I really should blog here more. I really should. I spend a lot of my time these days shar­ing other people’s ideas. Most recently, on Friends Jour­nal you can see my inter­view with Jon Watts (co-conducted with Megan Kietzman-Nicklin). The three of us talked on and on for quite some time; it was only an inflex­i­ble train sched­ule that ended my participation.

The favorite part of talk­ing with Jon is his enthu­si­asm and his tal­ent for keep­ing his sights set on the long pic­ture (my favorite ques­tion was ask­ing why he started with a Quaker fig­ure so obscure even I had to look him up). It’s easy to get caught up in the bus­tle of dead­lines and to-do lists and to start to for­get why we’re doing this work as pro­fes­sional Quak­ers. There is a real­ity behind the word counts. As Friends, we are shar­ing the good news of 350+ years of spir­i­tual adven­tur­ing: obser­va­tions, strug­gles, and imperfect-but-genuine attempts to fol­low Inward Light of the Gospels.

My nine year old son Theo is blog­ging as a class assign­ment. I think they’ve been sup­posed to be writ­ing there for awhile but he’s really only got­ten the bug in the last few weeks. It’s a full-on Word­Press site, but with cer­tain restric­tions (most notably, posts only become pub­lic after the class­room teacher has had a chance to review and vet them). It’s cer­tain ironic to see one of my kids blog­ging more than me!

Enough blog­ging for today. Time to put the rest of the awake kids to bed. I’m going to try to have more reg­u­lar small posts so as to get back into the blog­ging habit. In the mean­time, I’m always active on my Tum­blr site (which shows up as the side­bar to the right). It’s the bucket for my inter­net curations–videos and links I find inter­est­ing, and my own pic­tures and miscellanea.

Theo and Fran­cis play life­guard

Orig­i­nally uploaded by martin_kelley

More pics over on the Flickr account. The after­noon rit­ual is to run off to an out­door adven­ture when Fran­cis wakes up from his nap. Favorite spot: the lake park. Here are the boys on top of the life­guard stand.

…are worth taking:

Appar­ently the best part of mak­ing Christ­mas cook­ies is the mess afterwards.

Since I use this blog as a bit of a per­sonal jour­nal, to remem­ber dates and hap­pen­ings, I should duti­fully note that last night was the time four year old Theo pushed two year old Fran­cis off the foot­stool while brush­ing teeth, caus­ing said Fran­cis to fall pre­cip­i­tously against the bath­tub and open a nasty gash in his chin. Three hours and a Martin/Francis emer­gency room visit later there were four stitches in the poor guy’s chin. I’ll spare you all a descrip­tion of the ini­tial mess or the dif­fi­culty of hold­ing down a scream­ing child while the doc­tor tries to put the stitches in. Every­thing is fine now. And no, no pho­tos or Youtube videos of the pro­ceed­ings. Maybe I’ll snap a pic­ture of the stitches so Fran­cis can see just where that scar came from!