Those Martins

In about a week, we’ll be in Barbados.

Epic employees earn a 4-week sabbatical, after working at Epic for 5 years. I earned my sabbatical in May, 2010 and we’re finally getting around to using it. Epic offers employees the choice of one 4-week sabbatical or two 2-week sabbaticals. We’re choosing to take two 2-week sabbaticals.

Not only is Epic generous enough to give us extra paid time off, but they’re also willing to pay travel expenses. The “international sabbatical” reimburses employees for visiting a country that we’ve never visited before.

I’m taking my 14 days of sabbatical time and adding on 6 days of vacation time. All told, I’ll be away from work from Thursday, March 8th through Tuesday, March 27th. That’s 14 business days away from the office. It’ll be glorious. (It’s 19 days total, which is also fantastic.)

Not only am I taking time off of work, but we’re both taking time away from the children. Grandma is coming out to Wisconsin, to babysit all three girls for the full 19 days. We’ve done overnight dates before (we even did 2 nights away once) but this will be the first extended alone time that we’ve had since Esther was born. I know we’ll miss the girls but it’s hard to express how excited we are to be alone for a couple of weeks.

Why Barbados? Well, it comes highly recommended by James & Liz, who took their sabbatical there last year. It’s a country that speaks English, has a high literacy rate, and a good healthcare system. And it’s tropical and warm, which is a key factor when coming from cold, grey Wisconsin.

I’m extremely thankful to Epic for giving us this opportunity and for paying for our expenses. We certainly wouldn’t have been able to afford a trip like this on our own. I’m also very grateful to Grandma for coming and watching the girls. Making a trip like this without 3 accessories is a real treat.

Last night, I read an article about the French style of parenting. It was adapted from “Bringing Up Bébé: One American Mother Discovers the Wisdom of French Parenting.”

This is what prompted me to start setting stricter boundaries for our own children. For Bethany: no more nighttime bottles. For Esther and Katya: toys stay in their room or in the basement. I want to stop the trend of having toys scattered all over the living room, dining room, and kitchen.

One of the keys to this education is the simple act of learning how to wait. It is why the French babies I meet mostly sleep through the night from two or three months old. Their parents don’t pick them up the second they start crying, allowing the babies to learn how to fall back asleep. It is also why French toddlers will sit happily at a restaurant. Rather than snacking all day like American children, they mostly have to wait until mealtime to eat. (French kids consistently have three meals a day and one snack around 4 p.m.)

…It’s a skill that French mothers explicitly try to cultivate in their kids more than American mothers do. In a 2004 study on the parenting beliefs of college-educated mothers in the U.S. and France, the American moms said that encouraging one’s child to play alone was of average importance. But the French moms said it was very important.

…After a while, it struck me that most French descriptions of American kids include this phrase “n’importe quoi,” meaning “whatever” or “anything they like.” It suggests that the American kids don’t have firm boundaries, that their parents lack authority, and that anything goes. It’s the antithesis of the French ideal of the cadre, or frame, that French parents often talk about. Cadre means that kids have very firm limits about certain things—that’s the frame—and that the parents strictly enforce these. But inside the cadre, French parents entrust their kids with quite a lot of freedom and autonomy.

…Authority is one of the most impressive parts of French parenting—and perhaps the toughest one to master. Many French parents I meet have an easy, calm authority with their children that I can only envy. Their kids actually listen to them. French children aren’t constantly dashing off, talking back, or engaging in prolonged negotiations.

I’ve heard a lot from people who say that short-term trips aren’t really beneficial, that the money should just be given to the organization rather than paying for plane tickets when the people on the team aren’t really going to have that much of an impact in two weeks.

Yep, that’s me. So, why am I wrong?

We sail to a new port in January, untie everything that’s been secured for the sail and scrub down the hospital before setting everything up so that we can function. We train the crop of new nurses, hold screening and admit the first patients for surgery. For the next ten months, we operate and care for the patients on the wards and in the outpatient clinic and eventually it’s time to close up shop and move on. We double-bleach every surface, pack everything away in carts and on pallets and we tie everything back down to the bolts in the floor. Somewhere in December we sail away to a first world port so the crew can have a break and maintenance can be done on the ship. Christmas, New Years, and it’s January again. Lather, rinse, repeat.

It can get old.

