Think of this post as me searching for the one sheep lost from the ninety-nine

I hear that some of my dear readers are still subscribing to this, my old blog.  But I have moved!  I have not been silent for two months; I’ve just been blogging at a different address: ToddledDredge.com.

Also, judging by my sitemeter report, many of you are still linking here to my old blog.  Oh, do be kind to a poor blogger and update your links.  It raises my Technorati score and makes me feel all successful.  You don’t even have to do much; just delete the .wordpress part of the url.  Easy peasy, and I will be ever so grateful.

See you over at the new place.  It’s really nice.  I promise.

Moving Due to Comments

You may have noticed that a spambot has found my blog, and I am regularly deleting 5-10 comments a day that slip through my spam filter. The spam filter (Akismet) is filtering out roughly 500 comments a day from this nasty little program, all of them nonsense strings of words that include something about gambling.

Unfortunately, sometimes real comments from real people also get sent to the spam file by Akismet, and I have to search through the hundreds of fake messages if I want to find the missing real ones. I am tired of doing that.

So even though the new site is not quite ready, I am going to move to the new domain name, ToddledDredge.com. If you read this blog on RSS feed, go ahead and update to that address. If you link to me on your blogroll, please update that also.

I will have a new post up on the new blog tonight, and after a day or two, I will change this old blog to registered commenters only. If the new blog gets targeted by spambots too, I will have to introduce some kind of comment verification system. I know typing those jumbled words is a nuisance, so we will wait and see if the move solves the problem first.

The Ultrasound Was Today

And everything went well. The baby looks healthy, with all the functioning parts a baby needs. They couldn’t see both feet because she kept them crossed, and the sonographer wants to do another ultrasound to rule out clubbed feet. That sounds like a waste of time to me – if she did have a clubbed foot, it wouldn’t be life-threatening and it’s easily correctible, so there’s no real reason to know that before birth.

Did you catch that use of the pronoun? Yep. I am pregnant with our FOURTH GIRL. Az the Husband was completely unsurprised. He expects all girls. He is a good dad to girls (and not all men are), so it may just be sensible divine economy.

You may be hoping that I will do another name game like I did during my last pregnancy, but nope. Since we are currently thinking this will be our last child (but not taking any permanent steps yet), I am using one of my favorite girl names. It’s all picked out and waiting for her. Wanna know?

Here’s a hint: it’s one of the moons of Uranus.

The Bible and Polygamy

Given its prominence in the news and the religious background to the FLDS marriage practices, I thought it might be worthwhile to talk about polygamy in the context of the Bible. There is a tendency in our culture to treat the Bible as a collection of aphorisms, a kind of compendium of easy to use sayings and holy examples. If something is “in the Bible,” then it must be a good thing, right?

Of course, the reality is that the Bible is a kind of anthology of different literary genres written by many different authors across different centuries. And when we interpret it according to genre and cultural context, its portrayal of polygamy is not exactly positive.

Polygamy is actually a broad category, referring to any kind of marriage that involves more than two people. In the Bible, polygamy appears strictly as polygyny, the practice of one man having multiple wives at the same time. In the ancient cultures of the Bible, polygyny was usually the privilege of the rich. A wealthy man might be able to afford more than one wife, but it was never common practice.

The Bible never explicitly condemns polygamy except in the case of a man marrying two sisters (Lev 18:18 – something the FLDS practices anyway), but scripture nevertheless speaks negatively about polygamy, once literary form is accounted for. Here, in bullet points, are some handy responses for you the next time someone tells you that polygamy is “in the Bible”:

• Every time the Bible describes a family where the husband has more than one wife, the marriage is unhappy. The wives are rivals, not friends. The husbands are harangued, burdened or hated. In terms of the narrative, the misery of the marriage always seems to be the result of the polygamy. Examples: Abraham, Jacob, Elkanah, David, Solomon.
• The examplar marriages in the Bible are always portrayed as monogamous. Examples: Ruth and Boaz, Mary and Joseph.
• The creation of the first marriage in earth’s first paradise (Adam and Eve) suggests a one man-one woman paradigm for marriage.
• The extolling of romantic love in Song of Songs includes the expectation of exclusivity. The bride’s jealousy of the Beloved is not condemned as selfishness; it is instead a part of the celebration of love. She has a right to his exclusive affection. “Place me like a seal over your heart, like a seal on your arm; for love is as strong as death, its jealousy unyielding as the grave. It burns like blazing fire, like a mighty flame. (Song of Songs 8:6; consider also 6:3, 7:10) A seal, in ancient near eastern terms, is a mark of ownership, the unique mark of a single individual. When the bride demands that she be set as a seal on his heart, it means she alone owns his heart.
• In the New Testament, the standards for church leadership include the unavoidable prescription that men be “the husband of one wife.” (1 Timothy 3:2)

Works-for-Me Wednesday: Brushing the Kids’ Teeth

I haven’t done one of Shannon’s Works-for-me Wednesdays in a while, but the last few nights a new trick has been working for us, and I thought I would share it.

Our two older girls – four and almost three years old – hate getting their teeth brushed. It is a struggle every night. We won’t relent, but they howl about it every night. It takes dexterity to clean all those teeth, and our kids just can’t get the job done by themselves yet. Our general rule is that we will brush the kids’ teeth until they can write in cursive. That’s still a long way away, and I cannot bear the thought of hearing the howls of protest every night until then.

Two nights ago, in desperation, I tried something new. I handed them my toothbrush and I opened my mouth. While I brushed their teeth, they got to brush mine. The protests stopped, and they giggled. Currently, they think this is fun.

It’s not a perfect solution. My almost-three-year-old tends to just gag me with the toothbrush. But it is still much, much better than the screaming.

For more helpful ideas, visit Shannon’s Works-for-Me Wednesday.