Tag Archives: Family

Well, pack my bags and call me a Buckeye!

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I’ve got a fresh design for the blog (I liked the last one, but this simple, ultra-clean look is more my style), but that’s not the only change around here!

  • I’m stepping down as Art Director for Gemstone Publishing’s line of Disney Comics. My last day will be Wednesday, November 26th.
  • Two days later, we’re loading up a truck and moving to Columbus, Ohio! (Thanks in advance to Rae Whitlock, who’s already agreed to round up some strapping young church men to help us unload the truck over the weekend.)
  • I’m looking to take on some additional freelance web design and optimization clients. If you know anybody who’s looking for that, you can get yourself a 10% referral bonus (because I’m cool like that—also because I hate cold-calling). Just go on over to the “Feedback” page and pick your favorite way to get in touch with me.

UPDATE: According to Google Maps, this might be where we’re moving:

How to stay up-to-date on toy recalls

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As we’re getting ready to move, we’ve gotten to the point where we’re packing up most of the kids’ toys. That got us wondering: what with all of the recalls that have been issued lately because of lead paint and all (why on earth isn’t China under a trade embargo yet?), are any of the toys in our house unsafe? I mean, Joshua seems like he’s half-puppy; he’s always chewing on something.

So while looking around, I got a bit overwhelmed by the huge lists of recalls. Thankfully, it looks like we’re okay, but I was wondering if there might be an easier way to keep track of new notices.

Well, there is. Just plug the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission’s child products RSS Feed into your feed reader of choice (Google Reader, Feedblitz, Sage, etc.) and you’ll get updates as other items are recalled! (The CPSC provides a number of other recall feeds, too.)

I hope you find that as helpful as I do. :)

Gemstone Publishing moves office to York, PA

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Geppi announced that… Gemstone Publishing will be… relocating to York, PA effective the first week of October 2007.

[snip]

“York has an exciting dynamic to it. It’s definitely a city and a region on the move, and we’re excited to be a part of that. This is a terrific entry into a rich marketplace, both in terms of the history to be found and the collectors with a vibrant interest in it. I am personally very pleased to be able to create this opportunity,” Geppi said.

Yup, that’s right: moving from Timonium, MD to York, PA in just a couple of weeks: “The new facility, located at 3679 Concord Road, York, Pennsylvania 17402, is expected to be fully up and running by the first week of October 2007.” Gemstone is now under the “Geppi Entertainment” banner, along with Diamond Intl. Galleries, Geppi’s Entertainment Museum, Hake’s Americana & Collectibles and Morphy Auctions.

Alport Syndrome (Follow-Up)

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Thanks to everyone who left comments, phone calls and e-mail for us in response to my last post. Joshua is doing much better, and since then Katie’s also gotten that fever (and gotten over it).

I’m still pretty sure Joshua has Alport Syndrome, though. This fever was just a fever, but it seems to have caused some symptoms that pretty much only show up if the fever victim has a disease like AS. Prayers are still appreciated.

Thanks, everyone.

How the Seitler Family Spent Their Weekend

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Nicole and I went to a cute little B&B in Lancaster County for our fifth anniversary, but we had to come home a bit early because Joshua was running a fever of 102°F and wasn’t sleeping. That was Friday, and he was still the same all day Saturday. Round about midnight, Nicole and I were talking over our options, and decided an emergency trip may be in order because his wet diapers left us with the impression that he might have something serious, like a urinary tract infection. However, there’s another reason for this sort of thing… one we didn’t really consider (nor did we want to):

The hallmark of Alport syndrome is blood in the urine (hematuria). In boys with X-linked Alport syndrome, hematuria first appears in early childhood and their urine always tests positive for blood. [...] The hematuria of Alport syndrome is usually microscopic, meaning it can only be detected with a microscope or a urine dipstick. Sometimes children with Alport Syndrome have brown, pink or red urine (gross hematuria) for several days, associated with a cold or the flu. This gross hematuria eventually stops on its own. It can be frightening, but it is not harmful.

Source: Inheritance of Alport Syndrome & Your Child (Renalife)

If only we knew this before taking Joshua into the emergency room on Saturday night. It was especially stinging because:

  1. we were there till 5:30am Sunday morning,
  2. Joshua got a catheter so they could get a urine sample,
  3. they told us to come back Sunday afternoon for antibiotics only to tell us at 8:00pm (following a three-hour wait) that it was a 24-hour dosage and they wouldn’t be giving him any then,
  4. we had to follow up at the doctor’s office the next day,
  5. he needed a 10-day antibiotic prescription,
  6. the doctor wants a renal ultrasound this week, and best of all?
  7. We have no health insurance. (In a touch of irony, we just couldn’t afford it this year.)

