What's in a Name?

We are approaching the 3rd trimester of Julie's pregnancy, so the portentous day is now approaching when we will need to provide a name for a newborn child.

This post is an invitation to offer suggestions. But there is a catch: you have to do more than just throw names at us. We would like your comments to be either:

1. serious suggestions of names you like, but you must also say why (e.g. Ebenezer - comes from a cool Bible story), or
2. funny / clever (e.g. 'Minnie Holmes' - a pun of mini-homes), or
3. about yourself, why you have the name you do (e.g. Julie's dad Gary, named after actor Gary Cooper), or
4. about your naming philosophy (e.g. do you choose names because of how they sound? ethnicity? popular? uncommon?connection to your family history?) or
5. what you would have been named had you been born the opposite gender

Will there be any Salome Esmereldas (a serious suggestion made about Julie to her mom)? Can you pun on Page or Golding or Steve or Julie? Dazzle us, O Masters of the Moniker!
-SP

Registries Online - Our Baby / Nursery Wish Lists

Updated July 18th.
Whew! After weeks of browsing whenever we could get to a city, and comparison shopping, and researching safety issues and features (hey, it's how we shop!) we finally have set up a registry or two, to help our many sweet friends and relatives who wish to participate in our preparing for August's arrival of Baby Golding Page. Thank you all!

We have a registry with Toys-R-Us (very good website, and free shipping for qualifying orders, important given where we live). Search for last-name "Golding Page" to find us.

We also set up a short one with Sears (short because we have lots of complaints about the awful Sears website!) Search for last-name "Golding Page" to find us. We have a Sears parcel-pickup in Hudson Bay. This registry unfortunately does not automatically update itself - so if you purchase something from it, please let us know and we will do a manual update.

Both registries can be accessed online or in the stores.

Below, we list other things that we'll need, but that did not make sense to add to a Registry. After all, we need things like bibs (well, not us personally, we're not quite that messy), and we hope you will use your creativity rather than have us pick the exact ones!

Some notes to keep in mind:

• We won't know whether it's a boy or a girl until birth
• Here's a list of what we already have for Baby / Nursery
• Our Nursery décor theme is Noah's Ark
• We love bright colours - primary colours are not just for children, we believe!
• In clothing, we love the (bilingual) Gagou Tagou line of clothes and linens (from Babies R Us and The Bay)
• Our mid-August due date is "late summer" in our neck of the woods; the trees will be bare within a month. Baby's first 6 - 9 months will be mostly fall and winter.

Since our baby won't be arriving with a suitcase full of clothes, we'd love your help in giving them a wardrobe! To see what we already have for clothing, and in which sizes, click here. Some things we still need are in the following categories - especially in 6 month and up sizes, as we have mostly newborn to 3 month sizes so far:

• Onesies, rompers, bodysuits (with snaps)
• one-piece footed outfits
• a fancier outfit or two - after all, this child will be going to church lots ;-)
• nightgowns with elastic bottoms
• blanket sleepers
• sweaters
• hats / caps (heavier for the coming prairie fall & winter)
• bunting or snowsuit with attached mitts

Some other items we are especially interested in are:

• Aitken's Pewter baby mug
• Dr Seuss books (we have Oh, the Places You'll Go, The Cat in the Hat and Are You my Mother?)
• An outfit from PEI's COWS store chain (also found in Banff, etc.)
• Some waterproof pads
• Insulated bottle holder for diaper bag
• A few burp cloths
• Pocket-style or all-in-one reusable cloth diapers (the one-size option)
• Mild, HE laundry detergent with as few additives as possible (e.g High Efficiency Sunlight Sensitive Skin (in a white bottle) 
• Strap-on soft carrier or sling

Thank you to everyone who has already asked about how they can help outfit us (I mean Baby!) And thank you in advance to all of you!
-S, J and TBD

Nursery Theme - Noah's Ark

For our nursery theme, we have chosen Noah's Ark.

Why Noah's Ark, you ask? We have several reasons:

1. It's a fantastic biblical story, with wonderful theological meaning - God's covenant (promise to love unconditionally), made not only with Noah, but also with the whole world, including people, animals, and everything else.

2. The story is also in common with two other major world religions, where we have dear friends - Judaism and Islam.

3. We are both fascinated with animals and the rest of God's world, as children are.

4. We love and wear lots of bright colours, and this story has many colourful artistic possibilities.

5. This theme will work well, not just for a baby, but for several years beyond. After all, we adults like it, too! :-)

Now for the 3 fabrics we are using to decorate the nursery:

Main fabric, for curtains

Panel for a large wall hanging

Fabric for other decoration in the room

For those of you who have been asking us about gift suggestions...we will be registering online with a couple of baby registries in the next few weeks. When we do, we will list the links here on the blog. Thanks for your excitement and also for your patience. :-)

Where ... all the Verbs....?

