, and straining voices, anticipating every line and echoing every refrain. Under the night sky, immersed in the amplified beat and soaked in The Edge's aching string-work, I sang along with Bono, lifted my palms to the sky, and wept. Like the ancient clans brought to tears by Gaelic bards, I succumbed to the power of music. And it felt like . . . worship.

Now I know why folks follow bands like U2 across the country for entire tours. They want to feel part of something bigger than themselves. They want to feel larger than life, ecstatic with sound and light so bright they can only come from heaven. They want to be carried out of themselves, if only for a moment, and into something powerful and orchestrated and harmonious and . . . more than human. They want to worship. And the opportunity comes only once very four years at the cost of one hundred dollars a pop.

~ emrys

Discrimination

I own a 1979 Schwinn ten-speed bicycle. The frame is made of steel, which, if I ever wreck it, I will sell on Craig's list as a boat anchor. The brakes pivot on a bolt above the wheel, and because of the condition of the hardware one front brake pad rubs constantly against the rim. The height measures nineteen inches, three and a half inches too short for me. This combination of factors makes any ride heavy, difficult, and exhausting. But it's the only bike I have.

Yesterday morning my father-in-law and I rode into Williamsburg on their new bicycles. The frames are aluminum, the brakes attach to the forks, and my seat adjusts until my leg reaches full extension. As a result, the twenty-one-mile ride today was a delight. (Of course, getting brie-stuffed French toast for brunch at the half-way point makes any journey delightful.)

Ten minutes into the ride we stopped at a traffic signal. The intersection had three lanes; the right lane was right turn only, and we were going straight, so I sat behind David on the white line in the middle of the road. I thought it a blessing that no cars had come up behind us at the signal. I hate that kind of pressure to accelerate.

The opposing traffic received its green light, complete with a green arrow that allowed them to turn in front of us. David decided not to wait, but pulled across the intersection through our red light. I figured our green light was about to come, so I remained behind. As David started picking up speed on the other side, the cross-traffic got a green light. Cars started cruising past across my path. Where was my green light?

I then remembered that some traffic lights change according to photo sensors on the poles or magnetic coils under the asphalt. The sensors and coils detect the metallic presence of a car and change the signal accordingly. They did not detect the presence of my ultra-light hybrid road bike.

I cursed the city planners that failed to take cyclists into account. I'm used to riding with the mentality that cars cannot see me, but I don't expect to be discriminated against by the civil engineers. Don't they want their citizens to ride bicycles more? "Ride your bike, sit at a light" is not an enticing PR slogan.

Thank God some internal combustion engines pulled up behind me before the next signal rotation. I huffed and puffed for a few hundred yards, but managed to catch up to David. We cycled on in good stead to Williamsburg.

Good thing there are no traffic lights on my commute to Nineveh. Then again, if I had been riding my '79 Schwinn, I would have set off the signal sensor.

~emrys

Farther on Less

2005 Hyundai Elantra GT + 70mph speed limit = 38 miles per gallon.

Thank you, Virginia!

~ emrys

Christmas Invention

The Wheat side of our family has begun to pull names out of a hat for Christmas. Instead of getting gifts for everyone, each Christmas we only need to get a gift for the name drawn. (We don't actually have a hat--there are websites that mediate this kind of thing now. Thank God! Where would be get just the right hat?) This year, I "drew" my brother-in-law Josh.

I don't see Josh much, so I have to go on family rumors about his current interests. The rumors are spare, since Josh doesn't let much slip about what he's up to. I had just two hard facts to go on last Christmas: Josh enjoys cooking (and works in the restaurant field), and like all the Wheat males, he's a Red Sox fan.

I decided to get Josh a Red Sox-themed fondue set. It's the perfect combo for a man of fine cuisine who hates the Yankees, right? Search as I might across the infinite field of the cyber-market, I could not find a Red Sox fondue set. Strange. Hasn't anyone thought of this before? Aren't the addicts of Boston baseball fame also interested in dipping pumpernickel in a white wine and gruyere sauce with their friends? Doesn't every Sox fan have a fondue pot on the simmer for his World Series party?

