I like routine. Someone told me I’d be a liability living cross-culturally because of that but I’m not wedded to it. Things come up: kids get sick, sometimes friends are in need, I’m asked to teach at something at the last minute, we’re informed that we’re hosting a dinner, etc. […]
The other day at our breakfast table, Elliot came out with, “They don’t say grace before they eat at my kindy.” Arthur and I tried to work out what he was drawing the comparison with. We have never been a big grace-saying family. We’ve been doing it a bit more […]
Arthur and I have been trying to put our finger on why kindy drop off is so different in Australia. At his new kindy, Elliot enters, signs himself in, hangs up his bag, puts his hat on, and goes off to play. What’s unusual about that? Contrast that with his first […]
We are in Australia again, somewhat unexpectedly. And I find myself parenting TCKs through transition once again. Except we don’t know how long this stint will last for, which means I can’t use my go-to strategy for making things concrete, that is, having a countdown. There are the initial transitions, […]
Wendy Alsup’s “Is the Bible Good for Women?: Seeking Clarity and Confidence Through a Jesus-Centered Understanding of Scripture” was released yesterday, and I’m looking forward to reading it. (You can see my reviews of her other books here, here and here.) As part of the promo for it, an excerpt […]
We’re into week six of sermons about money at church. It turns out our pastor has almost as much to say about money as Jesus did! This week was the third on tithing. The passages were Haggai 1:9-13 and Malachi 3:10, and he did all the things that Aussie evangelicals […]
Elliot changed nursery schools recently. At first we were motivated pragmatically: because of our religious and cultural background, we would be unlikely to get him into the primary school we wanted (read: affordable without being an hour away from home) unless he was already in the nursery school. But then, […]
Meet Jesus at uni 