Julia Child's My Life in France? Or Welty's Delta Wedding describes a lot of meals (and is one of my favorite books).

Our week 19 is up, complete with pictures of our new Christmas kitten

Lurking on this thread even though my oldest is 9--I tend to panic early ;) Would you mind listing some of the places you've used/looked into or point me in the right direct direction for searching myself? I tried to do a search a couple of months ago, and apparently I have no idea what terms to use.

My now 9 year old stayed home for 20-30 minutes by himself occasionally starting at 8. I can count on one hand the number of times it's happened, mostly because the opportunity doesn't arise very often (there aren't many places that are less than a 20 minute drive for us, so it's pretty much just if I go to the vet or the grocery store) and he usually doesn't want to stay. He's very cautious and conscientious, though, so I trust him alone. His 7 year old brother...will probably be older before I'll leave him.

First baby was magic sleep baby. Slept through the night by 8 weeks old, and was sleeping 12 hours at a stretch by 3 months. He slept in a crib because we had a tiny bedroom and a double bed at the time; I figured I'd bring him into bed with us when he woke up to nurse, but after a couple of nights in the crib...he stopped waking up to nurse. shrug. he needed his space. Second baby was a nightmare. We co-slept for 7 or 8 months, until it became completely unbearable. The issue wasn't that he woke up at night; it was that he woke up and stayed up for hours, night after night after night. Until he was past 2. Actually, it kept going after that, but he weaned at just past 2, so he didn't usually wake ME up at night anymore. But we'd find him regularly, playing all by himself in the playroom at 3 in the morning, having turned on every light in the house on his way downstairs. Third baby was pretty normal. He co-slept until he was 3 and woke up at night to nurse for probably a year to 18 months, but it was less and less frequent as he got older. He'd nurse and go right back to sleep, which seemed like no problem at all after what we went through with his brother. These threads are always funny to me because there's always this mix of "my babies slept great because we co-slept!" and "my babies slept great because we sleep trained!" As someone with some of each kind of baby, I think it's mostly just dumb luck.

DH wanted 2, I wanted 3 or 4, so 3 is supposed to be our compromise (that's what we talked about before we even got married). I'm pretty sure I'd like one more (some days, anyway), but DH is about as sure as he can be that he doesn't. So that's probably that. But you never know what will happen...

Wow, really? Maybe I wasn't paying enough attention in church growing up :lol:

I've enjoyed reading your thoughts, Heather, and I hope I didn't come across as too confrontational. I'm a believer in "in essentials unity, in non-essentials liberty, in all things charity" before I'm a believer in any particular doctrine, but sometimes I get overexcited :). Calvinism fascinates me, and I'm always interested in hearing how modern Christians understand it.

:iagree: I was really taken aback to read Heather's take on "God is love." I think of that statement as massively important because it IS (in my reading) so simple and so clear. I've always considered it a beautifully elegant way to help me understand God, and I've never even entertained the possibility that it could, in fact, be meant to make me rethink my definition of love. We understand love on some primal level from the moment we're born, and our understanding of it is reinforced in countless ways every day; God is the part that's harder to get. When John tells me that if I understand love I already understand God...well, that's kind of what won me over back when I was floating somewhere between belief and agnosticism.

This thread is really bringing the universalists out of the closet ;). Forme, it honestly is the logical endpoint of Calvinist thought. I was very surprised when I realized how easy it is to make a Biblical argument for universalism using many of the same thought processes Reformed folks use to make a case for predestination. Apparently, I'm not the only one who thinks this way...a quick google search turned up more than one Arminian website with ominous warnings that Calvinism leads to Universalism :lol:

Also in Romans 5...5:18 The Greek is the same for both "all"s there. How can it mean that all men are condemned but only some are (or at least have the opportunity to be) saved?

My understanding is that this is one strain of Reformed thought, and that another is that God intended the Fall to happen from the beginning. But I'm certainly no expert. At any rate, either way, God KNEW the Fall would happen. But at that point we get into why I also have some problems with Arminianism and why universal reconciliation is really what makes the most sense to me (I think it also provides answers to a lot of the objections Calvinists raise to Arminianism).

Ah, I guess the part where I laid that out is 4 or 5 pages back now. You were probably asleep ;). I don't see a difference, in practical terms, between forcing people to sin and deliberately creating people incapable of not sinning.

