After a few months of work, largely interrupted by Damian’s birth, the new website design is finally up. The previous design had been around since 3/31/2007, so it was well past time for a new design. This new design is intentionally lighter and more clean. I plan to add more Web 2.0 features to it later to make things a bit more slick. The theme is nice enough, I might clean it up a bit and release it for general use. Anyone want to use this theme on their own blog?
For those of you that follow my twitter, you would have seen me commend Damian on performing EC so well: Damian doing awesome ec. Didnt wet or poo a diaper all night. Even went in the potty.
Elimination Communication (EC for short) is a method of communicating with your baby about when he needs to go potty. It’s not potty training, it’s about recognizing the signals he gives you when he needs to poo or pee. Just like he gives a signal when he’s hungry (such as licking his lips, putting his fist in his mouth, or rooting), he gives very clear signals that he needs to go potty (grunting, tensing his legs, fussing a bit). If you learn to watch for these signals, you can help him go in the potty or wherever else you want him to go. Babies catch on to this very quickly - they do not like sitting in their own waste, and if they learn that you will help them not sit in their own waste they get very good at telling you they need to go. It’s about trust and communication.
From the beginning, Damian has been very good about letting us know when he needed to poo. Whenever we noticed that he needed to, we would take off his diaper and let him relieve himself on the open diaper on the changing table. There has been very few times that he has gone in the diaper directly. As far as going pee though, his signals have been much more discreet, so most of the time he would pee in his diaper. But last night, we hit a milestone. Not once did he pee in his diaper. He has learned to become more vocal about his signal that he needs to pee. All 3 times he woke up, he was dry, and when I encouraged him to go (by cuing him with noises such as ’ssssss’ for pee and ‘grrrrrrr’ for poo) he went.
Of course there is a long way to go on this, but I’m excited about how well he is doing. We won’t be out of diapers anytime soon, but we will be much sooner then most kids!
If you want more information on EC, I highly recommend the book The Diaper Free Baby by Christine Gross-loh.
Here are some other useful links on EC:
I thought we were done with the snow. But apparently not. It’s snowing right now.
I tried to get a picture of the falling snow, but the camera couldn’t pick it up. Jaspenelle says if we were in medieval times, her and Damian would have been declared a witch. Snow in June, I can’t believe it.
Damian Michael Stewart was born on June 6, 2008 at 10:15pm. He weighed 8lbs, 8oz, and had a length of 21 inches.
I’ve been working on a new website for about 2 weeks, and now it’s ready to share with the world. Quite simply, it’s a catalog of our home videos. Jaspenelle’s Dad bought us a video camera for Christmas, and we have made several videos.
Video by michaelandjaspenelle.com
Most people would use YouTube or some other video sharing site. I considered using them, but I prefer to host web-content myself whenever possible. If you are using a third-party, like YouTube, you have to agree to their terms and deal with their servers and their policies and restrictions. I don’t like being restricted.
The website was actually developed quite quickly - because of several existing open source solutions, I actually had a working (albeit not very pretty) mockup working after a few hours of coding. The remainder of the 2 weeks of development was making things nice and experimenting with different features. It’s built using the following technologies:
Currently, the code for the website is not in a releasable state - some things are very specific to the current environment. Over time, I hope to get it cleaned up, add a nice admin interface (right now all administration is done via WinSCP and SSH), and make it more configurable, then I may release it to the general public.
Let me know what you think!
Damian wrote this to me from within the womb (with Jaspenelle’s help of course)
Dear Daddy,
I feel your touch through Mommy’s belly and I know that,
you are her strength when she feels weak,
you are her smile when she wants to cry,
you are her calm when her mind is the storm.I can feel your love warm her heart.
It warms my heart too.I can’t wait to meet you,
I can’t wait for you to hold me.
I know that,
you will be my strength when I am weak,
you will be my smile when I want to cry,
you will be my calm when I am in the storm.I love you Daddy, I love you so much.
I will be your strength and your smile and your calm too,
Whenever you need me, I will be here for you.Your son,
Damian
Mars Attacks!!! The local stray makes an appearance in our back yard, putting our furbabies on edge.
So, I finally got around to upgrading to the newest wordpress, version 2.5. It was quite a pain due to the way I have this site setup. I keep everything in SVN to make it easy to make changes to the code from anywhere, without having to mess with FTP and such. My first attempt at merging the changes failed miserably, and I had to restore it all from backups and start over. The second time, I skipped the svn integration, I’ll have to fix that later, but it’s working for now.
Jaspy want’s a cloud, and to get rid of the categories, so that will be my next project - but not tonight, I need some sleep before I get sick again.
