Noah's Ark

Noah's Ark seems to be a preferred Bible story for young kids - I guess all the animals on the ark look cute if you can't smell them, and if you don't know the part about all the people and animals who didn't get on the ark being drowned...

A couple of weeks ago, some students gave Anne a box of foam animal stickers, and on the back of the box was a craft idea for making a Noah's Ark collage.  Monday night my last student was absent; I suddenly had 30 minutes unaccounted for, so I got out the stickers and told Anne we could do the craft.  At her request I cut out a pink ark and glued it to a purple earth.  In my mind, I somehow imagined Anne sticking on pairs of animals marching toward the ark and then hanging this little artwork up on the fridge.  However, Anne was much more creative than that.  She had no intention (and perhaps no concept) of making a tidy little craft.  Instead, it turned out to be a toy which was a work in progress for several days.  In its first version she stuck probably 50 foam animals on top of each other at jaunty angles into the little tiny door of the ark "so they won't get yucky stuff on them in the flood" and then tried to tape the door shut.  Then later on, she removed chunks of them and stacked them on the earth.  "I'm doing my work.  Here - these are yours.  You can do your work."  Eventually they all migrated back into the ark's tiny door.  And then back out.  And then eventually, she went wild with a copious amount of green duct tape and hermetically sealed everything into the ark for all time...

Thursday Anne seemed a little off, and Thursday night she came down with a miserable fever.  Friday she spent most of the day in her stroller either sleeping or crying.  Thursday and Friday nights, she and I spent most of the night in our living room in various sleeping arrangements involving the stroller and our sofa, which I might mention is only love-seat sized.  Not very restful.  So come this morning, I was not dragging her to church.  

She woke up at about 20 minutes 'til 10:00 when Jared was coming through finishing up his attire to head to church.  She popped her sleepy head up off my chest, noted "Daddy, you're putting on your belt."  And then requested, "I need to put on my big fancy dress for church."  I had to inform her that she and I weren't going to church, but we could have pancakes for breakfast (her favorite) and then we could do her Sabbath school class at home.  This was especially possible, because I am one of the pianists for her class and I possess one of the binders with all the songs.  

So she and I ate pancakes, put on our big, fancy dresses, and had Sabbath school at home.  The current Sabbath school theme is... Noah's Ark.  So I put the binder on the piano, played and sang the songs, and we pulled out props for the accompanying activities.  

She sang along for the theme song "Jesus is My Friend."

We pulled out a little bench, a screw, and the handle of a screw driver from her construction set and she tapped away while we did "Tap-Tap-Tap"  ("...Noah builds the ark.")

We brought in the rocking ottoman and her little basket of Ikea stuffed vegetables, and she loaded them food onto the "ark" while we did "Bring the Food."

She waved her arms wildly and clapped while we sang "Animals, Animals!"

She collected various stuffed animals from the bedroom and loaded them onto the ottoman while we did "The Animals Came A-Walking."

She stomped her feet for the sound effect while we did "An Angel Came Down and Shut the Door," except we changed the words to "The Lord came down and shut the door," because regardless of which Bible translation you look at, it seems to be recorded as a dramatic appearance of God himself shutting the door - not just an angel.

We opened an umbrella, and she held it over her head while we did "The Raindrops Fall" and "The Rains Came Down and the Floods Came Up."

Then she sat on the ottoman and rocked while we did "Rock, Rock, Rock, Rock, See the Boat on the Water."

For each verse of "Who's In the Ark?" she hugged a different stuffed animal she'd loaded on.  We ended up with a frog, an owl, a giraffe, and two bears.

When Noah let a bird out of the ark, we sang "Little Birdy, Fly" and she was supposed to fly like a bird, but she'd just fallen out of the ark herself and bumped her head on the file drawers, so instead, she sat on my lap.  

For "See the Pretty Rainbow" we hung her rainbow blanket on a chair and looked at it.

And finally for "Noah Built and Altar" we got out a bag of blocks and built an altar.