Then (Calvinist) God should probably stop forcing everyone to sin, if he hates it so much. Yep, no, can't get past that. If I believed in that God, I wouldn't trust a word that guy said, so it wouldn't really matter how I interpreted various Bible verses. The God is good because he's God argument is so broad it allows for...anything. How do you know God isn't tricking you? How do you know that your faith itself isn't an elaborate ruse? Also, I think a good deal of your argument assumes that predestination is sort of the default view, and that the only thing holding anyone back from embracing it is that it doesn't fit in with how we want God to be. For a lot of us, we don't really need to grapple with how God can fit a Calvinist definition and still be good and loving, because we really and truly don't agree with Calvinism. When I say that this whole "God punishes people for doing things they can't stop themselves from doing" thing is the part I don't get, I mean I don't get how Calvinists can get past it themselves...not that if only I could get past that I'd be out searching for a Reformed church tomorrow. Which I suppose could make one wonder why I can't seem to stay away from this thread... :D

This isn't really about feelings and preferences for me. 1. I don't find Biblical arguments in favor of Calvinism any more compelling than Biblical arguments in favor of Arminianism. We could all post lists of battling Bible verses all day long to support our various positions. Minds greater, I imagine, than any here have prayerfully studied these questions for thousands of years and reached dramatically different conclusions. I don't think any side can claim an open and shut case--to suggest otherwise is pretty insulting. 2. I don't really get suggesting that there's some sort of selfish motivation behind Arminianism. Anyone who's debating the issue is already a believer and therefore already one of the elect, no? That's what people here have said, anyway, that anyone with a desire to know God is getting that desire from God and has therefore won the cosmic lottery. I can think of a lot more selfish reasons for believing one's self to be one of God's chosen than for thinking everyone has a shot at what I have. If it's seriously a character flaw to hope that grace is for everyone, then, well, okay.

From your list, I like Elise the best. I love Eleanor, but I do think it doesn't really "go" with Lyla w/o a nickname, and I think the obvious nickname, Ellie, makes for too many Ls w/ two few other letters. For some reason, Rose sprang immediately to mind. Nora Clare Susanna Chloe Annie Margaret/Maggie or Daisy or Maisie

Disciples of Christ. Kids up to 2nd grade stay for the first 20 minutes or so then go to "Worship and Wonder" for the rest of the service. So my younger two go there; my 9 year old stays with us. There's no pressure at all to send kids to Worship and Wonder, and mine have stayed with us at times.

:iagree: I can conceive of a God like that, but not one that would fit any definition of "good" that I could ever agree with.

But that's not Calvinism, is it? Or are you saying Adam and Eve had free will, but they blew it for the rest of us, so we don't? I do still have problems with the Fall that aren't solved by Arminianism (see above: why I'm a universalist), but they aren't as...insurmountable to me as the problems with Calvinism.

Yeah, I'm pretty much a universalist, or at least a hopeful universalist at this point. It's the only thing that really makes sense to me, logically and emotionally. It also has a strong historical foundation; a lot of the early church leaders were universalists to some degree or another.

I guess for me there are aspects of both Arminianism and Calvinism that challenge my sense of logic and reason. But I'd rather wrestle with how I can have free will and God still be God than wrestle with how God can create sin and then blame me for it. One leads me to a God who is more loving and kind than I can fully comprehend; the other to a God who is more angry and vengeful than I can fully comprehend. Susan--in your example, I can't get past the fact that everyone is rushing headlong toward hell because God set them down facing that direction and they CAN'T turn around. I can't get past the fact that God is punishing people for something that they can't stop themselves from doing.

Okay here is my problem, and one that I've never heard a reasonable answer to (generally just some variation on "it's a mystery," "we can't understand how God works" etc)....God MADE people. On purpose. An omniscient God made people whom he KNEW would be "totally depraved." A reformed view would force me to believe in a God who created people incapable of doing good and who then punishes them (and by "punished" we're talking "allows to be brutally tortured for all of eternity") for not being good. God as parent is a pretty powerful metaphor for me, and to me that would be akin to beating an infant senseless for peeing in his diaper. My understanding is that there's some disagreement about God's intentionality concerning the Fall, but to me there's very little difference between planning for the Fall to happen and wishing it wouldn't but doing all of the things you KNOW will lead to it anyway.

There used to be a band in Atlanta called Big Fish Ensemble, and they had a song called, "I Hate Parties," with lyrics like, "I wish I'd stayed at home and watched TV / I hate parties more than anything." I agree with them. I'm another vote for sit on the couch and play with my iphone, wondering how much longer before it's socially acceptable for me to leave.

Just FYI, you can put PDFs on the Nook, too.

They all sound the same to me, too. I think we're not very careful with our vowels in the south. I was in high school before I realized that pin and pen aren't homophones. And I went to the University of Georgia, where they spell the mascot "dawgs" to somehow emphasize that it should be given a certain pronunciation that still sounds pretty much exactly like the regular pronunciation of "dogs" to me. Oh! Except one time when I worked at a movie theater I kept seeing a trailer for the Tom Berenger/Barbara Hershey movie, "Last of the Dogmen" and the narrator said both "dog" and "men" with such exaggerated pronunciation that I finally understood the difference (with dog; I had already figured out about e's vs. i's way back in high school :D).