We just completed two nights of discussion here in St. Louis on biblical worldview and education for the How Kids Think project. The groups were small (about seven each), which was a disappointment on the planning end, but on the implementation end, we realized the groups needed to be small to facilitate the kind of discussion we were hoping for. There was a good representation both nights from Christian school teachers, homeschool parents, and parents of really young kids. It was pretty amazing, really, how the groups turned out, and the input we gathered was great.

Craig and I are paying for it a bit now as we’re both introverts. Though we didn’t interact with scores of people two nights in a row, we were both “on” with people two nights in a row (we’ve agreed that tomorrow we’re “off”). I’m thinking a movie tomorrow night and no phone calls answered. Dr. Douglass called it the rubber band effect (which I’m sure I’ve mentioned here before) in which someone can be stretched outside of his or her personality, but to the degree therubber band is stretched one way, it will inevitably spring back to that same degree in the other direction.

Our girls have done well through all of this, even entertaining themselves in one of the Sunday School classrooms tonight for two hours (complete with video, all-you-can-eat-Goldfish, and fun toys they don’t get to play with much on Sundays). But two nights of this has been enough for them, too, and they’re ready for a return to normal, especially after our busy Apple Festival weekend in Illinois.

Days like yesterday and today usually breed family-pajama-day tomorrows. We’ll get done what we need to get done, but we’ll look like we’ve just rolled out of bed all day long. Sounds pretty good to me.

• Miles driven: 200
• 4-H lemonade shake-ups downed: 16
• Corndogs consumed: 11
• American Legion french fry sides ordered: 10
• Rainbow-flavored snowcones slurped: 4
• Cheeseburgers purchased: 3
• Place Dunham Family float won: 2nd (the dynasty ends)
• Fried fish and butterfly porkchop sandwiches eaten: 1 each
• Rural America entertainment (queen contest, lip sync, Macon County Line country/western band, Magnificent Mile parade) and more hometown culture than you can shake a stick at: Priceless

I’m a stay-at-home mom by trade, call, and desire. I also like to write, which doesn’t seem like a job, but more like a way to process the world so I can move on with life.

Currently, I’m a researcher masquerading as someone who has an actual job with a work-related email address, payroll paperwork, and administrative folks I communicate with on a daily basis.
The research of the job is fascinating to me, and I’m liking it a lot. The administrative details? Let’s just say I’m not as administrative as I thought I had the potential to be.

Case in point #1: I locked myself out of my gwnews.com email address this week and had to get help from the Tech Master to get me back in. (Hi, my name is Megan, and do you think you could explain how email works again?)

Case in point #2: I have not been able to submit my reimbursement paperwork correctly to the Payroll Master and I’ve tried, oh, about five times. (Hi, my name is Megan, and do you think you could just give me an allowance so I don’t have to keep track of paper and remember how to do hard computer tasks like type inside boxes on a standard form?)

Case in point #3: I’ve been working on surveys to send out to folks that will be going in official-looking formatted and html-enabled emails. I’ve sent 3 of them to the Email Master two times each, each time with “These are ready to send!” typed in with them. Each time, 12 hours later, I’ve emailed her again with a, “WAIT! Those can’t go yet. Just throw them in the trash and I’ll get them to you again.” Like she’s going to believe me the next time I send her anything with “Yes, send these now, please!” (Hi, my name is Megan, and I just like to create extra work for everyone.)

The upside? Everyone I’ve been working with has been extra gracious with me, and nobody has cyber-sighed in my direction (at least not that I’ve heard). They seem to be okay with the fact that I have no idea what I’m doing yet.

So the only one being hard on me is me. I told Craig I’m feeling this weird need to bake cookies for the entire administrative team of GWN and apologize with sugar.

Maybe just getting my details submitted properly the first time would suffice.

This is our third fall season back in the Midwest, and with that comes our third year to participate in the Griggsville Apple Festival with the rest of the Dunham crew. Craig’s sisters do most of the work on the float and we show up and look cute (okay, the girls do).
The Dunhams have won the Apple Festival Parade trophy for the past two years (maybe more, but that was before our time), so tomorrow we go back to defend our title, eat corndogs, drink fresh-squeezed lemonade, peruse the public library’s discards, maybe take an overpriced tractor ride around town, and take pictures of funny advertisements we will see along the way.

This year will be extra fun, though, because Craig’s parents are the honorary citizens of the festival, so we will go tomorrow to watch them participate in that aspect of the festival as well.

My parents have been in town this week since Tuesday and they leave tomorrow morning. Tomorrow afternoon we take off for the farm, so this is Grandparents week for us and the girls have enjoyed it very much. I have too, for all the obvious reasons of getting to see my parents again, but also because my mom should win some kind of award for washing, drying, folding, and putting away all the laundry we had piling up in this house. All of it (and there was a lot).

My dad taught Chloe how to tie her shoes, as we’ve made learning to tie your shoes a “learned from Papa” skill around here, which has been a beautiful thing because my dad is the perfect person to sit with a kid and go through the tying process over and over and over and over and over. Early Wednesday morning, he and Chloe took their tennis shoes to the front porch, sat on the steps, and began. She was a pro in no time, so we can now successfully mark “ties shoes” off her list of need-to-learn life skills.

I’ve been How Kids Think-ing, grading papers for Craig, and teaching the girls. I need to be sleeping and staying current with our laundry so we don’t again develop the problem we had when my parents arrived on Tuesday. I officially admitted to my limitations in the ironing department, and hauled a whole basket full of Craig’s shirts to the cleaners last weekend. It was the best $20 we’ve spent in a long time.

So, that’s the latest scoop from the Half Pint House. Our chaos has exceeded the “acquired” state right now (it’s more like “normal,” which we hope will change – maybe in November).

Only no longer 17. But that’s a good thing, because if I were, I wouldn’t have Katie. She brought this picture to me while I was still sleeping yesterday morning and said, “I drew this picture for you, Mama. It’s you in a hat at a disco.”

If that isn’t a sure way to wake me up in the morning, there isn’t one.

My brain has been taken over by How Kids Think, and each day this week I could have sworn I’d written something here, only to realize later that I’ve been spending most of my time over there. These next few weeks are going to be fairly research-heavy for me (not just here on the WWW, but in the World As We Know It).

This means that when I’m not holding conversations about what does having a biblical worldview even mean, I’m holding ones that go like this:

Millie: (Singing, about something that sounded like, “I-I-I-I have an H H H H H”)
Me: Wow, you do? That sounds really neat.
Millie: It is. I like it.
Me: Tell me more about your “H.”
Millie: My what?
Me: Your “H.” You said you have an H.
Millie: What’s an “H?”
Me: It’s what you said you had.
Millie: I have an “H?”
Me: Don’t you?
Millie: Don’t I what?
Me: Have an “H.”
Millie: No, I don’t have an “H.”
Me: What were you singing about then?
Millie: I don’t know. Are we having peanut butter for lunch?

And this is who I’m trying to figure out how to teach biblical worldview concepts to…