Video: Mikey, Danny and Ruth at T-Ball

Video: Selah Does the Dishes

Happy Birthday, Selah!

It's your birthday, sweet girl... three years ago today we first held you in our arms. Your daddy says that you were the model child since Day 1, arriving at a very reasonable 8:30 PM and allowing us all to be in bed before midnight. We all know that three years later, he's still wrapped around your little fingers!

You're a delight. A joy. An amazing child with such a cheerful and helpful disposition. Your smile brings a smile to every face around while your laugh is just positively infatuating. Your feet are never still but your hugs and love are generously given. Like I already said, you are a delight!

We pray that your passion for life will grow and deepen into a never-swaying passion for the Creator of life! He loves you so much and delighted in creating you... and we are ever so thankful that He delighted in giving you to us, too! We pray for wisdom in raising you and we trust in His goodness for directing your path. We love you so much, and we are so thankful that we have such a good God -- we entrust you to Him!

Happy, happy birthday, sweet Selah!

(Guest appearance by Swiper)

Diapers and Robots

What do diapers and robots have in common? According to Wired, the answer is Diapers.com:

Diapers.com warehouses are a bit of a jumble. Boxes of pacifiers sit above crates of onesies, which rest next to cartons of baby food. In a seeming abdication of logic, similar items are placed across the room from one another. A person trying to figure out how the products were shelved could well conclude that no form of intelligence—except maybe a random number generator—had a hand in determining what went where.

But the warehouses aren’t meant to be understood by humans; they were built for bots. Every day, hundreds of robots course nimbly through the aisles, instantly identifying items and delivering them to flesh-and-blood packers on the periphery. Instead of organizing the warehouse as a human might—by placing like products next to one another, for instance—Diapers.com’s robots stick the items in various aisles throughout the facility. Then, to fill an order, the first available robot simply finds the closest requested item. The storeroom is an ever-shifting mass that adjusts to constantly changing data, like the size and popularity of merchandise, the geography of the warehouse, and the location of each robot. Set up by Kiva Systems, which has outfitted similar facilities for Gap, Staples, and Office Depot, the system can deliver items to packers at the rate of one every six seconds.

In related news, Amazon.com recently purchased Diapers.com. So far this development has been a very good thing for us. After Christina signed me up as an Amazon mom, we were able to order pull-ups for less than Costco prices with free delivery right to our front door.

One final note on robots...Mikey is really, really into robots right now. So if any of you have any spare robots that you're not using, feel free to send them our way.

Video: Eliana at Gymnastics

Loving Your Husband

Here you are, ready and eager to read another portion of my random thoughts that I dish out on a fairly inconsistent basis. But, before you continue, I have to warn you: This post is not about babies. Or birth control. Or a lack thereof. It's not even about children or parenting! I must give a secondary warning, but this is just for Sean: This post does include some mention of the awesomeness of my husband. Feel free to gag now and get it over with.

As I know that some people reading this probably don't have the same beliefs that I do, I'd like to summarize those. I believe that the Bible is the inerrant Word of God, given to us as His revealed knowledge to all of us, inspired by the Holy Spirit and meant to guide us, primarily, to our understanding of our own sinfulness and knowledge of Jesus Christ as God and faith in Him and His sacrificial love and death on our behalf as the only way of salvation from our sin and from eternal punishment (see Romans 3:23, John 3:16, and Eph. 2:8). This post, though applicable to all, is primarily focused at those who would agree with me in these beliefs.

Given my trust in God, His love, and my high esteem of the Bible, I take literally the concept that men and women have different roles in this life. In marriage, men are called to love their wives and protect them, and women are called to submit to their husbands and respect them.

BUT, given these specified roles, there's something that has struck a raw nerve with me over the last year and a half. I've noticed that men often have a really hard time admitting their weaknesses and mistakes, taking personal responsibility for them, and asking others for forgiveness. (Don't get me wrong, women. We have a hard time with this, too.) If left with this difficulty, they are prone to arrogance, hypocrisy, self-righteousness, and a lack of love and grace for others around them. Not a pretty picture, and certainly not a good position from which to be representing Christ in a marriage -- or to others, for that matter.

David, on the other hand, is pretty darn good (though not perfect, Sean -- no husband worship here!!) at, at least eventually, admitting his sin and repenting for it.

