Chocolate chip ridiculous...

To reveal a glimpse of your silliness is kind of endearing and even scores you some humility points, or it would if you weren't, you know, too super-humble to care about such things. For obvious reasons, however, I rarely reveal on the world wide web the heights to which my ridiculosity can soar.  An exception...

This week our small group served at Church Under the Bridge, a ministry that does a church service and feeds about 200 homeless folks nightly in Houston.  We brought pizza and cookies.  When we were working out the logistics, I threw down the gauntlet and demanded that the cookies everyone brought be homemade because...

1. I do think it's meaningful to bring good food that you would serve at your own home to these things.
2. Seriously, I rock out at homemade chocolate chip cookies.  If you leave out people I love, my cookies rank second only to books I've read in areas of personal pride.

So, I threw down my homemade demand and then sat for an uncomfortable interval in the silence and guarded discussion that followed and realized that

1. I was one of two people in the room that had access to a kitchen for most of every day.
2. There's really no better way to squelch a serving opportunity than to demand that everyone do it your way, playing to your talents and ideas.

I retracted my demand.  

Fast forward to the evening of the event.  At 5:00 I remembered that HOMEMADE COOKIES banner I'd been flying the week before and noticed that

1. I had to get three kids to karate in 45 minutes.
2. I needed to leave for the service in an hour.
3. There were not 4 dozen homemade chocolate chip cookies in my house.

Now, if I had been mature, I would have recognized the chastening of the Lord and humbly bought some cookies and calmly taken my people to karate.  If I had had a taser gun, I would have tased the children and whipped out those cookies in uninterrupted silence without a problem.  But I do not own a taser gun and there is no way in hell I'm showing up without homemade cookies after the fuss I raised.  It was frantic.  In the end, I could only pull it off by putting the kids in the car, slapping the last batch in the oven, sprinting to the car, driving, ahem, briskly to karate while explaining the meaning of "tuck and roll," drop-kicking the children out of the car and racing back home, where I found

The event was a blessing to me, and you know what?  In the end, I think just hanging out and listening to people who needed to talk is what I was actually supposed to do there - not march at the front of a parade of browbeaten people carrying homemade cookies.  Who knew?

Six years old...

I love this little guy.  So much about him makes me smile.  He's a curious mix of spunk, humor, narcolepsy, affection and braininess.  He has an irresistible crooked smile.

Bryan in bullet points

• He maintains a count on how many kisses on the lips Chris and I each get so he can keep it fair.  If Chris is out of town, no kisses on the lips for me.
• He's fascinated with numbers.  The book he got for his birthday says it has 63 pages, but that's wrong.  It actually has 72.  He knows.  He counted.
• He writes stories.  He's kind of limited by his repertoire of spellable words.  He just learned to spell "thief" and is really excited about the new possibilities for his writing.
• We spent the night at the zoo for his birthday.  A line of older kids all took turns touching elephant poop.  When it was his turn he said, "No thank you."  I hope that trend extrapolates.
• An hour or so later, he tried to lay down on the floor of the reptile house and go to sleep.  He combines his father's talent for knowing when he's tired with my talent for being able to sleep anywhere, which I think could qualify him for some kind of sleeping Olympics.
• He's obsessed with Legos.  He has his Lego birthday requests planned out through his tenth birthday.
• He's going to invent a spaceship that travels faster than the universe is expanding.  It has to go faster than the universe is expanding or else you could always be traveling right at the edge and never break out.  He will then travel outside the universe and see what's there.  He expects to find:
• More universes - probably there are 5 or 6 altogether.
• God.  He will see his body but not his face because if you look at his face, you die.
• Side note, the verse in the Bible that says "For you brought nothing into the world (Bryan translates world as universe here), and you will take nothing out of it" does not have to be true - your spaceship.
• He gave Rand a chess lesson, fully expecting to then play a game of chess with him.
• He figures that in the summer, Earth is close to the sun, so it's hot.  In winter, Earth is far from the sun, which must imply it's close to Pluto because Pluto is also far from the sun.  Snow on Earth comes from snowballs shot at us by Pluto.

Someday I may get homeschool credit I don't deserve for his love of learning.  The truth is, I just have to not beat it out of him.  I think I could put him in room with paper, pencil and an assortment of decent books, and he would educate himself.  

Happy birthday, little man.  Save me a seat in your spaceship.