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This blogging break has been brought to you by the seasonal flu.

For those of you wondering why I haven’t posted much this week: we are experiencing flu-like symptoms.

For those of you who are not paying attention to how often I write on this blog: I’m not keeping track of how often you read this blog, so we’re even.

I started the family off by getting sick on Thursday. Beta quickly followed and started demonstrating his symptoms about a half hour after I did. Alpha held out until this afternoon. My wife is hoping not to get sick, but the peer pressure might get to her.

Gamma is doing fine so far. We have changed his diet preemptively so that his digestive system will be in better shape if he does catch whatever this is – all he had today was applesauce, bananas, toast, and his formula.

The kids had the swine flu back in the fall. I’ll take that over this flu any day – low-grade fever and a cough versus intestinal problems.

Having just the two kids sick is plenty. We did 3 or 4 loads of laundry today, and that was barely keeping even with all the blankets and sheets and towels that were added to the laundry today.

I hope to be back to a somewhat normal schedule, blogging and otherwise, next week.

In a shameless spoof of MckMama’s Not Me Monday, I am posting a Not Mine Monday.

• My wife and I have not been reprimanding our children when they reference bodily areas or functions inappropriately (i.e. “No potty talk at the dinner table.“). Therefore, it was not our children who invented their own euphemism for such language (e.g. “Hey Alpha, Gamma is going to smack you on the potty talk!“).
• I did not tell the kids that they had to finish putting away their clothes before they could come downstairs and play Lego Star Wars on the Game Cube. We do not bribe our kids to do their chores like that. And if it had worked, I would not have tiptoed downstairs so that my wife and I could play Lego Star Wars before the kids came down.
• I did not notice all the food in Gamma’s bib when he was done eating, and I did not take his spoon and feed him several spoonfuls of whatever had collected in there throughout the course of the meal. That would be gross.

The row in front of us was empty at church last Sunday. We attend a small church, where news travels fast, so we knew exactly who was missing and why they were missing.

At our church, most people have their own spots. This seating chart is unwritten, of course, but well-known and followed. Our spot is behind a family. The mom and dad, in their fifties, along with their daughter, who is our boys’ Sunday School teacher, sit in front of us. Their son used to sit in that row too, before he went away to college. Their other daughter used to sit with them, before she got married two summers ago; our boys were the ring bearers at that wedding. And her parents used to sit there too, before they finished their days on this earth.

But they weren’t in church last Sunday. The marriage which started two summers ago had resulted in the birth of a granddaughter – the first grandchild in the family. That happened just before midnight on Saturday, and the family was awake into the wee hours of Sunday morning. The birth announcement was made from the pulpit, though by that time everyone knew.

She had been ready for grandchildren for a while. She was glad when it was her turn for nursery duty. The church nursery for the last several years has involved our children, and she would let us know after church how much she enjoyed watching or holding our child and how good that child was. She was an elementary school teacher, and kids were a joy to her. Even the troublesome ones received kind words from her. It would have been nice to congratulate them on the birth of their grandchild. “No matter,” we thought that Sunday morning, “we will see them next week and ask about the baby then.”

Later on Sunday, she said she didn’t feel good, and complaints were one thing you did not hear from her. She went back, as a patient this time, to the same hospital in which her daughter was recovering and her granddaughter was sleeping. She got to be a grandmother for about twenty-five hours.

Tonight was the visitation; the funeral is tomorrow. I have been to funerals before, but this is different from any of those. All the others were at least expected – advanced age, prolonged illness, etc. This came out of nowhere and was over before most people even knew it happened.

I was glad the casket was closed during the visitation. I am not a fan of open caskets. I would rather have my memory of a person be that person’s doing something other than lying in a casket. In this case, my mind pictures the photograph that was displayed at the funeral home – she is sitting next to her husband and holding her grandchild.

God has spared me from major sorrow in my life so far, and for that I am grateful. It will be rough for me to see them in church again – just the dad and the daughter now. The spot where she always sat will be right in front of me. It might be empty on Sunday, or maybe someone else will sit there. But it won’t be right.

You may have seen last week’s introduction to PSALMs. Now it is time for the second movie. Once again, there is no theme or correlation with anything – I just made the animation that came to mind with the Legos at hand.

Now only 148 more to go.

If the movie player isn’t working, you can save the .mpg file to your computer and open it with your computer’s movie-player software

or “What’s Wrong with a Pint?”

With no further introduction, ladies and gentlemen, I give you this:

An Open Letter to Bottled-Water Companies

The cost of water in a bottle of water is around 5 cents. So the average company might save a quarter of a penny per bottle. For 2007, the top brand was Dasani, at about 22% market share. The US consumes around 40 billion water bottles a year, so Dasani’s share would be at least 8 billion water bottles per year. At a quarter of a penny per bottle, that would be $20 million in savings per year for one company.

What do they have to lose?

Inspired by both The Brick Testament and Wallace and Gromit, I made a movie. Okay, it is really not much of a movie, just a couple seconds of animation. But it is fun to watch.

PSALM stands for Progressive Stop Action Lego Movie. The official term is stop-motion animation, not stop-action movie, but I took some liberties to make a nice acronym. And if you use Lego people (AKA minifigs) for the characters in the movie, you’re supposed to call it a brickfilm or something like that. Oh well, I’ll stick with PSALM.

Now only 149 more to go.

Notes:

• this movie has nothing to do with Psalm 1.
• usually the verse-of-the-post is somewhat related to the content of that blog post. With this movie, however, I am just going to pick a verse out of that chapter.
• if the movie appears as a white rectangle, scroll the web page up or down.
• if the movie player isn’t working at all, you can save the .mpg file to your computer and open it with your computer’s movie player software

And now it is Gamma’s turn.

It is appointed to our children once to contract roseola, and after that the judgment umm… not to get it anymore.

When Alpha was 15 months old, he got roseola. I had never heard of roseola before, but by now I am quite familiar with it. It started off as a FOUO (fever of unknown origin), and then once the fever had gone and we thought everything was fine, the body-wide rash appeared.

Alpha

So, I learned all about roseola and it passed and was never a problem for Alpha anymore.

Then when Beta was 17 months old, he got roseola. Well, we didn’t know it at the time. We just knew he had a fever. It was very high, over 105, and it wasn’t coming down so we took him to the ER. Beta always did run warmer than the other children, so we should expect his fevers to be higher too.

The hospital gave him an IV and some over-the-counter fever reducer and ran a blood test. The fever came down eventually and the blood test did not show anything. The hospital didn’t know what else to do, so they gave him a course of antibiotics (through the IV – much more efficient, though of course totally useless against the virus that he had) and sent us on our way. We should have known what was coming, but we were surprised a couple days later when spots appeared all over his body.

Beta

Gamma has them both beat. He’s not even a year old and he already contracted roseola. His fever was slight, only 101. It’s hard to pinpoint when or how or where he picked up the virus, since the incubation period is over a week. But slightly over a week ago he, along with his brothers and mother, swam in a hotel pool. Coincidence? You be the judge.

Gamma

We’ll see if Gamma is ahead of the curve in his other developments too. Maybe we should add roseola to the list of developmental milestones. It would fit right in there with when your baby should get teeth, start walking, say his first word, etc.