Happy Birthday Maddie!

The Birthday Girl

For Maddie's tenth birthday we came down to spend the night with Jon and Beth. Tiffany came over to babysit while Jon, Beth, Cathie and I went out for dinner. They'd gotten Maddie a cake with a trick candle, along with a Justice Shopping spree (which I suggested Jon go with Maddie).

For breakfast we went to the place with pancakes about the size of her head.

Ten things you might not know about Maddie:

1. She would rather have an inferior iPod nano than her iPod touch.
2. One of her best friends just moved to Germany (not to be a nazi).
3. She likes peanut butter cake.
4. She can do a round-off-double-back-handspring.
5. She would like to get her ears double pierced. The jury is still out on this.
6. Her uncle Jon has referred to her as "Cheeto Head". The name has stuck.
7. This is the first birthday in ten years she hasn't celebrated at home and woken up with a room full of balloons.
8. She wants to be a fashion designer when she grows up.
9. She has so many of her Mom's quirks and sayings that it's a bit scary at times (in a good way of course).
10. She has the best fashion sense of anyone in our family.
    

Kur Family Moves

Last weekend weekend my Dad, his friend Dick, Mike Koch, Dan and I all headed down to Memphis to help Jon and Beth move back to Michigan. The Kurt family moves have a number of unspoken rules that have become lore over time:

1. All members of the Kurt family must show up to help the others move no matter where in the country they are located. If you don't, you will be shamed to no end for years on end. The collective memory is long and distinctive.
   
2. If you allow the family to help you move, the family has complete freedom to go through your stuff and to comment on the value of what you own and why you are moving it.
3. If we see a box marked fragile, we pronounce it 'frag-i-lay' and act ignorant. We will do this 20 - 30 times in a given move.
   
4. Dan is always in charge, no matter who is moving. Dan always packs the truck. Dan spent a summer working for a moving company and he knows what he's doing. He has always been very good at packing and enjoys it.
   
5. Dan always wears his bandanna, combat boots, back strap and brings his hump straps. Unfortunately for him, and fortunately for us, Kris has thrown away Dan's jean shorts (which he likes to refer to as his 'daisy-dukes').
6. The move where Cathie and I moved from Livonia to South Lyon has grown to be the worst move ever. If you believe the stories, we packed nothing and actually made people walk each item over to the new house.
   

Em lost her other 'buck' tooth

Secret Santa

When we moved Jon into his place in Memphis we hung this plastic Santa on his roof. We decided to hang it up in his new, fancy, schmancy neighborhood and let his neighbors get the right first impression. We tried to get it up even higher on the roof where Jon wouldn't see it for a while, but the ladders didn't quite make it.

Trailer when loaded by Dave

Truck when loaded by Dan and Mike Koch

Beale Street in Memphis

Mike Koch and Dick are in Memphis

Greatest Invention Ever

I headed down to Memphis to help Jon and Beth move. While Jon and I cleared out more crap than you can imagine from the attic, I had an epiphany. Instead of handing boxes down the steps, I laid a board across them and turned it into a slide and halved our work. You may be saying to yourself that I invented nothing, and simply used an inclined plane. I'm sure they said the same thing to Newton about gravity. I don't expect the Nobel Peace Prize or a Congressional Medal of Honor, but a large cash bonus would be adequate.

Jesus. the Novel

I've been reading the book Jesus by Walter Wangerin. If you've never read one of Wally's (is Wally short for Walter?) books, they're pretty amazing. The first book i read of his was The Book of God. It's an amazing book and essentially a novelized form of the Bible. it focuses on some key characters in the bible and focuses on personalities and some of hte big themes. It leaves out a lot of the geneaologies and minutiae and makes it really come alive. He incoporates the history and the drama into the stories in a way that make them seem very real and makes the themes of the old testament really jump out at you. The first time I read the whole old testament, I walked away thinking that God was a grumpy old bastard who just liked to mess with people. I read The book of God and then re-read the Old Testament and walked away with a completely different view. The people were more real, God's pursuit of his people and constant attempts at redemption were so much more vivid, and how everything pointed to Jesus, which is what i was originally posting about.

