I spent some one-on-one time with my six year old last night.  We had the following conversation that brought me much amusement:

Matthew: “Mommy, when we have our 6th baby, do we need to change our van?” (Just so you know, we’re having our 5th baby this year and we haven’t made any plans for baby #6 … and baby #5 will max out the capacity of our family minivan.)

Me: “Hunny, I’m really not sure if we’re going to have a 6th baby.”

Matthew (a bit perturbed): “But we’re going to have an odd number of children!!!!”

Me (smiling and amused): “Okay, hunny, we’ll see what the Lord gives us. Let’s just concentrate on having baby #5 for now.”

My boy loves symmetry and completeness, just like his Daddy the software engineer / numbers guy. Even numbers are good and odd numbers are just odd.

Lately I’ve been pondering on the number 5. This particular number doesn’t seem to bear much significance, but allow me to expound for just a bit.

• In the world of sports, it takes five players to form a basketball team.
• Anatomically speaking, we have five fingers per hand and five toes per foot.
• Geometrically speaking, a star has five points and a pentagon has five angles.
• Our youngest child was born on our five year anniversary.
• Last, but not least, we shall have one more addition to our family to make F-I-V-E kids in late November 2008. Click here to see the latest ultrasound (12wks 4days gestational age).

Now you know why it’s been quiet on the blog of late.

Today we celebrated our 7th year anniversary by going out to a nice and quiet dinner, just the two of us. Grandparents watched the kids while we enjoyed our dinner.

Afterwards we bought a cake and brought it back to celebrate our youngest’s second birthday. Alas, I was unable to make a cake for the birthday child. Perhaps next time.

The whole family:

Calissa holding her birthday present:

Happy birthday, baby girl.

And cherish your baby status as long as you can!  We love you!

Today we made a penguin and a frog out of pony beads.

Matthew stringing the beads together:

A happy boy and his finished penguin:

Andrew and his froggie:

The boys being silly with their new toys:

When you’re working with 500+ pony beads, it is almost inevitable that someone spills the beads. The guilty shall remain anonymous. Here are the kids helping to pick them up from the floor:

I remember when I was applying for colleges years ago, that one of the reasons I didn’t get so many scholarships was that I was too lazy to write essays to get them.

That and the fact that I wasn’t a young three-legged short male of Tahitian-German descent with financial need.  Yes, I’m making fun of the fact that so many scholarships are tied to very narrow categories of people.

Anyway, since getting on the blogosphere — and many years later — free stuff seems so much more worth working at.  Why?  Because I’m a little less lazy about writing, and much more cheap frugal! Ha!

For example, last week, Bob Kauflin offered 20 copies of his new book Worship Matters to bloggers who wrote in with a blurb on “why worship matters.”  And I got an email this morning that I’d won.  Yay!  As the main “worship leader” in my church, I think it’s important to constantly be challenged and refined in my thinking on worship; so I look forward to reading the book.

Here’s what I submitted, so you can read it here and on Bob’s blog when he announces the other winners later today:

Worship matters because we were created by God to worship.  More specifically, we were created to worship Him.  But sin has corrupted us, and still we continue to worship; but instead of worshiping God, we worship created things (Ro 1:23).  But worship still matters because it is still the reason we were created, and more importantly because it is the reason Christ came (Jn 4:23-24) and redeemed us, and it is therefore the reason the church exists, and the reason we continue to preach the gospel: to draw men and women into true worship of our great and awesome God.

Today we did a very simple experiment of mixing primary colors to produce secondary colors.

These are the colors we mixed together:

yellow + red = orange

yellow + blue = green

red + blue = purple

Here are the kids getting ready for the experiment:

Let the mixing begin:

As much as we dislike it, anger springs up very easily in the world of parenting. Inevitably our children will do the most irritating things throughout the day which make us want to pull our hair out.

Of course, anger can happen not just in parenting, but I’ve found that parenting has a way of bringing out problems with anger.  Yet I also believe that every good parent doesn’t like it this recurring problem.  How then do we resolve not to get angry when the children seem to excel at pushing our buttons?

I’m currently reading Raising Godly Tomatoes by L. Elizabeth Krueger, and in the last chapter she touched upon the subject of parental anger. On how to stop the cycle of anger, Mrs. Krueger explains from her own experience:

I decided to view my irritability as a serious sin, not just an unfortunate personality flaw. I decided to view losing my temper as totally unacceptable and completely forbidden. Instead of seeking to “improve,” I determined to “quit.” I changed to viewing anger as poison, not just as a small bothersome bad habit. Big difference.

. . . You must cultivate and ponder a HATRED for anger, be vigilantly on guard for its earliest signs of emergence, and be prepared to immediately overcome evil with good by replacing angry reactions with calmness and godly, right thoughts.

Watch yourself closely, raise your standards, and train yourself to be godly, just as you want your children to be godly.

I believe Mrs. Krueger’s advice is right on. In order to mortify anger, we must view anger as sin and have an intense hatred for it. We may feel justified in getting angry because after all, it was the children who cause us to sin. We need to first acknowledge that when we lash out in anger, it is our own sin, not our children’s. We have to own up to our sin and resolve to hate our sin because the God we serve is godly and detests sin. Sanctification is a process so stay vigilant in praying and in training ourselves to rid the problem of anger.