Every so often, when browsing blogs, I come across an entry like this:

I haven't written for a while, but I'm writing now...

Now it is my turn.  Here's why you should read my entry:

Because being a really good homeschool husband and dad is time consuming work.  Not complaining, mind you, except that I admire and envy (in a sanctified way, of course) hard working moms and wives who manage to juggle parenting, teaching, and holding down the home front and living to tell about it!

So, inspired by your example, I pledge to do a better job of writing from the husband and father point of view, to hopefully encourage all of us, make us laugh, and challenge us.

If nothing else, to help my Darling Bride know what I'm thinking, because that's why I started this anyway.

Growing up, Christmas routine was generally the same, and it became a cherished tradition for me:

Christmas Eve, we would go to my Grandparents' house and have punch, cookies, and presents!  We had gift exchange for my whole mom's side of the family that night. 

The next morning, my brother and parents had Christmas morning with Santa's visit.  Later we would visit my dad's side of the family at my other Grandmother's.

Finally back to my mom's parents for Christmas dinner with aunts and uncles.

This tradition is cherished to me because it endured my parents' divorce and was a light at the end of the tunnel of a very challenging childhood.  Grandparents and extended family helped carry the burdens of growning up.  It was also consistent because for the most part, both parents' extended families all lived in town.  This tradition extended as far back as I remember, with an occasional exception here and there, through my first above mentioned Grandmother's passing in 1999.

The most memorable and best part was Christmas Eve.  That was the climax.  Grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, food, toys and other presents for all, and knowing that this was done last year and would be done this year, no matter what family life and the torture of John Wood Elementary School and Aylesworth Middle School would throw my way.

Nowadays, remnants of the past are incorporated into the best of the present.  This past Sunday my Mom, brother, and one uncle and his family came back and we had "Christmas Eve."  This Christmas Eve at my wife's parents.  Christmas at our house.  Worshipping Jesus, the Reason for the Season this past Sunday.  My prayer is that my family, wife children, and I will someday look back upon these years just as fondly.

As Christmas routines change as time demands they will, we all ought to strive to be blessings to one another.  This truly is the most wonderful time of the year. 

Inspired by my much better half, My Darling Bride has begun blogging about her personal goals for 2008.  Link to Darling Bride's Goals. 

She made a wise observation about some of our most important goals, such as Bible reading, prayer, eating well, and exercise:  We don't achieve these goals and stop, we keep going.  So, for 2008, I purpose to work through a Personal Mission Statement and Priorities that I've already written, and find specific ways to act on them and specific Bible verses to memorize about them.

Here's my Personal Mission Statement and Priorities:

I live dependently upon Jesus Christ and interdependently with others.

To that end, I prioritize:

I cultivate love and fellowship with God through listening to Him as I read His Bible, talking to Him in prayer, trusting in the person and work of Jesus Christ, living a Spirit filled life, and commitment to a local church, to the glory of God. 

I am a servant/leader of my household consistent with Biblical Principles.  To fulfill that calling from God:

• I joyfully love (my wife) and proactively fulfill our marriage and family covenant by serving and leading us according to God's Word, so that our marriage would model Christ's relationship to His Chruch, we would mutally complete one another to experience companionship, and we would multiply a Godly legacy.
• I also encourage and build up (my wife) to empower her goals of Biblical Womanhood and her relationships with God and others.
• (My wife) and I love (DS1, DD, and DS2), and we bring them up in the love, mercy, discipline, and instruction of the Lord, to provide a Godly family culture encouraging them to grow up discovering, nurturing, and fulfilling God's purposes and plans for each of their lives.

Regarding my vocation, I work at an elite level of excellence and high level of obedience that makes others around me better and calls attention to God.  Worthwhile work is:

• Serving God by serving and influencing others:  customers, coworkers, vendors, whomever God sends my way;
• A stewardship to create profitability for my company;
• A conduit of provding means for my family;
• A model of responsibility and diligence for my children, family, and others I influence;
• Access to the culture as an ambassador for Chirst.

