Happy day in the Happiest Town on Earth

MC and I were watching Property Newby or Home Scavengers or something like that on HGTV the other night and the young couple settled on a house they wanted to buy.

The agent advised them that the house was a short sale, so they’d be negotiating with a bank instead of the owner. The agent also told the couple that a short sale takes a little longer than a normal sale.

When they asked how long the short sale might take, the agent said:

A short sale can take as long as 30 days.

When I heard that, I almost choked on my ice cream.

For whoknowshowmany months, my brother and sister-in-law have been trying to buy a short sale in Celebration, Fla. They put a contract on the place ages ago.

After months and months and months of waiting, they closed yesterday on their new house home.

Congrats, hermano!

Where do you list your excess golden parachute income?

I’m not an accountant, but sometimes I have to look at tax forms at work.

Today I looked at one called IRS form 1099 -MISC.

I think this is the form you use to report income that doesn’t get reported on any of the other forms. In other words, if you’ve got some cheese coming in that’s not from your job or interest or dividends, I think it goes on a 1099-MISC.

But don’t take my word for it, because like I said, I’m not an accountant.

Anyhow, I got tickled looking at the form because of some of the weird specificity the IRS form drafters used. For example, Box 5 gives you a place to report all the money you made when you sold your watercraft in 2009.

So if you turned a profit on a jet ski or a Hobie cat, I guess that’s where you list that income.

Wait…check that. Box 5 is reserved for fishing boat proceeds only. I guess I’ll have to list my paddleboat jack elsewhere.

My favorite spot on the form – hands down – is Box 13.

Down in Box 13 is where all of us who are plagued with excess golden parachute payments can list that income.

What cracks me up is that at some point someone at the IRS thought that there would be enough people receiving excess golden parachute payments that they made a whole box for it.

Have a look at what golden parachutes are and you’ll get a feel for just how small the pool of people getting these payments is. And then to think about the IRS freaking out about the four people getting excess golden parachute payments makes me laugh.

So consider yourself informed. If you turned a tidy profit on a fishing boat last year or made some crazy golden parachute bank, now you know what to do with that stuff when tax time rolls around.

The words just aren’t happening

You ever have one of those dreams where you try to scream but you can’t? You try and try but no sound comes out of your mouth?

That’s kinda what’s been happening every time I’ve sat down to post something here at my blog. I’ll click the button to start a new post and then…nothing.

For about two weeks now that’s kept me from writing anything new, and by all accounts that should keep my silent for a while still since the problem hasn’t yet gone away. You see, if you listen to all the blogging gurus, they’ll tell you it’s better to not write anything at all than to write when you don’t have anything to say.

But let’s be honest. When has not having anything to say ever stopped me before?

So this is just a quick post to hopefully break the blockage and get things moving again.

In the meantime, how have you been?

About books and buttery noodles

Last Friday, I took the boy out for buttery noodles and a trip to the bookstore.

He was due some one-on-one time, so on Thursday night MC encouraged me to take him on a little date after work on Friday.

Before I put the kids in bed on Thursday, I typed up a note inviting Son on our special night out. His face lit up as I read it to him.

At the bottom of the invitation, I wrote:

Will you come? Yes or no?

Lucky for me, he said yes.

To hear MC tell it, he spent all day Friday telling anyone who would listen that he was going to the bookstore with his daddy that night. And I won’t water down the way I felt about it either – going out with my boy was the light at the end of the tunnel during a long day at work. I couldn’t wait.

I got home from work and MC brought him home from getting his hair cut at about the same time. I grabbed the Books-a-Million gift card he got for Christmas and asked him what he was craving for dinner.

“Buttery noodles!” he said.

We kissed all the girls goodbye and set off on our adventure for the night.

We ate spaghetti and looked at books and talked about a lot of things.

Sometime around 7 p.m., wandering through the aisles of the bookstore, I noticed he was getting tired. In a moment of epic foreshadowing, I heard five words that his wife is going to hear someday:

Can we go home now?

We went back home and told the girls all about our big adventure. Then I tucked the boy into his bed and read him the new book he picked out. After that, he fell asleep with his head resting in the bend of my elbow.

It was a great night. I’m still happy thinking about it now.

Here’s what I learned from that night:

My kids desire me. They like their Leapsters, the Wii, their art stuff, the huge cardboard box in our hallway, but they’d ditch it all in a heartbeat for time with me.

