Ordinary Time

Painting..... Reading.... Kayaking.... Sand sculpture (it's a penguin sunning himself, of course)..... Sparklers...... Walking on the beach..... THANK YOU, Aunt G. & Uncle W.!

A recent thread on a bulletin board I am on has me pondering the following question: Is it hypocritical to say one's family is TV-free and yet either still own a set or watch videos and DVDs? My gut says no, but I'm a little fuzzy as to why I have that feeling. If I write down my reasoning, maybe I can stop having arguments with myself and be able to focus on other things.(You know, like all those children running around my house.) We have not always been a TV-free family. (Note: For the sake of argument, I will consider being TV-free as not watching commercial or cable television. This is different from being monitor-free... i.e. no screen-related activities of any kind.... [Sort of like vegetarian vs. vegan....] ) Our oldest two children have certainly watched their share of PBS shows in their younger days, and J. and I once had shows that we enjoyed watching most nights of the week. (Back in the days of "Star Trek: The Next Generation" and "Deep Space Nine

Well, it seems I was correct in my estimation that we wouldn't travel until at least January. K.'s province is moving even slower than usual and the timelines have changed to expect at least 9 months between dossier submission to travel. We knew going into this that it wasn't going to be a fast process, but never in my wildest dreams did I think I would have to start worrying about whether Tet would be an issue in travelling. On the positive side....warming-up in Vietnam while everyone else struggles to keep warm during typically brutal January weather sounds lovely....then there are the post-Christmas sales for gift buying....yeah, well, there's two items on the positive side. We did find out that K. only had his lip repaired. But we also learned a new piece of information in that the doctor reported that his palate was not too bad, so he didn't want to repair it at the same time. I'll take this as good news; we had no idea about the extent of clefting in