Anyhow, this book looks at Jesus as the story is told from all sorts of different angles; his mother, his disciplines and family. It puts the historical context around things instead of just having to guess, and forces you to think about the combination of the diety and the humanity that lived together in Jesus. I'm looking forward to going back and reading the Gospels after reading this. It's far less sacreligious than one of my favorite books, Lamb (The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal).

Emily's Lost Tooth

Em lost her front tooth, or her "Buck Tooth" as she calls it. She was very excited about the whole deal. Luckily she didn't ask Nate to "help" her pull it. When Nate helped Maddie, he tied a string to her tooth and the door-knob and pulled it out just like they do in the cartoons. It worked. As my brother Jon says, TV can teach you just about everything.

Leaper

This is leaper, Emily's new pet frog. She named it that because it jumps a lot, or so she says. She has been playing with him non-stop since she found him at a friends house today. It seems a little more resilient than the tree frogs she finds and keeps. She's been known to love the occasional pet to death (Not in a Of Mice and Men Kind of way, but in the "play with an animal so much" kind of way).

She explained to me today that she has already taught her frog to stand on his back legs, but she doesn't quite know how she taught him. When I saw him later in the evening he was lying on his back (probably playing dead hoping she'd go away) as she stroked his belly.

Happy Father's Day to Me!

After the long fun day on Saturday, we continued Father's day weekend in a little calmer fashion. I woke up to breakfast in bed and some fantastic gifts from each of the kids (and from Cathie as well, because I'm her sugar-daddy). Nate picked me out a collection of stuff that he knows I like (including a special girly placemat, because he thought it was funny), all of which he bought with his own money. Maddie and Em made me a couple of very cool poems and coupon books which I've been using. We spent the day hanging out around the house relaxing. For dinner, I got to to choose the meal from an ala-carte menu. We topped it off with Blizzard's from DQ. It was a great day and a great weekend. I'm a firm believer that father's day ought to be celebrate more times throughout the year. Because really, isn't every day mother's day?

Whoops, Emily was Student of the Month.. in May

Emily was named the student of the Month for May at her school. Regardless of the fact that it took me a month to post this, we're very proud of her.

Father's Day Pool Party

What a great fathers day weekend. Cathie's parents were kind enough to invite my whole family over to celebrate Cathie's Dad, my Dad, my brother and brother-in-law all at once. I liken the Kurt family's invasion of someone's pool to the scene in Caddyshack where the caddies are given one hour in the clubhouse pool every year. Being father's day, the day was filled with gifts. We tried to explain to my Dad that the custom is for him to start giving us gifts, but he didn't buy in to that. We got him a GPS system, which he's needed. Dan was kind enough to set the language to Swahili upon setup, which my Dad was able to restore after a couple of days. As any Kurt gathering goes, the day was filled with many naps. The picture below on the left is of all three of Kevin, Dan and I all taking naps in the pool. The one on the right is what happens if you take a nap in the open. That is lotion, not bird poop. Susan explained it this way:

Ben walked by Dave and said, "What that stuff on him??" I whispered to him that it was sunscreen and that he couldn't say anything to him. Ben looks at me and whispers back, "Oh. You not want him know that on him. 'kay." He totally got that it was a joke, without me actually telling him. Boy that kid fits perfectly into our family.

One thing I learned about my sister is that she doesn't know how to dive into a pool. I'm not talking fancy dives - I'm talking diving period. Check out the pics that Dan took to watch the sequence of her trying. Very amusing.

Again, Susan's description of this picture made me laugh:

While we were all sitting around chatting, Dave pulls out one of Cathie's books. Or so we thought. The cover has a guy, half dressed and underneath it said, "The best fantasy series......" He finally admitted that it was his book....and not Cathie's.
He claims its the best series ever. I'm sorry, but no matter how good that book is, I would never take it out in public....especially around my family.

We spent most of the day in the pool, drinking drinks and launching kids. The Mom's did a great job taking care of the Dad's and making it a very special day for us.

I started throwing the kids up in the air frontwards until they graduated to the back flip. I was amazed when I saw Dan's pictures just how high up they were going. I think I chucked Andrew about 10 feet up at one point.



