We got a really fun picture frame from our friend Kristy that came in the mail today. It’s really cute with Kiley’s picture in it, and it will help daddy remember the vital numbers some time into the future! A big thank you to Kristy!
Kiley Addison Cline
Our little blessing arrived 24 minutes after midnight, on June 6th, 2012. At first, we could only see a little hair on the crown of a little head, but a few pushes and contractions later, she came right out in Dr. Ronda Gaiser’s skilled hands. Less than a second later, we heard the crying from the first healthy breath of fresh air that meant her lungs were okay. Dr. Gaiser showed her to me so that I could tell Laura that she was a girl, for we had kept that fact a secret, even unto ourselves, so that we could be surprised the day she was born. I took a long, hard look, not wanting to mess this up and to make the right call. I looked into my beautiful wife’s eyes and said, “It’s a girl!”
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Deadbeat or Pro-choice?
I find this cartoon by Steve Kelley to be both enlightening and sad at the same time. Decadence and political correctness in America have reached a stench so high that while on one hand, we punish one group of people for being deadbeat, on the other hand we champion, crusade and march for, and protest over the “right” to end life for another group of people.
It is sad, really, that our society has become so selfish that we only think of ourselves and most often not of the innocent who are just waiting for a chance to become one of us.
Broc Obama
The truly green president!
Unintended Consequences
The law of unintended consequences has a strange way of winding its way back to biting us in the behind. Congress recently passed a “Bill of Rights” for passengers flying on commercial airliners in the United States. They deemed that any airline keeping passengers on board a flight for longer than three hours before taking off would be subject to huge fines. This sounds great, right? After all, no one wants to be stuck on an airplane for hours on end. Regulators love to regulate, and law makers love to write new laws. However, what sounds beneficial to passengers often has unintended consequences.
At the country’s largest and busiest airports, this law, and the avoidance of its fines, can often cause more problems and delays than if the rule didn’t exist. I was trying to get home to Columbus from JFK one stormy night, and the delays to push back off the gate were mounting up as flight departures were slowed due to the weather. After sitting onboard for around an hour at the gate, we were all told we had to deplane. Once in the terminal, not five minutes passed and we were told to board again. My guess is that Delta was trying to reset the three hour clock and avoid a potential for delay fees.
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Gus Ran Off
Gus gave us the scare of a lifetime — he ran off! As parents, you never want to lose your child, and to us, Gus is our first child. I placed him in the yard because he wanted to play and chase squirrels and I had to give Laura some medical attention with a shot she had to take.
As I was giving her the shot, she heard him barking. However, the bark seemed to be coming from the street out front, not the back yard. I said, “Oh, your just imagining things.” But, to be sure, I looked out the back window. To my horror, I saw the back gate wasn’t closed!
My mind raced back to Alamo, my family’s first dog when I was a kid. He was a pure bred Irish Setter, and at six months old, got hit by a car when my cousins came to visit and unknowingly left the gate open. The last thing I wanted was for life to repeat itself this way. I ran downstairs, grabbed the car keys, and ran out the door. I yelled for him from the middle of the street, but never saw him so I took off for the car.
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The Blog is Back
After a pause that lasted far too long, the blog is back! I don’t know exactly what precipitated my lapse. It could have been laziness or being too busy with other things, but for whatever reason, I’ve let the TobyLaura.com blog take a back seat to other priorities. Sorry about that! Ultimately, I want to write this online journal, this web log, our blog, for ourselves to be able to look back and remember the stories of our lives. Even though most of this is all about us, we are happy for you to read along, enjoy, learn something, laugh, be entertained, tear up, pray, rejoice, or simply follow along from whatever part of the world you may be reading this.
Also, we’ve switched from a Google hosted blog at Blogger to our own installation of WordPress on our own web server. It will give us more control over the look and feel of the blog and we and our web host will own the content, not Google.
So, thanks for stopping by and know this: the blog is back!