There is a reason this campaign Rolls on.
by John Armstrong
I’m sure most political experts expect Ron Paul to drop out after Super Tuesday. They expect this because they mistakenly believe Ron Paul is simply a politician who wants to be President; they don’t realize that he is actually the leader of something much bigger. The 90+% of people who didn’t vote for him today don’t understand this either. But there is a chance they will by the brokered convention if the message I attempt to explain below gets out to them. And if it isn’t this year, or the next, or the next, it will happen as long as we who do know why we vote for him don’t get caught up in politics.
How often have you heard someone say, “I don’t really pay attention to politics” and then follow it up with a meager “but I probably should”? The reason often given for not knowing more is that it is just “too complicated.” And there is a reason it is complicated:
People vote based on their personal beliefs.
If you believe in the right of a woman to choose, you vote Democrat.
If you believe in the right of an unborn child to live, you vote Republican.
If you believe that the government should provide universal healthcare, you vote Democrat.
If you believe that spreading democracy is the best way to protect us from terrorists, you vote Republican.
If you believe that gay people and minorities have collective rights, you vote Democrat.
If you believe that Christians have collective rights, you vote Republican.
How often have you heard that as an educated voter you should study the issues and then vote for the candidate who most closely shares your beliefs as you on those issues? How many people have told you that they voted for someone because that candidate believes in what the person talking to you believes in?
The paradigm shift that must occur for our country to be what it was intended to be is to stop asking this ridiculous question and start voting on the one and only issue that should matter: which candidate has the best ability to do what they are sworn in to do? I have asked about 50 people over the last week if they knew what it was that an elected federal government official was supposed to do–what they swear they will do–and not surprisingly not a single one so far has known.
Why? Because the discussion for so long has been based on voting based on what you believe, and there are so many different beliefs, that the whole thing has become “complicated.” Do you know what these officials are supposed to do? If you do, congratulations, you are probably already voting for the one candidate who stands out above all the rest because of this candidate’s proven ability to do it. If you don’t, read on, and if you are intelligent you will come to the same decision other people already have.
The reason voting for your beliefs is the wrong way to go about voting is that your candidate’s actually following through on his/her campaign commitments may ultimately lead to a future where your beliefs may not matter at all. Huh? Let me explain.
Despite popular belief, the Constitution does not grant us our freedom or rights as American citizens. These “self-evident truths” are part of (depending on your personal beliefs) derived either from your Creator or from natural law. A person born in a place where no government existed would indeed be free, but his freedom would not be protected against another’s freedom. It was with this concept in mind that our nation’s founders drafted the Constitution. It wasn’t to give us freedom, which would necessarily imply that we aren’t free unless the government allows us to be; it was to create a government that not only allowed a person to keep his natural state of freedom, so long as it didn’t interfere with another’s; this by turn protected his freedom against the use of theirs to deprive him of his. Therefore, the government as established by the Constitution was created for one reason: to protect the freedom with which we are all born.
Because the people who created this document had just pledged their “lives, fortunes, and sacred honor” on the line in order to regain this freedom from an oppressive government, they made sure when they wrote it that if it was followed no such government could ever exist in our country. It’s not that these men were infallible demigods (although they were pretty dang smart), it was that they understood how much freedom cost and how much it was worth. They wanted to make sure that their sacrifice didn’t go to waste.
Just as a successful progenitor will create specific rules for the trust he leaves his family, which if followed will ensure their wealth; our founders created a trust for our freedom. And much like the heirs who have little appreciation for the sacrifice of the person who created this wealth for them take what they have for granted and sometimes squander it all by not following the rules; we are doing the same thing when we ignore the rules of the trust fund of freedom left for us.
It is this freedom that allows you as an individual to believe what you choose to believe, to freely express your beliefs as long as doing so does not interfere with other individual’s rights to believe what they choose to believe. The founders were also intelligent enough to realize that times and situations would change. That is why the document came complete with easy to read instruction included on how to change it should times demand it. This process is called amending the Constitution, and the change is called, duh, an Amendment. And while changing the Constitution is not complicated, it is not easy.
That is by design. The founders knew from personal experience that the greatest threat to freedom was the government which is why the power of the government is incredibly limited in the Constitution. They realized that every law passed, regardless of how good the intention, could potentially damage the freedom of the individual since the enforcement of that law would require a sacrifice by the people (either in money or personal liberty).
