Isaac was circumcised today. This is not something that we would have done if we didn't believe it was a biblical commandment. I was in the room to watch the procedure. It was very difficult for me to go through. Even as the pediatrician was starting there was a voice in the back of my head saying, "What if this isn't really necessary? You can still have it stopped now." But I still believe that we did the right thing - not for ourselves, but for Yahweh.
It's been a week since Beth started labor for our baby boy. Beth is now watching the same TV shows that she watched that night.
This weekend my parents came to visit and to see the new baby. We had spaghetti dinner together and played Bang! I'm glad that they were able to come visit and get a few pictures taken.
Yesterday I took my truck in to get fixed. The transmission had to be torn apart. That cost over $700 to get repaired. At least I saved some money when I fixed my own brakes recently.
After living with us for the past few months, Beth's mom returned home this morning. Despite our differences, she will be missed. She cared for our kids and us a lot and was a great help around the house. We'll probably really start to notice how much she did around here very soon. I know that she helped us keep up with our laundry and many other household chores even when we didn't ask her.
My brother came to visit yesterday and today. He gave me my belated birthday presents (The Settlers Of Catan: 5-6 Player Expansion and a model Chevy Xtreme S-10 - I wonder if I could modify it to fit my Mini-Z) and we played Carcassonne and BattleBall together. He didn't like BattleBall very much, saying that he doesn't like dice games. He did enjoy Carcassonne though. We played that a few times. The last time that we played I had gotten to my third lap around the scoring track by the end of the game. Tim had gotten around twice and at a quick glance it looked like he was ahead. We had quite a "farmer war" (as Tim put it). He actually matched me with 3 farmers in the best farmland, and he was close to getting in a 4th one to knock me out of the scoring for it. He said, "If I would have gotten that farm I would have stomped you." Of course I thought that he realized that I was ahead so I figured up what the score would have been if he would have done that and I said, "Yes, it would be worth 44 points, but you still would have been behind." (The scoring track goes from 0 to 49 so that would have been almost one complete lap.) He said, "I would still be what?" "You'd still be behind." "I thought I'd won." At that point I felt really bad for pointing it out. Especially since he had lost every game that we played these last two days.