10 Simple Things Every Child Needs
Interaction: Spend time watching me and responding to my cues. It tells me I'm important and special to you
Loving Touch: Cradle me, hold me, give me lots of hugs. It keeps me calm and comforts me and gives me courage to move on.
Stable Relationships: I need someone special to be there when I call. When I look around and see you I know I can go far.
Safe Healthy Environment: Plug the outlets, block the stairs. Use a carseat.
Self-Esteem: I can do it, yes I can, if you tell me so. Pay attention, give me praise and watch me go, go, go.
Quality Child Care: When you're gone I need to be with people you can trust to help me grow and teach me new exciting stuff.
Communication: Our little conversations mean a lot, even when I don't talk much.
Play: Play is fun, play is work. It is how I learn the ropes. When we play together you help me more than you know.
Music: 1, 2, 3 sing to me and make up silly tunes. Music is a special time that's fun to share.
Reading: Read to me, show me books, write my stories out in words.
Summarized from the Ounce of Prevention & McCormick Tribune Foundations video "10 Things Every Child Needs"
Ok, folks...I'm going somewhere I rarely go, ecspecially here in such a public format. I was in Germany in March 2003 when our base was nearly emptied as troops deployed to bring justice and freedom to Iraq. We were all impacted and though I'm stateside, my heart yet aches daily for those who are serving; for those who's loved ones are in harm's way in efforts to pave the way for freedom for an oppressed people.
Also, during international fellowship meetings in Germany, I sat with displaced & distraught Iraqi mothers, fathers, daughters...who fled their homes due to tyranny; who freshly wept over imprisioned, kidnapped, and/or killed family members. They rejoiced in our efforts to bring down Saddam for hopes of freedom and a better day without fear or oppression.
As you well know, we rarely see the whole picture on CNN or other mainstream news. I don't claim to know to all or even enough to intelligently articulate/engage in debate. But this one thing I do know: I am thankful and proud of our armed service men and women. I pray for their protection, their families and for Godly direction for our nation regarding this matter of war.
A weeks few ago, former Iraqi general George Sada spoke at CLC along with Terry Law. Riveting...to say the least. He spoke freely about his experiences as a General in the Iraqi Army and advisor to Saddam Hussein.
One of the most exciting "secrets" revealed during General Sada's visit was the reported growth of Christian churches since the dismantling of Saddam as well as the provision for religious freedom in the new Iraqi constitution.
Below is a lengthy, but well articulated summary and key points of Sada's book from Melanie Phillips, award winning British journalist and author:
In London yesterday, I met General Georges Sada. An Iraqi Christian, he was Air Vice Marshal in Saddam’s Iraq and, despite being an Assyrian and not a member of the Ba’ath party, was by his own account a close adviser to Saddam and was very much at the heart of the action during Saddam’s regime. Somehow he survived and became, among other things, the President of the National Presbyterian Church in Baghdad and head of the Iraqi branch of the Centre for Peace and Reconciliation, whose headquarters are based at Coventry Cathedral and whose bishop bestowed upon him the Prize for International Peace and Reconciliation.
Last year, an American Christian organisation that raises funds for needy Iraqi children invited Sada to a conference. At that conference, he raised eyebrows when he announced that he knew beyond any shadow of a doubt that Saddam had hidden his weapons of mass destruction in 2002-3 by transporting them to Syria. He was persuaded to set down his account in a book, Saddam’s Secrets, which was published in America earlier this year by a small Christian publisher, Integrity. This is what Sada says in his book about Saddam’s WMD.
The UN inspectors found and destroyed thousands of tons of weapons in Saddam’s Iraq.
But I can assure you, they didn’t find everything. Because of his rapid rebuilding capabilities, Saddam managed to hide many of these weapons, along with the raw materials for building weapons of mass destruction. During the times when these weapons were not actually in production – mainly because of the threat posed by the United Nations inspectors – Saddam gave orders that the scientists who had been working on these programmes were to keep their plans, diagrams, formulas, raw materials and everything else in highly secure underground vaults so that they could continue their work the minute they were no longer being observed...If Saddam ever suspected that there was any chance the inspectors would find something, he would have everything destroyed. But even then, nothing was really destroyed: the scientists had the knowledge and the budget, and when the time was right they would simply begin again. This was even true in the nuclear weapons programme. Even though we had not yet developed actual nuclear warheads, we were working on them. We had some components, and Saddam had developed sources in Europe, Asia and America who were willing to supply whatever we needed.
As Sada says, prior to the Iraq war no-one in Europe or America ever doubted that Saddam possessed WMD. So what happened to it?