After the program it was story time, so we laid out a blanket on the floor in the living room and read about Noah in her Bible.  Normally the kids eat crackers during this, and since we don't have any crackers in the house, she ate a little pancake instead.  Just like at real Sabbath school, she said her memory verse ("Give thanks to the Lord.") and got a sticker on her hand.   And she opened the cabinet to get her "mail" since we don't have a "normal" mail box.  

She had fun, and wasn't sorry to have missed her real class today.  Here are some sideways photos.  There is a hack I know to right them, but even the hack isn't working today...

Yom Kippur and Eid al-Adha

I don't have any local Jewish friends to mark Yom Kippur with.  I suppose one doesn't exactly celebrate Yom Kippur, since it's usually observed by attendance at prayers and by fasting.  Of course, many people celebrate after sundown by eating a large breakfast...  The Bible has a pretty detailed chapter about the Day of Atonement in Leviticus 16, which I reread on Wednesday.  God apparently gave these instructions to Moses after the exodus from Egypt as an ordinance which was to be a permanent law for the Israelites, purifying them from their sins and making them right with YHWH once each year.

I wanted to think about, what does the day mean for Christians?  Most Christians, of course, don't believe that after Christ's sacrifice that we are bound to most of the ceremonies God gave his people in the desert.  A very few do observe those holy days given by God, but leaving out the sacrifices, since as far as I know, all Christian groups see the animal sacrifices as a temporary teaching tool until the Real Sacrifice came along.

Some Christians see the holy days given to the Israelites as prophetic - pointing to Christ.  The Passover, with its wave offering on the third day, and attendant Festival of Unleavened Bread points to the sacrifice Jesus made of his life during that very festival - and there are more details about that could be added...  Shavuot (Pentecost) was the festival day when God chose to pour out the Holy Spirit on all the disciples after Christ's resurrection, showing that Christ would still be very much with His people in a new sort of way.  Therefore, it is often seen that these spring festivals pointed to Christ's first Advent.  There is less of a consensus about the fall festivals, but many see them as pointing to Christ's second Advent.  Rosh Hashanah perhaps points to the announcement of the Time of the End.  Yom Kippur perhaps points to the Judgement, both Christ's sacrifice purifying his people and Satan's eventual banishment to the eternal wilderness.  And perhaps Sukkoth points to the eternity of God and His people dwelling together.  Other commentators see Sukkoth as pointing to Christ's incarnation as Immanuel, "God with us."  Lots of interesting study available there...

This year Yom Kippur, the most solemn day of the Hebrew calendar, and Eid al-Adha, the most joyous day of the Muslim calendar fall back to back.  A good opportunity for me to do a little learning.

I'd never heard of Eid al-Adha until a couple of months ago.  It translates "Feast of the Sacrifice".  It is a celebration of Abraham's submission to God in his willingness to sacrifice his son.  However, just before Abraham kills his son, the angel Gabriel appears and tells him not to harm him - his sacrifice is already accepted.  And lo and behold, there is a dead ram available right there which Abraham slaughtered instead.  This is rather similar to the Biblical story...  However, there are some pretty interesting key differences in the Quran passages and Islamic tradition regarding the sacrifice, which you can read about in this Wikipedia article.

The Biblical story of Abraham's sacrifice really struck me specially when I was sitting in a Sunday school class in college and heard the teacher explaining how Abraham's willingness to sacrifice his special, miracle, gift-from-God son prefigured the Father's willingness to sacrifice His Own divine Son and how God's replacement of Isaac with a ram prefigured the Lord's substitution of Jesus for sinful humanity.  I have never read the passage the same way again!  Maybe you would enjoy this beautiful commentary on the story from the book Patriarchs and Prophets.

Anne and I were invited to celebrate Eid at our Afghan neighbors' home.  Everyone dressed very nicely, and we sat around and ate wonderful Afghan food, and then the kids played until everyone was beyond ready for nap time.  It was fun for me to learn a little bit more about my friends' religion, and it was also wonderful for my own faith to revisit the Bible story and contemplate again Christ's greatest gift to humanity on the cross.