As the drinks flowed, we got a little more daring. We started trying to dive into the middle of this floating basketball hoop. We probably should of checked to see if it was physically possible to fit through it before hand. I'm surprised Kevin's head made it through the hole.


Thanks again to Mom and Dad Lebbon for inviting us over and making this such a great day. If you have a sec, take a look at Dan and Susan's view. They have way more pictures and a better description.

Butter Dish Update

As many of you recall from Christmast, my brother Jon tried to follow in Dan and Kris's footsteps and get Dad a quaint combination gift that would cover both Christmas and Father's day. Dan and Kris normally get my Dad very quaint things like old fashioned nails that can't really be used and an 80 year old fireplace popcorn popper.

Jon decided to play on the "Dad had a heart attack theme and needs to eat less fatty stuff" and get him a special butter dish so that your butter doesn't need to be refrigerated. Useful, huh?

Anyways, my Dad tried to sell this wonderful gift at Susan's garage sale. Unfortunately, it didn't sell. He might have overpriced it. After all, he was asking a quarter for it.

Burning Discussion

Relevant Magazine's panel discussion on homosexuality, including Shane Claiborne, Nancy Ortberg, Chuck Colson, N.T. Wright and Jim Wallis. There's some great, challenging thoughts in this. Here are some of the things that struck me as I read it:

• Well, Billy Graham said really well once that it’s God’s job to judge, the Spirit’s job to convict and my job to love. And if we get those right, this issue looks very different to us. -Shane Claiborne
• There's a big difference between being right and being wise. For example, you can be right on a particular issue, but be right in an arrogant or mean-spirited way.. - Brian McLaren
  
• I have a friend who says that you see a lot of fat preachers yelling at gay folks, but very few gay folks yelling at fat preachers. He was making the point that nobody has the luxury of speaking as an outsider of the human race and that our subculture has certain “acceptable sins” and others that are just not the ones for which Christ died. . Jesus said, “The Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they say, ‘Look at Him! A glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!’” (Matthew 11:19) Today Jesus would be accused of being a friend of gays and lesbians, too. That’s because He is. If we have “fat” preacher friends, we should also have gay and lesbian friends. Jesus hung out with sinners and called us to do the same thing. - Steve Brown

Crowder being Miley

Wow... David Crowder... He's just being Miley... If you don't know this song, you don't have daughters.. I'm embarrassed to say how many times I've found myself with this song bouncing around in my head.

Honesty is not always the best policy

I've been working to retrain myself to lie. Maybe not lie, but to be a little less honest. These are the kinds of things they don't teach you when you get married that all husbands should know.

When my wife gets her hair cut and asks me how I like it, my mistake is to look at it for a minute, reflect on how it looks and tell her that I like it. My answer is always honest. If I'm not sure, I'll say so. Occasionally I'll tell her that it's new and might take me a bit of time to get used to, but it looks great. Foolish, I know. I assume that logically if she's asking me, she really wants the truth. I made the mistake once of asking one of my kids teachers (Sherri) if she'd gotten a new haircut and then followed it up with, "Do you like it?" Equally foolish.

On Cathie's haircuts lately, I've been trying to simply respond that I love it without missing a beat. I think I need to add a slight pause in there for it to seem genuine - or maybe it'll never seem genuine again and she had no idea how good she really had it with such an honest, oblivious husband as me.

Christians can be Mean

I read this in Renovation of the Heart this morning and it rang true to me, not in a finger pointing way, but because this is part of who I've been in the past, and still have pieces of this in me:

A fundamental mistake of the conservative side of the American church today, and much of the Western church, is that it takes as its basic goal to get as many people as possible ready to die and go to heaven. it aims to get people into heaven rather than to get heaven into people.

Now , the practice thus understood and practiced is self-defeating. It implodes upon itself because it creates groups of people who may be ready to die, but clearly are not ready to live. They rarely can get along with one another, much less those "outside". Often their most intimate relationships are tangles of reciprocal harm, coldness and resentment. They have found ways of being "Christian" without being Christlike.