...there is a tremendous volume of intelligence on these matters and mountains of anecdotal evidence. These are issues the Americans would likely have pursued diplomatically. But if they did, they have not wanted to make any of that information known to the media or the public. I am in quite a different situation, however, as a former general officer who not only saw these weapons but witnessed them being used on orders from the air force commanders and the president of the country.Furthermore, I know the names of some of those who were involved in smuggling WMDs out of Iraq in 2002 and 2003. I know the names of officers of the front company, SES, who received the weapons from Saddam. I know how and when they were transported and shipped out of Iraq. And I know how many aircraft were actually used and what types of planes they were, as well as a number of other facts of this nature...
Everyone in the international arms community knew that Saddam had them and that he was spending like a sailor to buy more…The point is that when Saddam finally grasped the fact that it was just a matter of time until Iraq would be invaded by American and coalition forces, he knew he would have to take special measures to destroy, hide or at least disguise his stashes of biological and chemical weapons, along with the laboratories, equipment and plans associated with nuclear weapons development...
Saddam had ordered our weapons teams to hide the WMDs in places no military commander or United Nations weapons inspector would expect to find them. So they hid them in schools, private homes, banks, business offices and even on trucks that were kept constantly moving back and forth from one end of the country to the other. And then fate stepped in...
On June 4 2002, a three-mile long dam collapsed in Syria, causing a disaster over 40 square miles. When Syria asked for help from Jordan and Iraq, Saddam seized his opportunity.
For him, the disaster in Syria was a gift, and there, posing as shipments of supplies and equipment sent from Iraq to aid the relief effort, were Iraq’s WMDs. Weapons and equipment were transferred both by land and by air. The only aircraft available at the time were one Boeing 747 jumbo jet and a group of Boeing 727s. But this turned out to be the perfect solution to Saddam’s problem. Who would suspect commercial airliners of carrying deadly toxins and contraband technology out of the country? So the planes were quickly reconfigured...Eventually there were fifty-six sorties. He [Saddam] arranged for most of these shipments to be taken to Syria and handed over to ordnance specialists there who promised to hold everything for as long as necessary. Subsequently I spoke at length to a former civilian airline captain who had detailed information about those flights. At the time he held an important position at Iraqi airways, which is the commercial airline in Baghdad...
In addition to the shipments that went by air, there were also truckloads of weapons, chemicals and other supplies that were taken into Syria at that time. These weren’t government vehicles or military equipment but large cargo trucks and eighteen-wheelers made to look like ordinary commercial operators...
To keep all these transfers under wraps, the operators worked through a false company called SES.
This company played a key role in transporting equipment back and forth between Syria and Iraq, as well as in smuggling many former government officials out of Iraq prior to and immediately after the US invasion in March 2003.
When I spoke to Sada yesterday, he told me the pilots involved were now terrified for their lives. As a result, he has undertaken not to name them. This obviously makes verifying his account very difficult.
He told me that the pilots told him that they saw yellow barrels with a skull and crossbones motif being loaded onto the planes. Comical as this sounds, he says the skull and crossbones is a recognised signal of dangerous contents, and yellow signals the presence of chemicals.
He also says that he lived and worked with the ever-present daily reality of Saddam’s tactics of hiding his WMD from the weapons inspectors. Whole environments were transformed and rebuilt – buildings, whole factories – in the largely successful strategy of hiding the stuff. The idea that Saddam suddenly stopped hiding it and secretly destroyed it instead, he says, is utterly ludicrous. Hiding WMD was the unchanging pattern of his regime.
He has listened to the tapes that recently surfaced of Saddam’s discussions with his top brass about the problems being caused by the UN weapons inspectors. He says the translations that have so far been made of these tapes are inadequate because the translators, who are of course Arabic speakers, do not however speak Tikriti Arabic, the dialect in which these discussions were conducted. Sada does speak Tikriti. He has translated a crucial three and a half minutes of these tapes, he says, in which Saddam and his generals are discussing how to outwit the UN inspectors; in which they say that the problem of the chemical weapons is solved but the biological are still causing a problem; that this problem will probably be solved with the help of the Russians and the French; and in which Saddam says: ‘In the future the terrorism will be with WMD’.
In April 2004, a group of al Qaeda terrorists was caught in Jordan with 20 tons of Sarin gas. When Sada heard of this, he says, his blood ran cold. There was only one place which was capable of producing 20 tons of Sarin: Saddam’s Iraq. To his horror, he says, he realised at that moment that Saddam’s WMD had got into the hands of al Qaeda.
Earlier this year, Sada was interrogated about his claims by the American House Intelligence committee, to whom he gave the names of the Iraqi pilots. Subsequently, he says, the Committee went to Iraq and spoke to the pilots. The result, he says, is that a major American investigative and diplomatic effort is now under way to finally locate the missing WMD.
But in Britain, I say, people now firmly believe that there were no WMD and that we were taken to war on a lie. Sada looks utterly flabbergasted. ‘How can they possibly think that?’ he asks in bewilderment and anger, and puts his head in his hands.
