Daniel has been home for two weeks and is doing great. I’m still fighting exhaustion though so we’re still “flattened”.

[+] We had to hit up UCD Medical Center on Thursday For Daniel’s Lovenox. We ran into his speech therapist on the way back out and she was very impressed with how he looked. I was asked by a couple people if we’d gone up to the PICU or the Peds Unit and the answer is “no”. For one thing, I don’t know that we would have been welcome on the PICU because of the infection risk and all that. For another thing, we’re going to send pictures of Daniel at his second birthday party with a thank-you note.

[+] I’ve witnessed a fair amount of cattiness between atheists and Catholics over Jennifer Fulwiler’s guide to atheists for Catholics. Atheist blogger PZ Myers (who is quite anti-Catholic) took her on and managed to make himself look like a complete jerk (as did the majority of his commenters). Jennifer asked her readers if she should have responded and the majority of us said “no” though there was some fisking of PZ Myers in the process. One person who did emerge from all of this (at least in my reading) is Leah at Unequally-Yoked who I’m finding to be pretty amazing (the girl is a Yale student so she’s obviously wicked smart). She actually wrote an impressive guide to Catholics for atheists (which could actually apply to Lutherans and Episcopalians) and does a really fantastic job of engaging Catholicism (and Christianity) in a respectful way. Her blog started as a way to argue faith with her Catholic boyfriend (she is an atheist) and she actually participates in the weekly 7 Quick Takes (a largely Catholic meme). Anyway, go check her out.

[+] All the reading of atheist blogs and the wiki article on Anberlin I read recently (the chorus of “A Whisper & A Clamor” was stuck in my head for three months) made me want to affirm something: this is not a Christian blog. I am a blogger who happens to be Christian. I do talk about faith issues on here inasmuch as they’re affecting my daily life though less so over the last year due to the lack of Internet access from March 2010 to February 2011. I’m not really in a complacent place with my faith — just not vocalizing a lot of what I’m dealing with internally. I also really have no interest in fighting with people about whether or not God exists and whether or not Christianity is a pack of lies. There’s a point at which people cannot be convinced without something very drastic happening and until that happens for people like PZ Myers or Jen McCreight (who I do read on a daily basis), I think there will continue to be people who want to have fights over this stuff.

[+] I started some seeds yesterday. I planted pumpkins, sunflowers, tomatoes, basil, cat grass, oregano, lavender, spinach, and cucumbers. I’m hoping they do germinate and I have seedlings in the next week or so.

[+] I made it to church today. Go me. (Actually, the deciding factor was that I needed a parishioner to look at the knot on Daniel’s leg. She’s a nurse and her daughter is diabetic so I figured she’d know something about it.)