We work together to be good stewards of the resources God has entrusted to us, fulfilling Biblical mandates for managing what we have.

I strive to overcome my task oriented tendenices by cultivating strong relationships between me and my extended family, friends, and circle of influence through encouraging, building up, being friendly, serving, and personal evangelism.

I take care of myself through persevering through trials, managing the events of my life well, physical fitness, seeking wisdom, and taking time for rest, relaxation, fun, and humor, so that I live a healthy and balanced life.

Barbara Walters has said something that makes no sense, even though it may sound logical at first.

According to a top of the hour radio newscast I heard, Walters is criticizing President and Mrs. Bush's Christmas card (the one they send out to people).  The criticism focuses on the inclusion of a Scripture / Bible verse in the card.  Walters argues that the President "of all the people" should not do this because the card alienates agnostics, athiests, muslms, hindus...

The implication is that a Christmas Holiday Card would please everyone if it said nothing.  Problem is, saying nothing is still saying something.  Exclude a Bible Verse:  alienate a Christian.  Exclude something from the Koran, Book of Mormon, etc...you get the idea.

I wonder if Ms. Walters is more concerned about herself than "all the people."  If so, don't let her speak for us.  Nobody, even the President, can please everyone.  Neither can Barbara's suggestion of silence, which I would politely suggest to her.

"In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins."  1 John 4:10

Darling Bride and I figured out Christmas Business last night.  Stress does not come from all the things we get to do during Christmas time, stress comes because we still have to do everything else besides!  If we could just put life on hold while we usher in "the most wonderful time of the year" then we'd have something.

For me, I get the week between Christmas and New Year's off as one of my vacation weeks.  That's nice.

This past weekend I helped set the record breaking debut of the Will Smith movie, I am Legend.  I regret having done so.  Here's what happened:

Sunday was a mountaintop day:  Church was fantastic!  My oldest son had his first singing solo as part of the Christmas ensemble.  He sang in the morning, and again in the evening for the Christmas concert.  The rest of worship was A-1.  Preaching is great.  Even the weather, even though the "weather outside was frightful," we made it to church.

After the evening concert, some of the guys were going to the movie and I was invited along.  It's great to have impromptu men's fellowship with other believers, so I jumped at the chance with Darling Bride's sincere blessing. 

The problem is that I spend Sunday filling my mind with worship, spiritual songs, praise, and the joy of my son't efforts paying off.  In between services, a quiet day at home.  Then, BANG!  I find myself bombarded with images of people mutated by bad viruses, crashing cars, assault rifles, grenades, and other unsavory things.  So, my thoughts when I went to bed were about that, instead of all the good stuff I put in.

It's a shame that all the good got usurped by one impulse decision that went wrong.  I'm sure there's a moral there somewhere. 

Either that, or as Darling Bride told me last night, "The Sunday School song is right...'Be careful little eyes what you see...'"

The Lottery has invaded our house.  Here's how:  Our insurance agent sends birthday cards to his clients.  With the card is a scratch off lottery ticket.  This month Darling Bride got a ticket and won $20.00.  When I cashed it in for her at the grocery store, I also bought some groceries, and had $2.00 left over to buy 2 chances in the Hoosier Lottery.

That's when things went wrong.  The Hoosier Lottery was up to $53 million dollars.  I started thinking about what we'd do with the money:  pay off debts, buy a new car withput rust, invest in growth stock mutual funds with a 10 year track record of 12% return, buy a homesteading farm, take vacations, buy clothes, tithe like crazy, buy a vacation home in Michigan, never worry about making ends meet again, and generally live the good life of a relaxed homeschooling family that doesn't have to work for a living.

The idolotry and non-dependence upon God kicks in.  I start thinking about Wednesday night's drawing more than I think about God, Jesus, the Bible, my church, my wife, my kids, my job, my cat, our praying manis, and our cricket colony.  I fantasize about the big check, the fame, the fortune...