Posted by melanie at April 12, 2006
We played outside yesterday in the sun, breaking out the tricycle. Grace really has it mastered now...if only those pink cowboy boots wouldn't slip from the pedals. 
We rode around the neighborhood and then walked by the river, noticing the the deer prints in the dried mud. We visited the neighbor & all the kitties to learn one had babies just a couple of days ago. With the tulips coming up, Doris is preparing her soap posts to keep the deer from nibbling the tender leaves.
I knew warm weather was on the way when I saw the groundhog 
(AKA Chucky) hunched up on top of the tree stump just inches from my deck where he makes his home. Of course, we've seen deer for quite sometime. In fact, early Sunday morning, one was right by the deck craning his neck over the deck rail, perhaps in search of food. I hope they don't like geraniums because that's right where they'll grow in a few weeks. 
So thankful for sunshine and warmth to unthaw my frozen soul...feels like that. Winter's slumber, resembling death must give way to the new life burgeoning through the wet earth.
So it goes with the seasons in our lives; the ebb & flow of celebration; the surrender in autumn; death in winter- those difficult experience where we die to ourselves-our circumstances & wait for God to finish His work, trusting that what grows out of the dying will blossom far more beautiful than what we laid to rest. The promise of Spring~ new life- a fresh start.
Nicole Nordeman so captures this in her song Every Season~
Every Season
by Nicole Nordeman
Every evening sky, an invitation to trace the pattern stars.
And early in July, a celebration for freedom that is ours.
And I notice You in children's games, in those who watch them from the shade.
Every drop of sun is full for fun and wonder.
You are summer.
And even when the trees have just surrendered to the harvest time,
Forfeiting their leaves in last September and sending us inside
Still I notice You, when change begins and I am braced for colder winds.
I will offer thanks for what has been and what's to come.
You are autumn.
And everything in time and under heaven finally falls asleep
Wrapped in blankets white, all creation shivers underneath.
And still I notice You when branches crack and in my breath on frosted glass.
Even now in death, You open doors for life to enter.
You are winter.
And every thing that new has bravely surfaced, teaching us to breathe
And what was frozen through is newly purposed
Turning all things green.
So it is with You and how You make me new with every season's change.
And so it will be as You are recreating me,
Summer, autumn, winter, spring.
The past few days have brought not one but TWO visits to the zoo for little Miss Grace. She went with N&S to Lincoln Park Zoo on Saturday then Monday/today, she enjoyed Brookfield with the Kruder clan! She's had her hopes up for seeing a porcupine...not sure where she got that she would see one, but she's been disappointed both trips...just a bit though...she still can tell me plenty about other exciting things she saw. Whoo hoo for the zoo~ Thanks, folks, for loving on my Gracie baby~ What treasures you are! 
Plenty of park play today...she's quite the adventurous spirit. Hmmmm...wonder where she gets that from?? :o) hee, heee~ Here are a few pics of the Gracie girl in action. 
Sunny, sunny days to you & yours. I'll leave you with a cutie Gracie Quote from this weekend:
Have a good one~
Offer forgiveness to others - there will be times we are in the clear but still need to extend grace & mercy to another; forgiving one another as Christ has forgiven us. Colossians 3:13 NLT ...make allowances for each other's faults and forgive the person who offends you. Remember, the Lord forgave you, so you must forgive others.
Careless words disconnect relationships. Don't use foul or abusive language. Let everything you say be good and helpful, so that your words will be an encouragement to those who hear them. Ephesians 4:29 NLT
We need to learn verbal discipline in order to maintain healthy connections with others. And do not bring sorrow to God's Holy spirit by the way you live. Remember, he has identified you as His own, guaranteeing that you will be saved on the day of redemption. Get rid of all bitterness, rage, anger, harsh words, and slander, as well as all types of evil behavior. Instead, be kind to each other, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, just as God through Christ has forgive you. Ephesians 4:30-32
And there was more....connecting demands extreme commitment & produces extreme results. Good stuff~ As iron sharpens iron, so does a friend sharpen another. Proverbs 27:17 We need one another, folks. That's sums it up.
I have some friends I'd really like to reconnect with & asking God to help me take the right course of action...searching my heart & asking God for direction. I know relationships change; people change. I am the world's worst at hanging on far too long & I struggle with letting go; undiscerning of when it's over. I guess the social lover in me wants to love & be loved by- not by everyone, but wants to retain those relationship of sustenance; those I hold dear. Anybody else struggle with changes in relationships & how do you handle it? How do you know when it's over when it comes to treasured friendships? One of my Xanga friends sharedthe noteful line of a Dutch song: "when are we two friends that haven't seen each other in a while, and when are we friends no longer?" Precisely my question.
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