That desire is a limited-time opportunity. The day will come when some gadget, some show, some friend or some website is going to score one more affection point than I am in the heart of my child. The balance is going to tip someday, so I’ve got to soak up these moments now when they’re still all about their mommy and daddy.

I need to look inside my children. It’s amazing what I saw in my boy when I had him alone. It’s not that he was a different kid, but for a few hours he had the stage all to himself. He was relaxed and natural and a few degrees more mature than when we’re all together. I need to look inside my children to uncover and encourage their gifts and abilities.

Those are just three things I learned from a night out with my boy. There are plenty more, but I’ll stop there because I have mercy on your eyeballs.

If you haven’t had some one-on-one time with your kids in a while, let me encourage you to give it a shot this week. I think you’ll have a good time, and if your kids are anything like mine, they may even share their breadsticks with you.

Dancing in the park

I saw this tweet from CNN report Gary Tuchman last Saturday:

amazing. thousands of haitian homeless singing and dancing in park tonight near our live shot. they are celebrating being alive.

Those people amaze me.

I know my own nature.

In the midst of something like that, I’m almost certain that I’d be mourning what I’d lost rather than celebrating what I still had.

I do it all the time.

I mourn the money, the praise, the job, the respect, the looks, the fun vacation, the quiet time, the 300-yard drive, the wisdom, the humor, the charisma, the _____________, I don’t have.

And that’s absolutely ridiculous. I mourn what I don’t have but I so seldom stop and celebrate what I have. I have my life.

I’m alive.

So are you.

Celebrate it.

A half marathon, a lemonade stand, and finding your thing

Here are a few links to some great stuff I’ve read recently. I hope you find some value in this too:

• I don’t know how he does it, but Jon Acuff just keeps pumping out great stuff over at Stuff Christians Like. I loved this post on Trying to find “your thing.”
• Seth Godin may be one of the smartest guys on the planet. Here’s a great post called The lesson from two lemonade stands
• I’m headed to Nashville in April to run the Country Music Half Marathon. I’ve been training for a few weeks. I’m at a spot where my motivation is starting to wane. (Wane? Is that right? Or is it wax? Whichever one it is when it’s getting smaller.) Here’s a timely post from Michael Hyatt on Why you should sign up for a half marathon.

What about you? Read anything good lately?

The hardest thing to find in Haiti

Every now and then we have to ditch this house and go stay overnight with our parents.

I guess that’s one of the perks of having family in town.

Last year when we had a serious carbon monoxide problem, we stayed with MC’s mom for a week. This summer after a nasty storm we stayed with my folks while our power was out.

For the most part, life went on as usual while we were displaced. The kids went to school. I went to work. You get the idea.

And every time, we had light at the end of the tunnel. We had the pleasure of knowing that within a few hours, or days at the worst, we’d be back in our own home. We’d be surrounded by our stuff again, re-establishing our routines.

That’s one of the things I consider when I think about all the destruction in Haiti.

For all of those people, there’s simply nowhere to go.

There’s not that sense that, “if we can just get through these few days, things will get back to normal.”

There isn’t going to be a normal. There’s nothing to go back to.

If it were me, I think the hardest thing to find down there would be hope.

That’s why it was a no-brainer for us to text ‘disaster’ to 90999 to send $10 to Compassion International, and why we followed it up with another donation through their website.

Compassion serves 65,000 kids in Haiti.

Those kids – and everyone impacted by the disaster – need relief. And they need hope. Compassion is uniquely positioned to offer both just by the nature of what they do.

She’s seven what? Months?

I’m not sure who authorized this, but somehow our baby girl is seven months old today.

I certainly didn’t give permission for it to go by this quickly.

Almost without exception, anytime someone with grown children asks how old my kids are, they’ll follow up with the cliche:

Enjoy every minute. They grow up fast.

And the older our kids get – or maybe as they grow in number – the more I see the truth in that statement.

Sometimes I wonder though if I’m just around nice people all the time, because you never hear any of those folks with grown children say:

It takes forever for them to grow up. I mean seriously, every minute feels like an hour.

You don’t ever hear that, do you? (Please don’t ask my parents.)

A few weeks ago, we put some played some home movies for the kids from when Daughter was 3 and Son was 1. In that moment I realized why those people say, “they grow up fast.”