Not the surgeries and the patients and the lives changing in front of my eyes. That will never be commonplace. But all the in-between. The cleaning and packing and unpacking and setting up. It’s an endless set of jobs that we have to do every single year, and I’ll be completely honest when I say that I’m not a fan.

This is where the Mercy Teams come in. They don’t live this cycle year in and year out,so they don’t remember how much their knees hurt from scrubbing the floors just a few months ago or how tired they were after securing yet another strap. They don’t remember because they weren’t here.

… And you know what? It wouldn’t matter if these guys and girls never even talk to a single Togolese person while they’re here. They’ve blessed and encouraged and strengthened those of us who will be here for the long haul. We’ll go into this Field Service energized by their energy, more ready than ever to pour out our lives for the people here in West Africa.

That’s good to know. Thanks for sharing, Ali. I’ll try to be less critical of short term missions trips.

“I love you, but you need to obey.”

… Using but may be communicating something we don’t want to say—-namely, that there is some kind of conceptual opposition between “I love you” and “You need to obey.”

I grow concerned when I see well-meaning parents who, in an attempt to practice gospel-centered parenting, do not readily insist on obedience because they want to display that their love for the child does not depend on obedience. Unfortunately, parents take on an apologetic air when wills begin to collide. They hesitate to subdue disobedience out of fear of transgressing the unconditional part of love. Insisting on obedience from children feels legalistic or repressive. They fear that they’d slowly stiffen into the hawk-eyed disciplinarians of a bygone era with timorous children arranged silently around the dinner table.

… The but has to go. Try so instead. “I love you, so you need to obey.”

This was a good article for anyone attempting gospel-centered parenting.

Have you ever wished you could know ahead of time when things were going to go on sale? Sure, we all know that turkeys go on sale before Thanksgiving and hams go on sale before Christmas, but what about the rest of the year?

Well, believe it or not, this information is not that difficult to obtain. Each advertising collective has its own month—e.g., January is National Beef Month. The National Cattleman’s Beef Association has chosen the month of January to promote eating beef. That means you can expect excellent sales on steak and ground beef in January.

Use the following list to help plan out your food storage purchases for the year. For instance, if you know that June is National Dairy Month, then you know that products such as butter will be at their rock bottom prices of during the month of June. Plan on purchasing butter twice a year, once in June and again in November. In November, the baking sales get into full swing. (Butter stores well in the freezer.)

These were all good.

In fact, the whole blog looks good and I love the way David writes too.

Bonus link-within-a-link: Travel with Kids: Why You Should Do It – And Do It Now. We do plan to travel with kids. We only have one hard and fast rule: no international travel until they’re all out of diapers. (Come to think of it, I think we have that same rule for camping too.)

I have two more reasons for defending gift cards. They’re mostly reasons why I like to receive gift cards and not necessarily a great reason for me to give gift cards to someone else.

Impatience

I’m often hesitant to give people specific gift ideas because I’m impatient. Since I’ve been working in a steady, well-paying job I’ve gotten used to (mostly) buying whatever I want, as soon as I want it. That’s the main reason, in fact, that I don’t have a long list of gift ideas—almost everything I want, I’ve already purchased.

As soon as I put an item onto a list of gift ideas, I’ve lost the ability to buy that item for myself. There’s now a chance that someone else has purchased that item for me. Until the occasion rolls around (Christmas, my birthday, etc), I don’t know whether or not I received it as a gift. And I can’t buy it until I do know.

Because I’m impatient, that drives me nuts. When I decide that I want something, I want to get it now. I don’t want to wait another 3 months (or even 3 weeks). I want to be free to just go ahead and get it, without worrying about disappointing someone.

Sure, practicing the discipline of patience would probably be good for me. But I’m not particularly inclined to use gift receiving as an opportunity for that.

Laziness

Making a gift list would require that I then keep that gift list up to date. There are multiple book series that I’d like to eventually own. There are also multiple books that I already own as physical books that I’d like to own as eBooks.

In both cases, I could make a list of what I want. But then I’d have to keep that list up to date. Each time I think of a new entry, I’d have to remember to add it to the list. And each time I get something (whether on my own or as a gift), I’d have to remember to remove it from the list.

Honestly, that all sounds like a lot of work. And I’m lazy, so it probably wouldn’t get done. Instead, the list would rot and moulder and I’d run a very real risk of receiving something twice (from different people) or of receiving something that I’d already bought for myself. And that doesn’t sound like any fun at all.