In our 2 small churches, we have 27 people who committed to God and one another that we would read the daily lectionary in 2011. We're very excited, and hope people are finding it both a challenge and a joy.

We are using the "daily office" readings from the Canadian 1962 edition of the Anglican Book of Common Prayer. It gives 2 morning and 2 evening readings. Jumps around a bit, but by Advent 2011 we'll have covered 90% or so of the Bible. Quite a challenge!

Most are using The Message version.

I (Steve) am using the New American Standard Bible. The NASB uses italics "to indicate words which are not found in the original [languages] but implied by it." Knowing this, imagine my surprise on reading Revelation 4 on Sunday!

If you don't know Rev. 4, it's this awesome scene of worship in the heavenly throne room. Go read it now!

What struck me is that, from verses 3 thru 7, very few verbs are NOT in italics in NASB. It's all descriptive, and words like "there was" and "there were" appear in italics 8 times!

So I went back and re-read those verses, skipping the italics. Wow, did it ever change the feel of the verses! What before was slow, prosaic description (the 1st creature was like a lion, ho hum) became filled with breathless amazement (the 1st like a lion! The 2nd like a calf!)

I like that in my Bibile reading, breathless excitement.

Photography = Free Microeconomics Textbook!

We're very excited! we just received payment from a publisher for using one of our photographs.

Many months ago, an editor from McGraw-Hill Canada contacted us, asking to use one of our photos from our current town, Hudson Bay, Saskatchewan, in a new textbook on Microeconomics.

We sent them a selection, and they chose this one, of the elevator and hotel, two key landmarks in town.

Yesterday the agreed-upon payment finally arrived by mail: a hot-off-the pressees complimentary copy! With our photo there on p. 728, in chapter 19, in the section on "Oligopoly Markets"

From Day 1 we've wondered: why a photo of Hudson Bay? It's by far the smallest place I (Steve) have ever lived, with limited shopping, so our town is very micro-economic in my mind. But why in a textbook?

Now we know: the photo illustrates a real-world application of the chapter's principles, asking "How many tire dealers can Hudson Bay support?"

I must say, it's the jazziest Economics textbook I've ever seen, filled with interesting bits, like cartoons (from Calvin & Hobbes to The New Yorker), and applying economic principles to the "Battle of Wits" between Westley and Vizzini in The Princess Bride, among other things. And of course thousands of those little curved Economics graphs!

-SP

Microeconomics (Canadian Edition) by Bernheim, Whinston & Martin, McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 2011. ISBN 9780070969278

Gryffin-Gram 2010

Christmas Greetings from Gryffin, Julie and Steve!

This year, we sent out about 350 Christmas cards, before running out of time and budget. We apologize to all of the friends and family we missed sending greetings to by post this year, but good news! Gryffin has found a way to send his (and our) greetings to you nevertheless! (Ah, such a persistent and thoughtful terrier he is!)

As every year, Gryffin has written a fabulous newsletter for Christmas 2010. This year's highlights include photos from our travels, Gryffin's winning coffee label photo, and a recipe for Slow-Cooker Pickle Roast.

Check out the Gryffin-Gram by downloading it here: Gryffin-Gram 2010. For all you tech-savvy folks - it's a pdf. For all the rest of us - all you need to be able to view it is Adobe Reader, a free program which most people have these days.

Merry Christmas from Julie & Steve...with an enthusiastic wag and face-licking from Gryffin! :-)

What is a "Book"?

What is a "Book"?

You would think Julie and I could have figured this out by now - our shelves are filled, after all, with thousands of paper + cardboard + cloth + ink things that we call Books.

So many, in fact, that I wrote us a Home Library database program to keep track of them all - titles, authors, dates, subject keywords, loaned to whom, etc.

In a typical year, I read about 30 books. Like the list-keeper that I am, I record the ones that I read, and when, and what I thought of them. But since buying an iPad in the summer, I have started to wonder, well, what is a Book? Should the e-books I read on the iPad count in my 2010 list?

This latent question, percolating beneath the surface of my mind, came to the fore this morning, when I read The Idea of the Book, a review in the Books and Culture magazine.

I appreciated the author's teasing out of the differences between Book-as-Object, that physical thing that any toddler can identify, and Book-as-Concept, a "considerable length" textual document that "expresses a long story or complex sequence of thoughts," regardless of technology (scroll, codex, eBook, whatever)

I wonder: does The Cat in the Hat meet his Book-as-Concept definition?

So now I'm inclined to add those eBooks to my already-read list. Do I now need to go back and rethink some of the assumptions in my Home Library database program..?

-SP