Fountain of Youth

In our little, local Kent downtown, there is a water fountain that kids play in.  I'd never taken Anne, but it was on my mind as we'd been to the library across the street on Thursday, and I promised her that on Friday I'd take her down to play after nap time.  Friday was an unexpected warm day in the 80's.  I wish I'd started taking her at the beginning of the summer, not on a bonus day in September after we are very obviously into autumn.  There's next summer, I guess!

After a while she got cold, so we went back to the car and she changed into her clothes.  We returned and she joined kids in playing on the tiered grass beds.

Some of the kids were doing cartwheels, and Anne tried several times, quite unsuccessfully.  But she had fun falling over head first and landing with her feet sticking up in the air.

Sleepless in Seattle

Occasionally I can't sleep at night.  Recently under such circumstances, I have knitted, and I have read.  In fact, in the last two weeks, including an afternoon of doing nothing at the beach, I read an entire book I've had on my shelf for some years but not yet cracked.  It's called The Storyteller's Daughter by Saira Shah.

The book is an autobiographical work by a woman of Afghan heritage who grew up in Kent (England), and travelled to Afghanistan in the 1990s and 2000s to discover her family's roots.  Storyteller's Daughter  jumped forward on my reading queue after I've become friends with a neighbor of ours, who is from Afghanistan.  Despite the U.S.'s involvement in that country, I hadn't given that whole region of the world much thought.  But since I've made a friend who spent most of her life in Kabul, I've become very interested in that mountainous stretch of Asia.  What was my friend's life like back home?  What is it like for her family who are still there?  I've been doing a little research here and there about Afghan culture and history and different brands of Islam.  This book is a pretty incredible narrative which touched on so many aspects of what it means to be Afghan.  A lot of what happened in the story was before my neighbor's time; although the exact events might not have personal bearing on her life, I have a lot more pegs to hang my mental hats on now when it comes to hearing her talk about her country.

I dog-eared a few pages in Storyteller's Daughter which I wanted to find again, and I will share three of them with you.  These aren't central parts of the story exactly, I'm not even sure how to define what is central or peripheral - it's more the moment-by-moment discovery of how a woman's imagination and reality meet in a place she's heard about but never visited before.

On visiting a very rural and remote home in the mountains of the Nuristan region:

I followed him up the wooden steps and I think I might have gasped as I entered the room.  I was standing in a painting by a Renaissance master.  Everything needed for domestic comfort was there, but there was not a single object that could not have existed in the fourteenth century.

The walls were panelled with dark wood, and draped with curtains in rich colours.  A shaft of golden light from the timber-framed windows illuminated a carved bowl and spoon standing on a wooden table.  There were low chairs and an apparatus for spinning.  Suspended from the ceiling, an ornately carved wooden cradle swung gently back and forth.  The baby slept under embroidered coverlets, a flapped woolen cap upon its head.  Outside, I glimpsed hens pecking on a wooden platform, a cooking fire, and a clay oven.  The whole effect was utterly charming.  It roused in me a sense of deja vu.  This place seemed as familiar as a childhood memory.  I felt as though I had come home.

As she went on to describe her interactions with the woman and their conversation, I, like the author, was blown away by the possibility that a place and people like this still existed, completely untouched by the rest of the busy, interconnected world, during my very own lifetime.  I felt like I was looking into a parallel universe.

This following little bit on the utter madness of war struck me.  Really is there any such thing as a just war?  We often think curbing Hitler in WW II was in that category, but I'm not sure most wars are any where near as clear cut.  This one certainly wasn't:

A middle-aged man climbed down the hill to meet us.  Usman introduced us: "This is my commander.  Commander, take these people's bags and carry them up the hill.  How is the battle?" 

"Things are quiet," said the commander.  "The Taliban are firing at us and we are firing back." 

[...] In Usman's first battle last April, the Northern Alliance had taken the post opposite, killing (said Usman) a hundred and fifty Taliban and capturing a good deal of weaponry.  It cost the lives of many of their own men.  Unfortunately, a few days later, the Taliban counter-attacked, and now the front line was back to where it started.  When I asked what the point of all this was, the soldiers looked at me as if I was mad.  They said: "It is war.  This is Afghanistan." 