So now we’re weighing our options—all of them. This was also a bit of a wake-up call for me personally, because I’ve been living in this sort of “we don’t know if he’s got Alport Syndrome or not” limbo of blissful ignorance. Now I’ve got to wake up and be the responsible daddy, because this is going to be a lifelong battle: the only options for an Alport Syndrome sufferer are dialysis and kidney transplants. There’s no cure (yet).

I’m going to be a sporadic blogger for a while (it’s already started, I guess, but this makes it official). We’ve got some things to take care of before I can focus on this blog the way I was for a while there. In particular, we need to secure prayers, health insurance and a good pediatric nephrologist (preferably nearby, like at Johns Hopkins).

Right now my greatest temptation is to pull back from everyone around me and just sit quietly in a little bubble of depression and fear. Feelings of inadequacy (a distortion of Phillipians 2:3′s “count others more significant than yourselves”) lead to my believing that people either don’t/wouldn’t care, or that they’d see this as petty compared to what they’re dealing with. Either way, I feel like I’m just whining if I talk about this and I’m honest about how much fear and doubt I’m living with right now. So I just don’t talk about it…and all that does is make things fester inside me.

And then I go to work and make comic books, and it all seems so surreal. It’s like amusements are the “important” part of my life (my career), while what are quite possibly life-and-death matters (searching out the latest AS research and good doctors) are relegated to hobby status.

We live in a screwed-up world, and some days it leaves me in the fetal position.

Mini-Review: Future Men

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Wilson covers all the major concerns of shaping boys into real men: laziness, sex, secret sin, courtship, girls, friends, fights, school work, and sports to name a few. Each section is written with that ‘serrated edge’ he is known for, so you need to read with a smile and not take offense if you are to gain from many of his good insights. —Paul W. Martin @ kerux noemata

Interestingly, Wilson notes that the abandonment of the Psalms in worship means that the church has discarded a songbook, that is throughly masculine in its lyrics, in favour of the effeminate hymns of the 19th and 20th century. The result being that the church is dominated by females as men are put off attending divine worship. The author also has lots of helpful advice on how parents should instruct their boys with regard to work, sports, education, friendship, sex, courtship, fighting, bearing firearms and the use of money; which, all in all, makes for a very stimulating read. —Daniel Ritchie @ Reformed Covenanter

This is a book on raising boys? Wow, I think I came away from reading Future Men with more instruction on raising myself! Not that it was necessarily Wilson’s aim, but his lessons are of the sort that I need to put them into practice myself before I can raise my own boy in them. This one is so insightful that I need to read it again; there’s just too much to soak up in the first reading!

Mother’s Day Weekend

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Relaxing on Mother's Day Weekend

We had a really nice Mother’s Day weekend this year! On Saturday, we bundled up the kids and a picnic lunch and moseyed on over to Spring Lake Park. We’d only ever been to the “lake” side of it before, so the open grass and the quiet creek were wonderful. (More photos at Flickr.)

On Sunday we decided to pass on message #2 of Chesapeake’s building fund series and instead visit a nearby congregation. (See, we’re really bad about driving 30 miles to attend Sunday services and not having a clue who the believers are within a 2-mile radius of our apartment.) Timonium UMC got the short straw, so we went over there and checked things out.

Wow.

It’s one thing for a church to think it’s okay for women to serve in pastoral roles… but I saw a number of appointed leaders in there yesterday morning, and not a single one was a man. (The men were either in deacon roles or just not there.) If that wasn’t enough of a shocker for me, they had the kids come up for a kiddie sermonette on Acts 16 where they were told that Lydia had her husband and kids baptized and pastored a church in her home. Needless to say, Katie got some of Papa Bear’s personal commentary on that passage at lunchtime. Maybe I’ll post my thoughts on it later, but suffice it to say, I think there was no small part of eisegesis in what was told to the kids.

The really nice part about visiting that church, though, is that we were back home by 11am (where we usually get back after 1pm). We couldn’t get over how much longer the day felt because of that, so we went driving around later, looking at houses for sale.