Imagine!  There are people who do this everyday with their grocery money.  What a mess!  I can't live this way. 

After next week I'll stop.  I matched two of the six numbers, so I won a free ticket for this weekend's drawing.

In anticipation of my Darling Bride's birthday today, my mother in law, http://www.homeschoolblogger.com/bakerswife, has been presenting slide shows of my Darling Bride when she was a girl.  This got me to thinking.

Once upon a time Darling Bride, you, all our friends, and I were little girls and boys.  Then we grew up, and it seemed to take forever.

Today our darling children, all their friends, are little (or not so little) girls and boys.  They will grow up, and it will seem to take but a moment.

We grew up, and so will they.  Birthdays ought to be a happy time to celebrate the past present and future.

Happy Birthday Darling Bride!

The paradigm of how health care is paid for via health insurance and other benefits is changing, and you will do well to know what is happening so that you can maximize your care at a minimum of expense.  Here is a simple overview discussing the past, why the past no longer works, what's happening now, and why it is important to be informed.

In the past, the standard was to get a comprehensive plan of health insurance through work.  The plan functioned like this:  you paid your premiums through a payroll deduction, and if you needed medical attention, you would see a doctor any pay a copay ($10, $20, etc.).  Then you would get a prescription and pay another copay.

The problem is that this system masked the true cost of healthcare.  Most people would not conside the behind the scened operations:   insurance companies would get billed by doctors, hospitals, and pharmacies, and a lot of dollars were trading hands without the patient really knowing about it.  As a result, the insurance companies kept profitability by increasing premiums.  For example, a health plan from a mainstream provider that cost my family $300 a month in 2001 now costs $1200 today.

Because regular health insurance is cost prohibitive, other options are arising.  As an alternative to not providing health plans at all, employers are offering plans that do not cover as much as plans once did.  This point is so important that I'll repeat it with bold, underlined font:  employers are offering plans that do not cover as much as plans once did.  The purpose of this essay is to create awareness and give advice on how to maximize our new options.

Two popular plans now available are the High Deductible Health Plan (HDHP) and the Limited Medical Plan (or Mini-Med).  HDHPs are plans that replace deductibles with a co-pay.  For example, if you or a child has a fever, when you go to seek care, you have to meet your high deductible, likely in the $2600 (single) or $5200 (family) range before the plan starts paying.

Why this is worth a lengthy post is that these changes require a new way of doing business with health providers.  If you don't, you will be surprised like us:  a $10,000 medical bill we thought was covered by insurance was not.  We found ourselves with a medical plan that was nothing like we expected.

So we got informed:

1. Learn what your current plan covers and does not.  Find out first if something you are thinking about doing will cover you as you think.  Read all of your plan documents, even and especially the fine print.  If we had studied our documents, we would have found out ahead of time that our $50.00 co pay would balloon 200 fold.
2. Discover the lost art of negotiation.  Our $10,000 bill has been reduced to $4700 because I called the hospital, the surgical center, and the physician and they all agreed to rate reductions.  They do it all the time with insurance companies.  In fact, health care providers are really retailers:  they mark up to mark down.  One ultrasound bill went from $705 to $60 (that's seven hundred down to sixty)!
3. You can also negotiate before the fact.  When with your doctor, explain how your plan pays and see if they can mark your paperwork so that your out of pocket is reduced.  If they know you're footing the bill, they may adjust the billing.
4. Shop around.  If you're going to comparison shop for a TV, for a car, or for clothes, doesn't it make sense to shop for doctors and prescriptions?  Just as a 24 pack of Pepsi doesn't cost the same depending on the store, neither does health care. 

In conclusion, know that health care is now "consumer driven," meaning that the consumer (not patient, but consumer, because health care is a retail commodity) is bearing more and more responsibility for health care and its expenses.  If we assume this responsibility well, we can all reduce the cost and improve the quality of our care.