BilikFamily.com

Movie - Last night I stayed up to watch A Praire Home Companion. Did you ever endure a movie thinking "it must get better"? That's how I felt last night. While Roger Ebert said "What a lovely film this is, so gentle and whimsical, so simple and profound." I have to side with media critic Michael Medved who said, "The entertainment value stands somewhere between thin and non-existent…" and, "…[it may be] the worst movie ever made that pooled the talents of four (count ‘em - four!) Oscar winners…" I mean it had Meryl Streep, Lily Tomlin, Lindsay Lohan, Kevin Kline, Woody Harrelson, Tommy Lee Jones and radio star Garrison Keillor. I thought that if it landed that many big names, it must have some redeeming value. Alas, I must be a rube because it just did nothing for me. My only consolation is that I didn't have it checked out from Netflix long.

Timothy - Mighty Timbo is going to start an additional set of speech therapy sessions. When he was initially diagnosed as being very behind, Michelle applied for help from the school system and from the local Dartmouth-Hitchcock clinic. Both had some amount of waiting to be approved and scheduled. The school approved in August and thus Timbo became our first child to go to preschool — at age 3 even! During his time at school each week he gets half an hour for therapy in a small group and half an hour for one-on-one therapy. This week the clinic called because we'd moved up the waiting list. Michelle and I weren't sure whether to go for additional therapy with him. Michelle is already super taxi mom and this adds one more item to her plate of maternal chauffeuring. The therapist at the clinic is supposed to be good with 20+ years of experience so we decided to try. It'll be an hour long one-on-one session once a week. Between the two, we hope it helps him. At times he is so frustrated when he can't get out what he's trying to say.

I have to relay a Timothy story from last night. He was being a puppy dog for papa last night, following me around and wanted to talk and play. Michelle showed me a floppy disk of Claire's piano practice music that Timothy got into. Not only did he have to climb to reach the disk, he warped the little sheet metal shutter that they put on those 3 1/2 inch disks to guard against dust and finger prints. Now it was all warped and wouldn't go into a disk drive as is. I looked at him with disappointment and said "it's broken now. You broke it". His bright expression turned pathetically sad. There was no need to raise my voice or put him in a corner. He really understood and felt awful. His facial expression was almost cute in a strange sort of way.

Anyway, I attached a floppy drive to my laptop, ripped off what was left of the metal shutter of the disk, and put the disk in the drive. Luckily the contents were still readable so I backed it up onto a fresh floppy disk. He showed his usual Timbo curiosity as "papa fixed it". I was relieved that the data was recoverable since the disk cost me ~$20. Next time I buy a disk of piano practice music for Claire, I'll remember to back it up right away lest curious hands decide to experiment with it.

Meditation - I'll close with a famous meditation I read today by St. Teresa of Avila(1515-1582 AD) :

Christ has no body but yours,
No hands, no feet on earth but yours,
Yours are the eyes with which he looks
Compassion on this world,
Yours are the feet with which he walks to do good,
Yours are the hands, with which he blesses all the world.