Ok. So I’m back. The last 6 months or so has found me moving my professional life and personal life a whole ton closer while moving into one of the most challenging, filled seasons of our life as a family. The reality is a blog IS a public mouthpiece for someone, but things I want, I need to say, are sometimes best kept a bit quieter. It’s forced me to move to a ’secret’ blog in an effort to get thoughts out and I’m really sick of doing a secret blog.
So, in brief, where we’re at in March of 2010:
Melissa and I are running a half marathon in May: I’m finding I adore running. There are a ton of lessons to be learned while moving your body 6 miles (currently) down a road. I’m learning to be patient, enjoy the moment, trust in the process that God is taking me on and to really eat better. The way it’s working right now is that my training has me doing a mid range run twice a week and an increasingly longer run on Saturdays. This week was a 6 mile run.
We’re moving: in roughly two weeks, we’re upgrading our house. It’s that weird ‘mid career/bigger family’ move. God was really gracious in getting our place sold incredibly quickly. The intentions of this move are pretty transparent for us. Our current place will be getting increasingly awkward to live in over the next few years for size (we only have 1 bathroom), and we’d like to adopt more. Growing our family will be easier with a slightly larger house and we’ve been burdened to host people. All through our married life, we’ve loved having people spend the night at our place and this house will bring that back into our reality.
Kids are wonderful: Back a while ago Nicholas Cage stared in a movie called ‘family man’ and it really made me cringe a bit. The buried lie there is that somehow being a ‘family man’ isn’t a good thing and I’m finding the truth is very different. Aidan is wonderful, just wonderful; he’s an intellectual 25 year old trapped in a 6 year old’s body; at least when he’s not tired or freaky about something. Iona is a gem. She’s such a true girl in how she interacts and loves her family; she’s so compassionate (when she wants to be ). Lord willing, we’re starting up the adoption process again sometime this summer. Details, TBA.
So, what’s to come? Back to general banter, a peek into Pete’s life and our life as the Juvinall’s. Glad to be back.
After being gone for a few days to Educause, we spent the weekend at home pretty much on the down low. With the exception of Youth Group tonight, we’ve all been sleeping/watching TV/spending time together. I’ve come to find Aidan as he gets older is really affectionate to me and I’m looking forward to growing that relationship even more as we get older, even though I totally botched a parent moment with him this weekend. (Long Story)
As a small part of Orphan Sunday (http://www.orphansunday.org) this weekend we watched Meet the Robinsons. I love this movie because it really is a superbly positive movie about adoption that promotes the idea of family and also individuality along with it. Well, we started it up and found Iona was obsessed with the first part of the movie:
As she watched it, we just found ourselves moved to tears at the despair of the situation presented; of the mom whose option that made sense to her was to give up her son, at the culture that fostered this, at the boy whose life was changed and our daughter now watching this unfold. It was just a empathetic moment.
The other end of this, of course, is his eventual adoption into a family who loves him and who is really different in their personalities but their common love and respect for each other tightens the family bond. It’s such a good metaphor for families, but the larger church community. That God maybe did know what he was talking about when he made this comparison to us as adopted sons. Imperfect, silly, but really beautiful when we all come together.
Thanks for your patience as we’ve been rather silent (mostly been on facebook lately). One quick announcement though, after spending a year with picasa and two very cute children, we’ve decided to move to flickr. Picasa has a better interface, but flickr has more available plugins for blogs, unlimited space (we’re almost maxed out of our 10 GB) and will allow us to store everything a lot longer.
This last week was a notably bad week for me. This time of semester is usually horrendous for my schedule at work and there are usually a number of things that slip through the cracks regardless of how well organized I am. Running through and endless gambit of chasing my tail, I met my mortality head on this week as I was told I need to lose some weight, cut caffeine out my life and generally get a little bit more healthy and start eating like a 37 year old and not a 17 year old.
In the middle of all this I’ve renewed my love and passion for my wife. You know, we’re getting to the point in our relationship where we’re not ‘newly married’ and that’s not to say we don’t feel like it. But yet there is a beauty to the road that we’ve traveled so far. We’re getting to the length of time of our relationship where we’ve experienced some stuff of life. We’ve gotten a taste of the sickness and health as well as good times and bad, and you know what? It’s a beautiful thing to hold a hand of a woman I’ve done so far 11 years as her husband.
I don’t say this lightly because every step of our journey has been unique and beautiful in different ways but there’s something to length and battling together that really has made her that much more beautiful than our wedding day. The truth is that your wife does get more beautiful and there’s something mystical and cool to know someone for this long.
Things I’ve learned so far. Melissa offers wonderful advice, she has my blind spot and she’s a wonderful, compassionate person who is just a joy to be around. She’s my partner, my best friend, and I’m so thankful I’m married to her.
So, Corn Pops cereal from Kelloggs has a new commercial. Admittedly, I’ve only seen it once at 6:30 a.m, half asleep, but it goes something like this: the Corn Pop is stuck in his house and scared and he opens the door and a bunch of ghost pirate milk bottles with creepy white eyes are groaning and coming towards his door. My initial reaction was ‘Wow, they still make that?’ Aidan is now so frightened of this commercial that he had nightmares about it a couple of times and pleads with me to pray, nightly, that he doesn’t have nightmares. It came on when I was sitting in there and he ran to me and pleaded with me to turn off the TV.
Well, I thought I’d write Kelloggs consumer affairs department with a ‘gosh, am I the only one with a scared kid? Maybe fear isn’t a good idea for marketing.’ Following is the ever so generic response. Hopefully, “Let’s scare the snot out of kids so they’ll buy our non popular cereal” isn’t a sentence that gets uttered by their marketing department but somehow I think it might be.
Mr. Juvinall,
Thank you for contacting our company regarding the advertising for Kellogg’s® Corn Pops® cereal. We sincerely appreciate your interest.
We are sorry to hear that the commercial gave your child nightmares. Viewer reaction, such as yours, is helpful to us and taken into consideration when developing future advertisements. Your concerns have been forwarded to the appropriate company officials and we hope future ads for this and our other products will be more acceptable to you.
Again, thank you for sharing your views and interest in our company.
). Lord willing, we’re starting up the adoption process again sometime this summer. Details, TBA.