I've seen the weakness described above first-hand, magnified in all its ugliness, a few times over the last year and a half, and I've seen the destruction it has wrought in its path. It's been heart-breaking, to say the least, as these men -- who have so bullishly sought to destroy all who have lovingly reached out to help them -- have been men that are at least professing faith in Christ and lives that have been transformed by Him.

But none of this is at the heart of my ramblings here.

This post is for wives, with a very serious warning for all of us to be diligent in the role God has given to us. You see, at least in two of the situations I have referenced above, the actions of the wives of these men have left me nauseous, physically wanting to puke. A lot. These wives have both watched their husbands be lovingly corrected by godly leadership and refuse to repent for their sinfulness. Yet both these women have, presumably in the name of love, submission, and loyalty, patted their husbands on their backs and "lovingly" supported them in their self-worship. And in doing so, these women have proved themselves to be the epitome of adulteresses, lacking anything close to love and reverence for their husbands or the God they claim for their salvation. And for this, I pity their husbands and them, for they know not the joy and freedom of repentance nor the loving faithfulness of a godly spouse.

Women, we should be prayerfully, humbly, lovingly, and yes, privately exhorting our husbands to godliness. If our husbands are saved by grace, we can have confidence that the same God who saved them will continue to sanctify them. Yet God uses His children as sanctifying agents in each other's lives, and we are to be sanctifying agents in our husbands' lives. A wife is the one person God gives to a husband for him to cleave to and become one with. We can either love him in a way that helps him draw closer to God, or we can hate him in a way that enables him in his love for the idols of his heart. Seriously -- what kind of wife are you?

Most who know me know that I think my husband is about the most amazing husband a gal could have. (Sorry, gals--he's taken!!) And I definitely am very convinced that he's the one that got the short end of this marriage. But David is not perfect. He's in the process of sanctification along with the rest of us. But over the years, I've seen him grow dramatically in the area of being able to more quickly recognize his sin against God and others, repent, and ask forgiveness. Dramatically. And though I'm FAR from perfect and have a long way to grow in this area myself, I can see how God has used me as a sanctifying agent in this area of David's life.

There are many practical angles I could expand on, but this post is too long already. I would like to conclude by noting that saying things like, "I'm sorry if I hurt you" or "I'm sorry that you were offended" don't indicate real repentance. If one is not actually acknowledging sinful behavior and actively, with the grace of God, turning away from it, saying "sorry" in a way that turns the responsibility away from oneself and onto someone else is fake, to say the least. God empowers His people to righteousness through humility expressed in repentance. "If we confess our sins, He is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness" (1 John 1:9).

Video: Books of the Bible

Our Family by Eliana

Video: Baby Elijah at Three-ish Months

That Infants Are Like This

I love Augustine's perspective on babies--written all the way back in AD 397-98. Some things never change!

For it is from thee, O God, that all good things come--and from my God is all my health. This is what I have since learned, as thou hast made it abundantly clear by all that I have seen thee give, both to me and to those around me. For even at the very first I knew how to suck, to lie quiet when I was full, and to cry when in pain--nothing more.

Afterward I began to laugh--at first in my sleep, then when waking. For this I have been told about myself and I believe it--though I cannot remember it--for I see the same things in other infants. Then, little by little, I realized where I was and wished to tell my wishes to those who might satisfy them, but I could not! For my wants were inside me, and they were outside, and they could not by any power of theirs come into my soul. And so I would fling my arms and legs about and cry, making the few and feeble gestures that I could, though indeed the signs were not much like what I inwardly desired and when I was not satisfied--either from not being understood or because what I got was not good for me--I grew indignant that my elders were not subject to me and that those on whom I actually had no claim did not wait on me as slaves--and I avenged myself on them by crying. That infants are like this, I have myself been able to learn by watching them; and they, though they knew me not, have shown me better what I was like than my own nurses who knew me.

Source: The Confessions of Saint Augustine, Book 1

My New Blog

I have a new blog that I'd like to invite you to follow. The only problem is that if I shared the web site address here, I'd be violating our blog rules.

So let's try this instead. My new blog is http://www.[insert our last name]central.com.

If that doesn't work for you, drop us an e-mail, and we'll send you a link.

Don't worry...we'll continue to post cute photos and videos of the kids here at Diapers4three and other items related to our family. My new blog is only for those items deemed more boring by some of our regular readers here -- topics like economics, politics, technology, etc.

Little Christy, Zanna & Charity

Another blast from the past. Photos courtesy of Jan Freeland.