June 23, 2009 at 1:36 am (Photos of us)
A warning to all unmarried women out there: At first, it may seem great that your potential spouse has a fabulous sense of humor. But, think ahead eleven years: You may have a son with that same sense of humor.
Case in point: The Naturalist is always trying to make us laugh. He knows that we check on him before we go to bed every night. He thinks it is really funny to fall asleep in strange ways to surprise us. We have found him sleeping in strange ways dozens of times. This has been going on for months.
First, as you’ll see in the above picture, he started sleeping on the floor. It is obvious that this picture is three months old because he’s wearing winter pj’s. Why exactly do we spend money buying him a nice bed when he’d rather sleep on the floor?
Then, as you’ll see from the above two pictures, he started sleeping among his train set. This seems very uncomfortable to me!
Now that it is summer, he’s not only sleeping on the floor, but his pj’s are gone! (Also, note that his teddy bear is with him in all these pictures. He’s had that bear since he was a baby, and he is so attached to it.)
This picture is the strangest one yet. This picture was taken a couple of days ago. Why did he put his backpack on before he fell asleep?
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June 11, 2009 at 1:06 am (Photos of us)
The Dancer had her big recital on Saturday night. She did wonderfully! It amazes me that she can dance on stage in front of an audience of hundreds, and yet it doesn’t occur to her to be nervous. In fact, we sat in the third row, and she was smiling and waving to us prior to her performance (she stands on stage on the sidelines during the two numbers before her own). She was obviously having such a great time on stage! Here are a few pictures.
The Dancer with Mommy before the show.
The Dancer and The Naturalist with Grandma and Grandpa.
This picture was taken during her performance. The Dancer is the third girl from the right.
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June 11, 2009 at 12:54 am (Photos of us)
This weekend, we visited the National Museum of the United States Air Force in Dayton Ohio. We brought Grandma and Grandpa too. We all had a fabulous time. Here are a couple of my favorite pictures.
In this first picture, we are standing in front of a Wright brothers plane. Dayton is all about the Wright brothers!
Here we are in front of the Bockscar, the airplane that dropped the atomic bomb on Nagasaki.
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June 10, 2009 at 2:26 am (The Pill)
One of the key researchers who invented the contraceptive pill – 85 year-old Carl Djerassi of Austria – said the invention has caused a “demographic catastrophe.”
A personal commentary published in an Austrian newspaper laments that Europe’s demographic decline is a “horror scenario” brought about by the Pill’s invention. Djerassi writes that in Europe now, there is “no connection between sexuality and reproduction.” He wrote that young Austrians who fail to have children are committing national suicide.
In a seperate article, a leading medical expert said the Pill has brought about “devastating ecological effects” by releasing “tons of hormones” into the environment, which has lead to a decrease in male fertility.
Djerassi was one of three researchers whose formulation of the synthetic progestagen, Norethisterone, marked a key step in the creation of the first oral contraceptive pill.
In his essay, Djerassi called the falling birthrate in Europe an “epidemic” far worse than obesity, which has received much more attention. He said: “This divide in Catholic Austria, a country which has on average 1.4 children per family, is now complete.”
Dr. Jose Maria Simon Castellvi, president of the International Federation of Catholic Medical Associations, speaking to the Catholic News Agency, pointed out the “devastating ecological effects of the tons of hormones discarded into the environment each year. We have sufficient data to state that one of the causes of masculine infertility in the West is the environmental contamination caused by the products of the Pill.”
Source: Catholic News Agency and CathNews.com
Originally printed in the March/April 2009 edition of Family Foundations magazine, page 6.
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June 10, 2009 at 2:24 am (The Pill)
Millions of women in the United States ingest excess estrogen every day in the form of birth control pills. Within 24 hours, the effluent from those 12 million doses ends up in our sewage systems. And then?
The April 17 Scientific American reported results of a study warning that “many streams, rivers and lakes already bear warning signs that the fish caught within them may also be carrying enough chemicals that mimic the female hormone estrogen to cause breast cancer cells to grow.”
“Fish are really a sentinel, just like canaries in the coal mine 100 years ago,” says Conrad Volz, co-director of exposure assessment at the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute’s Center for Environmental Ecology. “We need to pay attention to chemicals that are estrogenic in nature, because they find their way back into the water we all use.”
According to the Freshwater Institute’s Fisheries and Oceans section, “The potent synthetic estrogens excreted by women taking hormone replacement therapy or birth control pills are not completely broken down in the sewage treatment process and are discharged into waterways.”
While cautioning that the exact process of hormonal confusion is not yet clear, the Scientific Americanarticle continued, “But the [estrogenic] effects on the fish themselves were clear: the gender of nine of the fish [tested] could not be determined.”
“Increased estrogenic active substances in the water are changing males so that they are indistinguishable from females,” Volz found. “There are eggs in male gonads as well as males are secreting a yolk sac protein. Males aren’t supposed to be making egg stuff.”
This article originally published in the California Catholic Daily, April 29, 2007
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