Kids!

I laugh a lot these days, thanks to these crazy kids. Zarya (3) and Jerod (1) are just plain funny. Here are a few recent moments that I actually managed to get a picture of. Some of them are a little blurry because, well, kids just don't freeze in place when they see the camera!

She loves burritos...

Curious George got his arm stuck in an elephant

He was dancing, something that I think he thought was a cowboy shuffle

Preschool fashion involves a lot of accessories

Zarya says really hilarious things. She's quite articulate, so it's an unusual window into the mind of a three-year-old that not everyone gets to enjoy with their preschooler. I've been reading her Bible stories recently and sometimes we act them out. She loves this activity, but sometimes a few facts get jumbled. Here are a few of her most recent Scripture-themed quotes:

Zarya: "Mama, you're Mary, I'm Joseph, and Jerod can be Baby Jesus." She then picks up a play phone and starts pushing buttons on it.

Me, confused: "What are you doing, Joseph?"

Zarya: "Texting the wise men about the gold."

Zarya and I were pretending to be Zacchaeus and Jesus eating lunch at his house. Zarya/Zacchaeus was giving me tons of pretend food to eat, but not eating any herself/himself. I asked, "Zacchaeus, aren't you hungry? Here, have some lunch," and handed her/him a few items. She/He shrugged and said, "No, I'm not hungry, I had a big breakfast with," and she pointed at Jerod, who was sitting  nearby, "this old woman who lost her coin."

While in the bathtub one evening, Zarya splashed around a bit and casually commented, "This water used to be wine."

Translating it is the easy part

"Him who overcomes I will make a pillar in the temple of my God." - Rev. 3:12

Sometimes I talk about how difficult Bible translation is, and yes, it certainly is! But you know what's more difficult? Being a pastor. Take the sentence above, for example. It's actually pretty easy to translate. We've got words for everything in that sentence. But what on earth does it mean?! Hey, don't ask us, we just translate it; it's the pastor's job to explain it!

*Take this post with a few grains of salt. Yes, at times we do try to help readers by making some implicit things more clear and helping with unknown concepts. But when it comes down to it, we don't add to the Bible, and when a verse is clearly worded, there's not much which is appropriate to change.

Baked Sister

Jerod was recently browsing through my cookbooks and he must have found a recipe for Baked Sister. I think it probably promised the cook that while your sister is baking to a nice well-done crisp in the oven, an hour's peace of getting all of the toys to yourself is guaranteed. Jerod somehow talked Zarya into cramming herself into the (play kitchen's) oven, and was about to saunter away for his promised hour of alone time when I stumbled upon the scene...

Dumb boats

Cutting loose the anchors, they left them in the sea and at the same time untied the ropes that held the rudders. Then they hoisted the foresail to the wind and made for the beach. (Acts 27:40, NIV)

Just about every verse has a difficult bit to translate - it might be a word, concept, or an idiom that made great sense to the original readers that is lost on those of us from another culture. But come on, let's face it, the entire chapter of Acts 27 (Paul's shipwreck) is just plain obnoxious agony to translate unless the people group happens to be a sea-faring one.

Take the above example for instance. It has a few problems for people who stay on dry land and grow corn and millet, and occasionally wander by a little stream or lake to get a bucketful of water. This verse assumes readers know the following:

• What an anchor is
• Anchors are tied to ships with ropes
• Sailors had a knife or something handy to cut the rope
• What a rudder is
• Why a rudder would be tied
• What happens when you untie the ropes holding the rudders
• What a sail is
• What it means to hoist a sail to the wind
• How one would head for the beach when in a boat

Shoot me now. I first worked through this chapter years ago, and am now going over it again for a spell-check. Just seeing it once more gives me the heeby jeebies!

Easter Egg Hunt

The kids participated in their first Easter egg hunt today! It was a little crowded and crazy, but they had fun. Zarya was much too timid to push her way into the mass of preschoolers (and their parents and siblings) who were grabbing eggs as fast as they could, but she enjoying gleaning behind the throng. She actually had to search for the ones she found!

As for Jerod, just picking them up and putting them in the bag was exciting for him. He held his own amongst the toddlers. It's a lot for a one year old to take in, but he didn't seem too fazed. He'll be racing around collecting them next year.

It must be easier if it's your own language

bhiikumaniirye

bhiikumanirye

If I were a native speaker of Zanaki, the two words above might be easy to distinguish. Context within a sentence likely helps, too, so one doesn't have to rely only on whether there is a short "i" or long "ii" in a word to know it's meaning. 

I'm not a Zanaki person, and when I came across these two words in back-to-back verses in Acts, I thought that perhaps one of them was simply misspelled. It looked like a typo had happened, but I could come up with a linguistic explanation of why there might be a difference (I'll spare you that one). The context seemed the same to me, though, so I wasn't sure why one would be different than the other, even though I could theoretically figure out how an extra "i" had ended up in one word. 

I gave the translators the benefit of the doubt and wrote a polite note in Acts asking if these really were two different words. The answer came back saying yes, in fact, they were! I'm glad I asked in a friendly way and didn't assume they had made a mistake!

If you're curious, the difference is that the top word, the one with the long "ii", means that people gathered indoors somewhere. The bottom word means they gathered outside in an open place. Languages are fascinating and complicated!

Father Melancholy's Daughter

Way back when I was a young thing in grad school, I read Gail Godwin's novel "Father Melancholy's Daughter" for the first time. I really enjoyed it - there is nothing as gripping as a book that is all about interesting characters and how they develop, in my opinion, that is. I thought, "Wow, I've found a fabulous new (to me) author! I've got to read all of her other books!" Well, I did read five more, and they ranged from just okay to good, but none of the others I tried were anywhere near great. I include that info so that you don't assume that I'm highly recommending everything she's written and go read one of the other books and then think I've got poor taste in literature.

But, back to the one exceptional book of the lot. What I can say without giving anything away that you won't learn in the first few pages of the book is it's a coming of age book, and the title character is the daughter of an often-melancholy Episcopal priest, and her mother has recently departed the scene. You follow her from age six to age 22, although more accurately, you learn about her at age six and at age 22, and not much between.

For fans of books in which the plot involves the inner workings of minds and dialogue, try it, you'll like it!