Left wanting (and disappointed) by Amazon and eBay, I decided to make it myself.

First step: cut dowel for the handles, then affix them to bare fondue forks:

It turns out that handle-less shafts of fondue forks are also in short supply. To pinch-hit, Sara found seafood doohickeys (no lie, the technical term is "doohickey"), normally used for getting crab meat out of the exoskeleton. Well, these eight would have a higher calling.

Then I designed and printed up handle-wraps with various combinations of Red Sox insignia on them. I needed eight distinct patterns, so that each guest would be able to tell which fork is hers:

A little mod podge will keep the designs on the fork handles:

But even dry mod podge doesn't hold up to water. So I applied one of my favorite newfound products, polycrylic, to the handles. I'm not sure that it'll hold up to a dishwasher, but warm water and dish soap I'm sure won't bother them.

I was on a roll, but I decided against making the fondue pot myself. First, I was pressed for time. Second, my electrical engineering and forging skills are a little rusty. So I had Sara pick me up a fondue pot, and put the custom-designed forks in (with a little sign that says, "Hand wash only").

No word yet on whether Josh has put it to use. We'll see him in May, I hope, so I can ask him then.

~emrys

Best Christmas Gift . . .

. . . ever.

(Short of the First One, that is.)

This past Christmas Sara put a little red packet of wrapping paper in my stocking. I opened it up to find a thin slip of green paper with a number and a phrase: my first clue. I knew from that moment I was getting a taste of my own medicine: a clue-to-clue hunt. So I followed where the hints led me--to places at work, around the house, and to people we knew. About twenty-four clues in all I had to find, and beginning with number two, I received a puzzle piece with each clue.

The tension built as I assembled the puzzle. I knew that Sara was particularly excited about her gift to me this year, but I had not idea what it was. Even the fact that she had reserved two days in July on my calendar did not tell me what was up. All I figured was that it couldn't be something that required a plane flight (too short). Not much to go on. So I patiently put piece after piece together.

With only three pieces left, I could see that I was assembling a poem. The first three stanzas, with only one lacuna, I could read:

"Your daughter and I, we love you so much

We're so glad to make a fuss.

For the husband so dedicated and the dad so fine

To give a break away from the grind

For many years you've been a fan

To see them live, Wouldn't that be grand

In 2010 you'll have your chance

To see the whole show, not just a glance

Tickets were purchased, to give you admittance

To Meadowlands Stadium, really a pittance

For all the diapers, toilets, laundry and dishes

Without complaint you care for our wishes"

Now I must admit that I think I had guessed it by this point. The best hint came not from the poem itself but from the background on which it (and the whole puzzle) was printed: a LAX-spider-like piece of architecture in the middle of a stadium. I had seen that before, in adverts . . . . But I held my peace for the last piece, which, when I found it, completed the last stanza:

"So on July 19th you'll join the throngs

To hear played many favorite songs

So now to wait until we go

For a night away to see U2's show"

We're going to see U2 in July!

My wife rocks. And she's a poet and I didn't know it. So I hung her work of art up on the wall:

I saw them in 1998 (also as a gift) at the Olympic Stadium in Montreal. Being college students, we had nose bleeder seats (though with U2's signature screens, we didn't lose much of the action). It was a cool show then, and I'm sure the boys from Dublin will live up to their reputation this year. Another reason to be excited about summer!

~emrys

Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night!

Letting the Picture Tell The Story

Book Review

Not the Way It's Supposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin, by Cornelius Plantinga, Jr.

The tastefully chosen deep gold of the cover has a mellow attractiveness that makes one want to reach out and snatch it out of the hands of its current reader. The high-contrast gold-on-black formatting of the spine print summons the wandering eye like a visual clarion cry.

This volume has enough heft to present ample resistance to the fingers and arms--not so flimsy that it is tossed with every jerk of the arm--yet is light enough to be maveuvered even by the most delicate frame. The flexibility of the cover presents an enjoyable challenge to one's digits, but the text has enough pages that its thickness is easily grasped.