As a result they actually fall far short of getting as many people as possible ready to die, because the lives of the "converted" testify against the reality of the life that is life indeed. The way to get as many people into heaven as you can is to get heaven into as many people as you can - that is to follow the path of genuine spiritual transformation or full-throttle discipleship to Jesus Christ. When we are counting up results we also need to keep in mind the multitudes of people (surrounded by churches) who will not be in heaven because they have never, to their knowledge, seen the reality of Christ in a living human being.

On the flip side, I've been coming to understand what it means to be a disciple of Jesus in a way I never had before, in a way that is changing me in ways I didn't know I could be changed. I've still got a long ways to go.

Sore Knees

A few weeks back my knees started bothering me. I attributed it to needing new shoes and kept running. Any time I'd run more than 5 miles they continued to hurt so finally I went into Triad to kept them checked out. Kirk videotaped me running and then hooked it up to the computer through a combination of slow-motion and some specialized software, he was able to diagnose the problem.

The amazing part was, it had nothing to do with my knees. It turns out that the upper body plays a huge part in running efficiently and correctly. I'd always wondered why sprinters have such huge upper bodies, which Kirk explained was because of how much they use their upper body for speed. Kirk showed me how my arm movements were throwing my hips and spine off kilter for which my left leg was compensating for. Kirk gave me a bunch of odd exercises to retrain my arms to move correctly with my run, which should in turn fix my knee problems.

Bears? Now you're putting the whole station in jeopardy."

A while back I had this Odd Conversation with a co-worker about bears. Apparently, she's not nuts. Or at least she's not hallucinating.

Velocity Car Wash Fund Raiser

We were supposed to have our fund raising car wash at church today, but Fez and Kasey ended up stuck in Holland (they went for a wedding shower, which Fez apparently loves going to). I found out when I showed up to church that it was canceled, but I figured it was too nice of a day, so we decided to wing it. We spent the first service figuring out how to do it and getting the supplies we needed and I think we were pretty much ready when the next service began.

We harassed people as they came into church to get a "wash while they worship". Cheesy, I know, but people didn't get it otherwise. It was too easy for people to wave as they went by, so I taught the kids the true art of the sale. I had the kids jump out in front of the cars as they came in and make sure the people had to roll down their windows and tell us face-to-face they didn't want to get a car wash and send a poor kid to camp. What can I say? Shame is a powerful motivator. The best I promised people was that their car would not look worse than it did coming in. We gave each person a card and had them leave their keys in car. During the service we went and got their car, washed and dried it, and then put it back in their spot.

The kids had a blast, and the cars didn't look too horrible for the most part. We earned about $210 which wasn't too shabby for one service. You can see the rest of the pictures here.

Stanley Cup Parade

Nate, Maddie and I went downtown to the Red Wings Stanley Cup parade. We went down there with Mark Kohne and his two kids, along with Fez. Mark Kohne almost didn't go because said that he would rather go shopping for patio furniture with his wife. After threatening him with his man-card, he relented and joined us. Being the poor example of parents, I took the kids out school for the day so they could witness the big event. They were both disappointed to miss tests, but they survived. I used the excuse that your team only wins the Stanley Cup so often, which Cathie refuted with the fact that the Wings have won it four times in Nate's lifetime. So much for logic.

We got down there at about ten over towards the Fox Theatre, near the beginning of the parade. It was stifling hot, 92 degrees without a breeze. The first half of the parade was stuff that we didn't care about: City Council members (no Kwame, though), marching bands and people who had no other purpose than to carry a banner. Then the greatness began with the likes of Gordy Howe, Steve Yzerman and Scotty Bowman. s you can see, we were right next to the players, who eventually came through. The crowd went nuts for all of the players and all of the trophies. The people around us were friendly and already a bit toasty by 11am. It didn't hinder their generosity and a cold beer has never tated better.

I tried to get a picture of Franzen, but somehow his wife blocked the shot. Not a complete loss, I guess. The players seemed to be having as much fun as the crowd - all of them with family and friends in the trucks, a drink in their hand and a family member video taping the crowd. Probably not something they want to forget any time soon.


