C.’s in the other room playing the piano.  The great thing about that is that he’s already done his “mandatory practicing” for the day – this playing is purely for fun and satisfaction.  

He started lessons in November and loves it.  And I love that he loves it.  He’s found his “thing.”  We tried soccer, but he couldn’t stand people bumping into him.  Hey, I can understand that – I have pretty strict ‘personal space’ standards, myself.  And let’s face it, you can’t love soccer if you can’t tolerate physical contact very well.  He does well at school, but doesn’t get the same satisfaction out of excelling at schoolwork that his nerdy mother did back in her day.  But piano… piano does something for him.  He’s driven to do his best, to ‘conquer’ the next hard song.  I never have to bug him to practice – he’s glad to every afternoon.  He takes pride in his progress, looks forward to doing ‘recitals’ for his Grammies, and thrives on compliments from us or from his teacher.  I realize that this might not last forever, but I’m thrilled that he’s found something that strikes a chord inside him (pun intended).  He loves to run around as much as the next seven-year-old boy, but this piano thing is something all his own.

My husband gets a kick out of this.  He took piano lessons for two years as a child, and had to practically be dragged to the piano to practice.  He couldn’t wait until his mom finally let him off the hook and he could quit piano.  On the other hand, he could kick a soccer ball at a barn wall for hours, practicing his strength and precision.  Clearly, soccer was his “thing.”

What’s your thing?  What is that activity, discipline, or passion that you can’t get enough of?  The thing that you are driven to conquer, that you take pride in, that is on your mind even when you can’t be doing it at the moment?

I’d like to say mine is writing.  I don’t always live that out, though.  I go days (all right, weeks sometimes) without writing more than emails and grocery lists.  But writing is something that keeps pulling me back.  Maybe it would be more accurate to say that ‘the written word’ is my thing.  I’m always reading, I love how words work together, and I can’t stumble across something interesting without thinking about what a great article that would make.  So I need to take a hint from C. and give more time and energy to my “thing.”  Who knows where that will lead?

Saturday morning, 9:30 a.m. The phone rang – it was my mother-in-law. She was very considerately calling to let me know that she and a visiting relative would be stopping by our house within the hour “to see your digs.” We moved to this house about a year ago, and the out-of-town relative had not yet seen our new place.

Now, I have no problem with people coming by to see where we’re living. I do what I can to accommodate family whenever possible. And I love our house, so I like to share it with others. But…

Yes, but. You see, I’m 6.5 months pregnant and to be honest, housework has not exactly been at the top of my to-do list. That list looks more like this lately:

• Doctor appointment
• Take a nap
• Finish the cookie dough ice cream
• Attack the overflowing laundry hampers
• Take a nap
• Run to the store to stock up on ice cream

See? Not much room for scouring tubs and vacuuming cat hair. Besides, my doctor has put me on “restricted activity” due to some minor pregnancy complications, so I’m not even supposed to be doing strenuous things like vacuuming.

Needless to say, that one phone call got me moving. Fortunately, I had hosted a play-date the day before, so the downstairs was in a semi-presentable state. The upstairs…not so much. But it’s amazing what you can do in an hour when you’re really motivated. There’s nothing like a little accountability, eh? Knowing that people would be checking out the half-done baby nursery, peering in every corner of the master bath, and possibly even opening closet doors that I’d rather keep closed helped me to do a much more thorough job than I might otherwise have done.

I survived the visit, they complimented us on our house, and today – three days later – we’re back to a more normal level of dust and cat hair. But it got me thinking about accountability. Some accountability – like phone calls announcing imminent visits – can be stressful and panic-inducing. But the end result is something I’m pleased with, so it’s worth it.

And it makes me thankful for my friends who hold me accountable in various areas of my life, and particularly grateful for my accountability partner. She and I have been ‘meeting’ by phone once a week for about 8 months now for the sole purpose of praying together and holding each other accountable. She is encouraging, but tough – she doesn’t let me get away with excuses. She asks me hard questions, praises my progress, and offers suggestions and resources to help me on my path. Knowing that she’ll be checking up on me in detail (yes, even opening some doors I’d rather keep closed) motivates me daily to examine my attitudes and activities. It just about kills me when I have to confess to her – again! – that I don’t think I spent nearly enough time in prayer this week, or that I blew up at my son when I should have kept my mouth shut. But again, the end result is well worth it. I’ve seen growth in my life and hers, and some of our most precious conversations have been when we’ve shared about how God has brought about real change in our hearts and lives.

So, here’s to impromptu visits, open closet doors, and people who care enough to ask us the hard questions!

March Madness is upon us. Of course, you already know this if you keep up with college basketball. I don’t. But what tips me off is that yesterday, I received my annual invitation to participate in an online “Tournament Challenge” arranged by a friend of ours. I look forward to this challenge every year because it gives me a chance to engage in a little friendly competition where I have a chance to do well, even though I have absolutely no right to. The process is simple: Log on to the web-site, predict who will win each game and fill out your brackets accordingly, then sit back and watch what happens.

Here is how a true NCAA fan might go about completing his brackets:

1. Research – the first step begins long before March. The key here is to watch as many NCAA regular-season games as possible. Note the strengths and weaknesses of each team, the coaching style, any lingering injuries that might hamper tournament advancement, how each team plays on the road vs. at home, etc.
2. Expert opinion – carefully study articles and blogs written by those who have watched more games than you have, and who know basketball inside and out. Observe their thoughts on potential upsets. Listen for any inside information they might have stumbled across, such as a conflict that might tear apart a high-seeded team.
3. Historical trends – keep in mind that 14 of the last 16 NCAA champions were either a 1- or 2-seed. The lowest seed to ever make it to the Final Four was a #11. Use these and other historical facts to make your winning predictions.