Bottom Line

Getting a gift card, allows me to be both impatient and lazy without making either you (as the giver) or me (as the receiver) feel bad. It really is the perfect gift. And I’d love to receive it, with thankfulness, gratitude, and appreciation.

I like gift cards. I know it’s considered gauche to give them as a gift but I’ve never really agreed with that. The common knock against gift cards is that they “show little thought” or demonstrate that you don’t know enough about the recipient to know what gift they’d really like. That can be true and in certain settings (like the family or supposedly close business relationships) it can be fatal.

But, in some circumstances, gift cards can also demonstrate both humility and that you do know the recipient well. I’m primarily thinking of circumstances in which the recipient himself doesn’t know what he wants and couldn’t tell you if you asked. I’m a great example of this. I love to read. And most people think that buying a gift for me is easy: buy a book. This is true.

But, which book? Aye, there’s the rub. Oftentimes, I don’t know which book I want to read next. I don’t even necessarily know which book I want to read in a year. I have ideas of books that I think I might want to read. But a cursory glance at my bookshelf would reveal that there are many books there that I’ve purchased and never read. I purchased them with good intentions but somehow never quite got around to actually cracking the covers.

Now, there are bad gift card gifts. A gift card to a store I never shop at (and never really want to shop at) does tell me that you don’t know me and didn’t ask others about me. That gift of a card does validate all of the negative stereotypes about gift cards.

But the fact that bad gift card gifts exist doesn’t invalidate the entire category. At least, I don’t think so. A gift card, earmarked for books, tells me that you know that I like to read. It also tells me that you’re willing to admit that you don’t know what I want to read, anymore than I do. And that’s appreciated.

I’ve never had even the slightest hint of resentment about receiving a gift card for books. Quite the opposite, in fact. It’s an opportunity for me to browse shelves, slowly and deliberately, looking for something new and unexpected. It’s an opportunity for me to splurge on a book that I might not otherwise buy (but will enjoy nonetheless). It’s an opportunity for me to complete (or start) a collection that I didn’t know I was interested in. It’s an opportunity for me to pre-order that book that won’t be released for another year.

It’s a great gift because, for a time, it’s every book everywhere. And that’s wonderful.

Last week in Life Group, based on this sermon, we discussed how we could recognize the idols our hearts manufactured and what could be done to deal with them.

Even though it’s a “Sunday School” answer, reading the Bible regularly is one way God has given us to check our hearts. How can we get into a regular reading of the Word when we are so busy and distracted with young families?

Below are some of the resources we discussed.

M’Cheyne reading plan read through the entire Old Testament in one year and the Psalms and New Testament twice. Schedule only

For the Love of God This 2 volume set contains daily meditations that coordinate with the M’Cheyne reading plan.
Volume 1
Volume 2

Kindle Put your Bible on this device and it is much easier to read anywhere you go.

Audio Bible Listen as you drive. Zondervan sells a dramatized version, making the scriptures easier to pay attention to.

I took Katya to Sam’s Club tonight. I wanted to get new formula for Bethany, in the hopes that it would fill her up more and help her to sleep through the night. (Her current formula is the “gentle” mixture and is advertised as being “easy to digest”. We’re hoping that a less easy to digest formulation stays in her belly longer and keeps her full longer.) Christine mentioned needing milk, eggs, and wet wipes too. Katya had a lot of fun on her daddy/daughter night. She chattered to me the entire drive to and from Sam’s Club.

We drilled counting from 10-20. Every time we got to 20, she wanted to start over and do it again. I think teachers resist drilling students because they (teachers) find it boring and repetitive—not because students don’t learn from it.

Katya trotted around the store, in front of my cart. She was quite animated the entire time and had a lot of fun helping me find the things on my list. She even found the milk before I did.

She said “there’s the milk” and pointed to straight to a case filled with sausage. I told her it wasn’t milk and she insisted that it was. I said that it was sausage and she said that it was milk “in there”. I finally bent down and looked at it from her eye level. On the bottom level, you can see through to the rack behind the shelf. She was looking at that level, seeing the milk that was on the opposite aisle, around the corner. She was right—it was milk “in there”.

As we were driving home, she said “I’m tired” and then proceeded to yawn the entire drive home, sometimes quite theatrically. When we got home, I was able to put her straight to bed. I found out that Esther was already sound asleep. She’d gone to bed around 1830 or 1900, shortly after I left for Sam’s Club.