Eclectic Amateur

The new eggs have hatched. “This time for sure!”

… to find that the NEA thinks homeschooling is awful.

I especially love this part:

Instruction should be by persons who are licensed by the appropriate state education licensure agency, and a curriculum approved by the state department of education should be used.

In other words, go ahead and educate your children at home, but you have to do it our way.

I guess they’re just sore because it’s now become news when it’s not a homeschooler that wins the National Spelling Bee. (Congratulations to Pratyush Buddiga on that accomplishment.)

Ah, well. The only thing more I can think to say to this kind of nonsense is to quote my son David: “Na na na na boo-boo!” Will not! So there! Can’t make me!

“Philothea” nails it in an email to the Heart, Mind, and Strength blog:

[T]he wonderful thing about the crisis in the Catholic church (as opposed to the Episcopal church) is that you are simply dealing with sin while we are dealing with heresy.

How true (see Borg, Marcus and Spong, John Shelby). I’m still utterly shocked, appalled, flabbergasted, and yes, scandalized to see Jesus Seminar tripe handed out for consumption by new confirmands:

The purpose of the group is to support and encourage one another as they try to live out their Baptismal Covenant, to explore and challenge their understanding of Christian faith by reading appropriate books, to deepen and strengthen their faith that they might more effectively demonstrate their faith in daily life…

I guess I must be one of those right-brained, analytical types, no doubt caught up in hidebound tradition, because I just can’t get my head around how denying the content of the Creeds (contained within the Baptismal Covenant) can deepen one’s faith.

You know, you’d think that after seven years of fatherhood (and four children!) that I’d have understood this a little bit before now.

But it’s so easy to get caught up in the day-to-day struggles, that you forget what a gift your children are. And just how much grace we can receive through them.

But today: I am, face it, a grump. I am tired, I am feeling the weight of the world on my shoulders from what I haven’t gotten done at work and at home, and I have more self-pity about this than I know what to do with.

And Andrew, bless him, knows nothing of this. He just knows that Daddy is home. And he laughs, a pure bubbling laugh to cure what ails ya. And smiles at me with his million-dollar smile that says I am full of joy and I love you, Daddy even though it comes out more like “HA-ha! A goo ga ga SQUEAK! HA-ha!”

(After that, how can I mind cleaning the baby food off of his face?)

This is what Grace looks like, transmitted through a 12-month old.