I’m sure there are more tips, but those three pretty much exhausted the little basketball knowledge I’ve retained from my college days when I actually watched college basketball games. Now let me tell you the principles I use in filling out my brackets. Feel free to use them yourself:

1. Know what a “seed number” means. The smaller the number, the better-ranked the team. So, pick mostly the better-seeded team in the first round.
2. Have fun with upsets. Of course, the better team can’t always win – that wouldn’t be fair. So pick a few underdogs in your first round as well. Pick these however you’d like. Perhaps you like the sound of “Winthrop” better than “Tennessee” – go for it. Or maybe your cousin went to Texas A&M and you feel they should beat Syracuse just on principle. Pencil them in for a win.
3. Once we enter the second round, the process becomes a little more esoteric. From here on, primarily go with your gut feeling, which is based on (among other things):
   
   • The sound of the school’s name
   • The school’s proximity to areas of the country you enjoy visiting
   • Whether someone you didn’t really get along with went to that school
4. Keep in mind Murphy’s Law. Not everything can go your way, so occasionally, if you feel a strong pull to pick one school, choose the other. Just because.
5. When in doubt, flip a coin.
6. Make sure the team you choose to win the whole thing has a name you like. Or possibly uniform colors you like (difficult for me, since I don’t watch the games and have no idea what colors their uniforms are).

Simple, no? The best thing is, I did very well last year – out-lasting several more seasoned basketball fans. I’m not sure if they were very amused, considering that they don’t think I take this challenge “seriously.”

Oh, but I do. I put a lot of thought and work into filling in my brackets. And I don’t let anything muddy the water. Just last weekend, my husband flipped to ESPN during a game and I had to leave the room. He asked if I didn’t want to stay and watch, so I could be more informed before the tournament. But I patiently explained that watching a game would interfere with my process. What if the coach irritated me, but I like the region where the school is located? What if the team looked awesome, but my high school nemesis attended that school? Nope. I couldn’t let silly things like performance wreck my carefully constructed bracket-filling techniques.

Crazy, you say? Well, it’s not called March Madness for nothing. I figure someone’s got to uphold the “madness” end of things.

So, what kind of blog posts are you likely to encounter at Callapidder Days?

• The mundane – Thoughts, opinions, vents, explanations, anecdotes about what’s going on in my life at the moment. They may relate to marriage, parenting, friendship, writing, life in general, or any other everyday topic.
• Exploration of issues that are on my mind.
• Lessons learned.
• Epiphanies.
• Links to things that amuse, intrigue, or fascinate me.
• Quotes.
• Other (just had to put this here to cover anything else that might come up).

I’d like to say that the things I write about will be profound and challenging, or will tell you something you didn’t know before. But I’m just as likely to write about how my seven-year-old keeps getting virus after virus this school year, or how my cat woke me up at 2 a.m. making horrible noises out in the hallway. Sorry about that. I do hope that here and there, you’ll find a few nuggets that make you smile. Or think. Or that just provide a moment of distraction in your day right when you needed it. Thanks for visiting.

Well, here I go again. To be completely honest, this isn’t the first blog I’ve started. I think it’s number three or four. Some I’ve kept completely private — my own little experiments in, Can I do this thing called blogging? And I still don’t have an answer. My blogs have ended up much like the many half-filled journals that can be found on various bookshelves throughout my house. I always have sparkling intentions of filling their pages with thoughts, ideas, dreams, profound conclusions, even mundane life-events that no one cares about except me. But somewhere between the intentions and the daily discipline, I lose steam.

I’ve been like that with blogging, too. I lack the discipline to do it regularly. Or I start feeling like I really, truly have nothing to say that anyone cares about, so instead of typing out my thoughts, I simply talk to myself on the way home from the bus stop, and get all my thinking-out-loud work done then. I don’t say that to be all woe-is-me, but just to state one of my ‘issues’ (and I have many of those…). I get too worked up over the quality of what I want to say, and the quantity dribbles off to approximately nothing.

But, I’m trying again. Primarily because I can’t not think about things, and because I order and understand my world through words, all those thoughts have to come out somewhere. I could continue to talk to myself, and probably will, but I’d like to get some of these thoughts down in a concrete way. I could keep a journal – and I do, half-heartedly – but it’s just as easy (and faster) to type my ramblings. And…why not post them for all the world (or more likely, 1-2 people) to see?

I can’t promise that I’ll post daily, or even weekly. I can’t promise that in six months, I won’t decide to quit blogging. But I’ll start, and we’ll see where it goes.

So, why “Callapidder Days?” When my seven-year-old son, C., was learning to talk, he had his own language, to a large degree. We worked to patiently and gently help him arrive at correct words (“car” instead of “mmmm,” for instance). But as he got older, I started feeling a little nostalgic, and I wanted to hold on to a few of his cute-isms. One such word was “callapidder” – caterpillar, for you laymen. I never corrected him when he said callapidder, hoping it would last indefinitely, but sadly, he eventually figured out on his own that the correct pronunciation was caterpillar. However, every once in a while, he still *almost* says callapidder, and it makes me smile.

So – now you know the origin of callapidder, but why use it in my blog? A caterpillar always reminds me of change. He hasn’t changed yet, but he’s going to, and he’s always working toward that end. Eventually, he will create his chrysalis and buckle down to metamorphose into something new. And me – I feel like that too. As if I’m always working toward, moving toward a change. I see so much in myself that needs work, that calls for transformation. And I hope that the things I do are preparing me for the changes – little and big – that God has in store for me. So, every day… is a Callapidder Day… working toward change, [hopefully] ready for and open to change, growing into something new.

Welcome. And thanks for reading.