And of course, the Cup! Lindstrom carried it over his head most of the way and I'm pretty sure he never got tired.



You can see the rest of the pictures here.

Congressional Medal of Honor Winner

President Bush recently awarded the Congressional Medal of honor to a 19 year old Army specialist posthumously. McGinnis was in Iraq, manning a Humvee's .50-caliber machine gun and saw a grenade flying toward the Humvee. He tried to deflect it, according to Defense Department accounts, but it fell inside the vehicle. His training called for him to warn his comrades, then jump from the gun turret and escape. Instead, Spc. McGinnis jumped into the vehicle, deliberately placing his body between the grenade and the rest of the crew. He died in the explosion. The other four crew members survived.

I wonder how I'd respond in his situation. I don't think you just behave this way in a given situation unless this is who you are at the deepest core of who you are. That's the kind of person I want to become.

It reminded me of these words from Jesus. I'll bet the other four people who lived would agree.

Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.
-John 15:13

A Different Consensus

I read an interesting article in the Wall Street Journal the other day summarizing the findings of the Copenhagen Consensus 2008. It's a panel panel of really smart people, including five Nobel laureates, who got together and weighed more than 40 proposals to improve the world by spending a total of $75 billion over the next four years.

They looked at ten different challenges that included things like air pollution, disease, education, global warming, malnutrition, water and hunger - all major issues. They looked at what the most effective things that could be focused on to help these problems in the world and have the greatest impact.

The answers surprised me. What would do the most good most? Supplements of vitamin A and zinc for malnourished children. Number two? A successful outcome to the Doha Round of global free-trade talks. Global warming mitigation? It ranked 30th, or last, right behind global warming mitigation research and development.

I think it's interesting how free trade and something as simple as has a positive impact on these huge issues that face the world. I'm not saying I'm going to stop recycling my plastic bottles, but I think it's interesting to look at the positive consequences of trade and economic stimulus abroad. Great reminder that the US is far from perfect, but we make the world better by driving free-trade and freedom in a lot ways.

Picture in need of a caption

Numnah

Don't ask me why I was watching the spelling bee on ESPN, but I saw this kid and just about wet myself laughing.

Babysitting Scorecard

We've been grooming Nate to start "babysitting" his sisters. We started by allowing him to stay home by himself, and then to stay with his sisters for an hour or so at a time. On Saturday, he had his first real gig.

My type A personality might shine through a bit too much here, but it's a start. I wanted to setup some measurable criteria for Nate so that he could understand what success would look like as a babysitter. I also wanted to set some objective criteria for the girls so they would know how they are supposed to behave when it's their brother watching them and what success would look like for them. I setup a report card for Nate and went through it with him and the girls. My plan was to sit down and talk it through with the girls afterward, fill it out and then talk to the Nate about the results.

We came home on Saturday night and were presented with an already completed report card by Madeline and Emily that you see here. He apparently got 100% and very high marks. I still haven't figured out what kind of coercion, if any, was used to get them to this point. So far, so good.

Zefty

This is kind of a cool free service I'm trying called Zefty. It basically allows you to keep an online allowance account for the kids so both the kids and the parents can keep track of allowances. We've been tracking this on our calendar, and it's kind of a pain to remember. Each kid gets an account they can login and check. The system this will automatically deposit the amounts in the kids accounts based on the amount and period I specify, and parents can mark when it's been paid out to the kids. No actual money is needed, it's purely a family accounting system. I'm guessing the Rays could have used this about 6 years ago to keep track of the finances for five boys allowances.

Ice, Ice Baby

I'd mentioned earlier that every so often my ice maker dies and then rises again. This time, I thought it was down for the count. It had stopped for about 7 weeks and didn't look like things were going to change any time soon. Late last week as Cathie and I were watching TV we heard this crazy rumbling noise from our fridge that sounded like it was ready to explode. It was so bad that I started looking at what a new fridge would cost because I figured this was the last straw. The next morning, I went to the tomb/fridge to see the ice-stone rolled away and glorious ice cubes filling my tray! My Ice Maker Has Risen! It has risen indeed!