The youngest soldier to take part in the battle didn't look older than twelve, but he had already learned to be macho:  "I've seen tanks firing, shells landing, people being killed, people without hands, without eyes, without heads - so what?"  he said. 

I asked what he would do when the war ended and he said, in the singsong voice of a child reciting a lesson, that when peace came each person would go back to kar i khud -  his own work.  What was his work?  He didn't know.  Had he been to school?  No.  Could he read?  No.  Did he remember how to farm?  No, and his family's farm was destroyed anyway. 

Usman led us out of the commander's earshot and said: "This country is full of men who know nothing except how to fight.  They have no other way to earn a living.  They have plenty of weapons and they will try to keep on fighting in any way they can."

This snippet about the courage of a woman under oppression felt so hopeful in rather bleak circumstances:

The senior teacher was a tall, middle-aged woman, who could never have been beautiful, but when she spoke about her girls, a fire lit up in her face.  "Most of the girls you see here are living in refugee camps," she said.  "Their lives are very hard.  For instance, when the weather is cold, they have to mix mud and water to protect their tents from the rain.  They are just little girls, their hands are very small.  They are too young for this work." 

She showed us how the girls sat on the concrete floor, four or five of them sharing a textbook.[...] 

[...] Then the head teacher began to talk in a way I had never heard any woman in Afghanistan speak before: "The girls in my class dream of becoming doctors or engineers or even journalists.  I teach them that when they grow up they must try to bring about change in this under-developed country of ours where women have no role.  Afghan women are courageous - they cannot be beaten, whatever the odds.  We are optimistic and hopeful for the future."

I wish the book had not ended so soon.  I want to hear more and more and more about this place which is so alien to me.  My friend is telling me a little at a time, and I am learning.

Ruby Beach

Finally I'm putting up part three of our vacation which was nearly two weeks ago now.

Saturday late morning we all went up to Ruby Beach which is just a couple of miles north of Kalaloch, because Linda had heard it was great in the tide pool department, and noon-ish was low tide.  We looked around for a while, then the Bridge/Perry car went back to the campsite for nap time.  None of them could nap in the Ergo while hiking, alas...

Ruby Beach has lots of sea stacks, believed to be the eroded remnants of large cliffs once upon a time.  This is what helps make the abundance of tide pools.

There is also a creek which runs down to the ocean, but during the dry season it is dammed into a shallow pool with only a trickle under the rocks into the ocean.  Great play spot for all the kids:

Anne did a bit of digging, but she saved most of that for the afternoon when everyone else had gone back for nap time.

Sea anemones and other tiny creatures in the tide pools:

And the best of all, running in the waves!

And then we found more tide pools!

See the tiny hermit crab?

We parked ourselves in the spot I shot below for the afternoon.  Anne dug and dug in the sand, and I painted the scene, taking some artistic license:

When nap time arrived, Jared and I headed north with sleepy girl in the Ergo for an "easy" three mile walk on the sand to the point on the Native lands where the Hoh River runs into the ocean.  Only we did most of it around high tide, and we were walking on tilted, high piles of rocks the whole way, trying very hard to keep our footing and balance.  It was quite difficult and not extremely fun.  We got our workout.  Heading north toward the Hoh:

Getting closer:

Looking back toward where we came from, you can see how tilted and uneven the rock piles were:

Here we've made it to the Native lands and are standing on a little spit into the mouth of the Hoh, looking upriver toward the rainforest:

Despite all the pain, it was worth it, because on the way back, we watched flocks of pelicans diving for fish in the waves:

And, although there was no way to take a picture, we saw many seal heads bob up out of the water and peer around.  Amazing!  

After the hike, there was a wee bit more wading for the wee one before we went back to Kalaloch and joined the others to watch the sunset:

On Sunday, we all went to breakfast at the park-owned Kalaloch Lodge, then the Bridge/Perry car took off for Seattle, since there were timings and agendas that needed to be met.  The Ballances spent the day on the amazing playground that is the Kalaloch beach, digging, wading, and in my case, reading the first half of a book, which I finished in the middle of the night later in the week.  (Blog post coming about said book soon.) Rather later into the evening, we drove home and said goodbye to vacation.