Sullivan (sheet music in hand): Mama, can you read this?
Carla: No, honey, it’s music. It’s not words.
Sullivan: Oh, well, can you sing it?
Carla: No, it’s piano music.
Sullivan: Well, WE have pirnano!
Carla: But I don’t know how to play the piano.
Sullivan: I know how to play the pirnano: You just press the keys! That’s how you do it!

“I feel the sound of the solar panels inject’ning light into our house.”

— Sullivan, out of the blue

Hey, no meta-chuckles.

— Scott to Carla

“And if her fingernails freeze, they will explode and float all over in the wind of the cold morning.”

— Sullivan, after Carla told him we were pulling over while driving so that she could cover Éa’s fingers because they were cold

“Yo! Ho ho! And a bottle of yo!”

— Sullivan, missing ITLAPD by four months and some liquor—also baffling his parents as to when he found time to read Robert Louis Stevenson.

Sullivan: I’m a postman.
Scott: Well, hello, Mr. Postman!
Sullivan: Daddy, I’m just pretending.
Scott: Well, hello, Mr. Pretend Postman. What are you doing?
Sullivan: I’m delivering mail.
Scott: Well, what are you delivering, Mr. Pretend Postman?
Sullivan: I’m just pretending to deliver.
Scott: Well, what are you pretending to deliver, Mr. Pretend Postman?
Sullivan: I’m delivering a television.
Scott: Oh! To whom are you pretending to deliver a pretend television, Mr. Pretend Postman?
Sullivan: Dadda, I have to tell you something: It’s not a pretend television. It’s real television.

Daddy, I want to decorate the whole, whole, whole EARTH. 🎉

— Sullivan, after walking through downtown State College on New Year’s Eve with me

“He who hurries his footsteps errs.”

— Solomon (Proverbs 19:2b), in a maxim I need and love to hear almost every day, as somewhere along the way I internalized the exhausting idea that there’s always something I must be doing and that I’m certainly not getting to it fast enough

If the labels on her Christmas gifts were any indication, my daughter is gonna have serious trouble with folks over age 50 misspelling her name.

Having a deer stare me in the eyes as I took aim at him on opening day of rifle season here in Pennsylvania brought me to a new appreciation of the solemnity of killing for food. Watching him take his last breath because of violent action I took against him makes me sympathize with the literalist Biblical view that eating meat is a temporary provision only (see Genesis 9:1-4, Isaiah 65:25).

I kid not in saying that I considered vegetarianism that week.

In the end, I decided to continue my carnivorous ways, but with it in mind that I feast on the product of my own violence (in the case of my venison) or that of an agricultural mercenary (in the case of the rest of the beef, pork, poultry, and fish I eat). As Bill Johnson coincidentally tweeted on the same day I shot my deer, “A non-hunting meat-eater: someone who pays another to do their killing.”

And I want my children, if they are meat-eaters, to understand the same, so I plan to take them hunting once they’re of age. A taste of...

Sullivan: I forgot my sunglasses. We need to go home to get my sunglasses.
Scott: Why do you need your sunglasses, Sullivan?
Sullivan: Because the sun is a big, hot, round FIREBALL.

One of these photos is of Éa at four days old. The other is of Sullivan at three weeks old. Which one is which?

Scott: Where can we find top shelf bourbon?
Carla: Maybe you could ask for it on FreeCycle? “If anybody’s looking to get rid of their top-shelf bourbon…”
Scott: I’m pretty sure people have other ways to get rid of their top-shelf bourbon…

Sullivan: What’s Mama doing?
Scott: What do you think she is doing?
Sullivan: She is wiping that hanger thinger linger.
Scott: Well, that’s a very good name for it. But most people call it a curtain rod.
Sullivan: Yes…but I’d prefer to call it a hanger thinger linger. OR…a hanger wanger sanger.

Light pollution is a theological issue. 🚀 🌎

What do you do with your excess weatherstrip?

[while listening to “Three Little Birds” by Bob Marley]
Sullivan: What are “every little things”?
Carla: Just everything. Everything’s gonna be alright.
Sullivan: God. ‘Cos he makes badness into…into…love-ness. He’s a nice guy.

Some platitudes aren’t all that banal that if you actually apply them. Thinking “no regrets” before all moral and relational decision-making and keeping “no regrets” as an attitudinal check and inspiration to action will inevitably result in a satisfied, good life.

It is kind of scrapey on your tongue. It is hard. It is hard to lick. It is round. In a ball. What is in it? It has a lot of sugar. You [c]an spin it. You can lick with two sides. It has a lot of juice in it also.

— Sullivan, describing his first lollipop

The scary part wiggled your head a little.

— Sullivan, after having watched portions of How to Train Your Dragon at a family friend’s house 🍿

[several days after Jami’s visit:]

Scott: Does Mama drive like a pinball?
Sullivan: Yeah, Mama drive data pinball into the back of Bam-Bam’s car yesterday!
Scott: Well, it wasn’t yesterday, but good job; you got the right half of eternity, at least.

Very glad human gestational length is getting media attention. No, seriously: Our understanding has consequences.

I write this to as a Christian to Christians in hopes of introducing a meme that’ll benefit the next generation of Christians: I’d like to float out there that evangelical Christian culture idolizes marriage such that some would-be avid do-gooders choose to get married and start a family without knowing the consequences it’ll have on their capacity for extra-familial ministry. Check out Paul on the subject:

One who is unmarried is concerned about the things of the Lord, how he may please the Lord; but one who is married is concerned about the things of the world, how he may please his wife, and his interested are divided (1 Corinthians 7:32-34).

My experience so far as a family man bears this out: I am less at liberty, time-wise and energy-wise, to minister to others because I must also minister to my wife and children.

Is that a bad thing? Of course not. I delight in giving myself to my family. I wouldn’t have gotten married and had kids if I didn’t. But I didn’t realize the extent to...