{"id":1240,"date":"2008-12-30T13:50:00","date_gmt":"2008-12-30T18:50:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/?p=1240"},"modified":"2008-12-30T13:50:00","modified_gmt":"2008-12-30T18:50:00","slug":"tarpaulin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/?p=1240","title":{"rendered":"tarpaulin"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>We&#8217;re driving back to Chapel Hill tomorrow morning to visit my parents for a couple of days.  It&#8217;s all part of the end-of-year succession of events.  I&#8217;m looking forward to it.  It&#8217;s always relaxing for me to be at my parents&#8217; house and they&#8217;re always more than willing to help out with the kids, which makes it doubly relaxing.  It&#8217;s less so for Diane, just not being a familiar environment, but she loves my parents and we always have a good time.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s also a good opportunity to step away from the normal environment and take stock of the year behind us.  Here are some major happenings of 2008 for us to think about:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Penelope grew a <i>lot<\/i>.  She went from 4 months to 16 months and grew up considerably.  She&#8217;s almost walking and getting more and more verbal.  Starting this year she was a lump and couldn&#8217;t even sit up.  And of course she&#8217;s more beautiful every day too.<\/li>\n<li>Luke finally got potty trained.  That was a really great achievement.  He&#8217;s learning more about God and more about the world as well, and is the most sweet boy.<\/li>\n<li>We finished remodeling the kitchen.  It&#8217;s got a lovely countertop, cabinets and just everything else.  We couldn&#8217;t imagine life without it and are so grateful for it.<\/li>\n<li>Diane got us involved in the 40 Days For Life anti-abortion campaign and we participated in numerous protests and met some really great people.<\/li>\n<li>I got a hefty raise at work and became really proficient with HTML and CSS (if a little lazy in my application of those skills).<\/li>\n<li>Diane and I went to the National Conference on Apologetics for our 2nd wedding anniversary back in early November and really enjoyed it.<\/li>\n<li>We started looking for a new church, still an ongoing and arduous process.<\/li>\n<li>We really started to get on top of our finances in the fall and are in a much better position to realistically look long-term at a house of our own.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>And of course there&#8217;s much more than that.  But it&#8217;s been a really great, blessed year.  We&#8217;re grateful most of all to the Lord for everything, both good and bad in human terms, which happened in it.  He is sovereign.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>We&#8217;re driving back to Chapel Hill tomorrow morning to visit my parents for a couple of days. It&#8217;s all part of the end-of-year succession of events. I&#8217;m looking forward to it. It&#8217;s always relaxing for me to be at my parents&#8217; house and they&#8217;re always more than willing to help out with the kids, which [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1240"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1240"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1240\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1240"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1240"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1240"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}