As I watched my much-smaller kids on the screen, I could feel my heart ache in my chest. It was incredibly sweet to see them on screen and remember those moments, but for some reason, it all carried a twinge of sadness.

I felt like I’d lost something.

Am I crazy? You ever have that happen when you see pictures from when your kids were younger or when you watch an old home movie?

So maybe that’s a little bit of what’s rattling around in people’s hearts when they say:

Enjoy every minute. They grow up fast.

And maybe that’s why you see such pride on people’s faces when you ask them about their grandkids. Or why they wear t-shirts that say:

ASK ME ABOUT MY GRANDKIDS

Or why they wear dark socks with their huge white tennis shoes. Or why they love to eat at Shoney’s. Or why they can get coffee for a nickel at McDonald’s. Or why they still talk about the glory days of television, when Murder She Wrote was on.

Oops. I’m on a tangent.

Maybe being a grandparent is so special because you get the feeling that you’ve regained some of what’s been lost to time. You get to relive some of it.

Or maybe by the time you’re a grandparent your brain is so consumed with making sure you have plenty of Werther’s on hand and being scared of driving at night that you forget what it’s like to be in the trenches of parenting small kids.

I don’t know.

But whether it’s sage advice from folks who have walked the road before or the delusional ramblings of minds littered with earlybird specials and group tours, I’m sold.

Enjoy every minute. They grow up fast.

Happy seven months, B!

Our first letter from our Compassion child

While I was at lunch today I saw a tweet from MC that we got our first letter from Lesly, the child we sponsor through Compassion International.

It’s been a few months since we signed up to sponsor her and aside from the picture we received of Lesly after we committed, this is the first link we have to this little girl in El Salvador.

We learned a little bit about her in the initial sponsorship packet. For instance, she’s roughly the same age as our oldest daughter and she lives with her grandparents.

Just as a quick aside, this Compassion thing is going to drive MC and me to encourage our kids to learn about all sorts of places. Here’s why I say that: when we told our daughter that Lesly lives with her grandparents, she assumed that was because her parents had been eaten by wolves.

I know El Salvador has more than its share of struggles, but I don’t think ferocious wolf packs is one of them. But what’s really sad is that I don’t even know enough about El Salvador to be able to look my daughter in the face and say:

“There are no rabid, parent-devouring wolves in El Salvador.”

For all I know, she may be right. But with the benefit of Google, I now know that most deaths in El Salvador are caused by heart disease, respiratory infections and HIV/AIDS. Now we both know a little more about where our little Lesly is growing up.

Anyhow, I was excited to know that a letter from Lesly was waiting when I got home.

Ever since I saw her picture, I’ve wondered about her.

Like I said, she’s roughly the same age as my oldest daughter. So we when pray for Lesly at night, I picture her doing the things my girl likes to do.

I wonder if she likes to draw and color. I wonder if she likes music. I wonder if she freaks out if her sock bunches up in her shoe. I wonder if she can be a space cadet at times. I wonder if she hates having the tangles brushed out of her wet hair.

Maybe it’s because we pray for her every night, or maybe it’s because I can so easily relate to her because of my daughter, but Lesly is very real to me.

So when I held that first letter today, I started to wonder if we’re that real to her. I really hope we are.

I hope we’re real to her because even though kids that age are innocent enough to not be burdened by a lot of the junk that we face as adults, eventually they still bear the weight of the situation they’re in.  Especially when their parents get eaten by wolves.

When those moments come, when that little girl feels lonely or hopeless or whatever, I hope she’ll grab the picture or a letter we sent and know that we’re real. And I hope she’ll find some comfort in knowing that God has people in another hemisphere praying for her.

The amateur meteorologist fails me

My iPhone thinks it’s so cool because it’s an amateur meteorologist.

I can touch a button on the screen and it’ll rattle off five days worth of forecasts.

But I think my iPhone skipped a few days of weather college because he/she/it is dropping the ball on a few of the fundamentals.

The best example might be this:

It’s forecasting a high of 36 and low of 22 here today. That’s chilly, but we’ll take it.

Yet when I look at the current temp right next the forecast high and low, there’s a big fat 7.

Seven seems lower than 22 to me.

So at this point in the day, all we need to do is warm up 15 degrees to hit the low temp? Sweet.