The complex interplay of its smooth glossy cover and the firm edges of its thick matte pages provides a delight to the palms and the tongue. The binding and spine hold up to the rigors of predental mastication.

In this reviewer's estimation, an excellent book.

Gwen's First Easter

Gwen's first Easter was celebrated with GrammaB and Valerie.  We all went to church for a wonderful Easter celebration and then to brunch with great food!  The evening included Wii for Emrys & I while Gwendolyn napped and studied the ceiling fan with Aunt Sharon.  I wanted to try to get a picture of the three of us but it just didn't happen.  

Birthday Weekend 4.0: The Rural Gourmet

In times long before ours, families would join for feast to celebrate special occasions.  This year's birthday weekend was a family gathering for feasting.  While we had some great meals, it was really about the time spent preparing and enjoying the meals that was the most memorable and enjoyable.  Mom and dad came to see us, ok they really came to see Gwen and we happened to be her, but all the same they came here for a long weekend. 

 Since Gwen’s arrival I haven’t had as much time to play in the kitchen.  I really enjoy cooking and since I don’t have 8 hands, the gourmet stuff has gotten thrown to the wayside as my energies have been spent on the care of a newborn.  So this weekend, since we had 8 hands in the house, I got to play in the kitchen. 

 

Dad had his meal of steaks, baked sweet potatoes and salad upon their arrival on Friday night (had to wait for him since the steaks were in his cooler!).  The gourmet touch to this meal was one of Emrys’ strawberry-rhubarb pies and homemade vanilla ice cream.  It was wonderful!

Saturday sent us in a lot of different directions since Emrys had an all day meeting, the ‘rents and Gwen and I ended up down in Binghamton running some errands.  Sunday was church and then my grand-daddy of cooking projects.  Last summer I got a ravioli mold at a random little kitchen store in Pennsylvania.  I kept saying that I wanted to make ravioli and somehow fall turned to winter turned to parenthood and I didn’t get the chance.  We have the pasta-rollers for the Kitchen-Aid but it never happened, until Sunday.  I started with this recipe and I tweaked it enough that it only remotely resembled the original for pumpkin ravioli with a pecan cream sauce. 

 

My dad is a fan of kitchen toys.  He got a food processor for my mom for their anniversary that he has more fun with than she does, I think.  The real gift is that there are now dishes that she doesn’t have to gook!  So when I proposed the ravioli project which requires the ravioli mold and the kitchen-aid pasta rollers and dough hook, Dad was in.  We started rolling pasta dough while Mom and Gwen snoozed.  The dough kept going and going and by the time we were done we had the pumpkin ravioli that was the original plan as well as cheese ravioli and sun-dried tomato pesto raviolis and blueberry and cream cheese raviolis.  

All of them were so good and I have cheese raviolis in the freezer for later.  One of my kitchen philosophies is that if I’m going to make that big of a mess, I better get more than one meal out of it.  So I had the original round of raviolis for dinner on Sunday with green beans and Tiramisu Cake and leftovers of the pasta and the cake on Tuesday for my birthday! 

 

Emrys’ birthday fell on Monday which is also his day off and he wanted Eggs Benedict for his birthday meal.  This brought on two new kitchen firsts for me.  The first was making hollandaise sauce; the second was poaching eggs in boiling water.  Both were great successes and the eggs were served with fruit salad and OJ. 

I crammed in about 3 months worth of cooking into one weekend.  I was tired, but it was fun to have family here and to spend so much time on a hobby that I really enjoy.  

Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas to all!  We are settled in having a happily lazy day, the ham is in the crock-pot and the bread dough is rising.  The dog's settled in and asleep, and Emrys figured out how to assemble the Pack-n-Play.  Emrys' mom is snoozing in the side chair and The Kid's kicking around.  I'm taking this moment of peace to send a quick blog :).

To all - we send our love this Christmas and pray blessings and health to you and yours in the coming year.  Stay tuned for updates, as the arrival of The Kid is rapidly approaching (4 weeks if it decides to be on time!)

Love, 

Sara, Emrys & The Kid

and for encouragement that the generosity of strangers can make miracles happen, check out this news story!