Yet they also knew that there could be an idea or philosophy that came along which would gain the support of enough citizens that they would decide to allow the government to adopt and enforce it as law. This is why free speech is so important. It allows a way for these ideas to manifest. If enough people think it’s a good idea, then the Constitution can be amended. But unless the people decide to allow the government to make such laws by amending the Constitution, the last line of Article 1, Section 8 clearly states that the federal government has no power to do so, and the 10th Amendment further solidifies this.
Unfortunately, most people hated history class. And the Constitution is something they learned about there. Each time the government decides to do something that is a “good idea” based on some “belief of philosophy” in order to solve some problem that pops up, the power of the government increases, and the freedom and rights of the individual decrease. Because most people slept through history class and don’t realize how important the Constitution is the government has become incredibly powerful by creating laws in order to solve problems that they have absolutely no right to create to begin with.
What most Americans don’t realize is that the the Constitution isn’t an archaic document that was written for “back then”; it is a Contract between we the people and our government. And we the people dictated the terms of that Contract. Every time the government decides it wants to do something in the best interest of the people that it isn’t allowed to do, it violates that contract.
Think of it like this: If you had a contract with someone to build a house for you, for a set price you would expect to receive exactly what you agreed to for exactly the price agreed upon. If the builder knew that you hadn’t read the contract he could give you less; he could also charge you more, and you would never know. This would benefit the builder but it would harm you. Similarly, if the builder just decided that your house would look better with brick instead of vinyl and decided to build it that way although you didn’t ask for it, you would be outraged when you were expected to pay for the additions he made without authorization. If the builder decided that you should have a brick house, and explained that to you, and you agreed; you could then make that change–by changing the contract. If you wanted something else added that was important enough to you to give up something for it, you could then go to the builder and ask him to do it (he would likely oblige since he would receive more money) and once again, you would change the contract. But anything done without changing the contract would without question be detrimental to the party giving up something and be exploited by the party that gains something, regardless of the intent. Which brings us back to voting based on your beliefs.
When you vote based on your beliefs instead of voting based on who is most capable of doing the job they swear they will do, you are essentially saying, “I’m okay with having my contract violated as long as the government thinks it’s a good idea; since the person I voted for claims to believe what I believe, it probably will be a good idea.”
But what happens when your candidate doesn’t win? Well then, you blame the other people who voted based on their beliefs for ruining your country. If you are a Republican, you blame FDR’s “good idea” called the New Deal for creating the welfare state. If you are a Democrat, you blame the Republican’s “good idea” of democratizing the Middle East for the war in Iraq. The thing both of these “good ideas” have in common is that there is absolutely nothing in the Contract that allows them to begin with, but that matters little if the people haven’t read it.
Of course, neither party points this out because if the people actually understood that their Contract was being violated when the party out of power got their turn to be in power again, they wouldn’t be able to exploit the Contract themselves. That’s why winning elections by getting you to vote your beliefs is more important than getting you to vote on the one thing that should matter: the person with the best ability to do the job they were sworn in to do. Still wondering what it is they swear to do?
It’s the last sentence of Article 2, Section 1 of that Contract. If you still don’t see why it’s important for you to read it, I’ll just put it here for you:
“I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”
Pretty simple, huh?
There’s only one candidate who can say that he has done this without fail for 20 years. Congressman Ron Paul. Of course, both parties want you to think he’s crazy because if he were elected the people would see how simple this government thing really is, start paying attention, and regain their freedom and power (which would take it from the politicians) because he would honor the people’s end of the Contract.
If you watch every debate, he has never criticized the Democrats for America’s problems and sometimes seems to blame Republicans. And despite what Republicans would have you believe, it isn’t because he’s a pacifist liberal in disguise. It’s because he knows it’s not the Democrats who are the problem. It’s both parties. And it’s because they violate the Contract between we the people and our government. And we seem to tacitly endorse this because we voted based on our beliefs instead of voting for candidates who would ensure we had the right to hold those beliefs.
If you are a Republican/Democrat first, Conservative/Liberal second, and an American third vote your beliefs. If you are an American first, vote for someone who will defend the very thing that protects your right to be what an American is supposed to be: Free. That choice is as simple as government was supposed to be before politics got in the way. Don’t sacrifice what you want most (freedom) for what you want at the moment (someone to solve your problems). It may be too late for Super Tuesday, but as long as the GOP remains divided this will end in September at the brokered convention which gives more time for the message to spread.
Your fellow American,
John Armstrong
strongarmedjohn@yahoo.comComment, it’s fun
As always, unlike the NFL, you have the author’s permission to rebroadcast, retransmit, reproduce, or do anything else you’d like with this article to promote the Restoration of our Republic.
