A Dad First

Roqos Review: Protecting Your Home Network…

For many years, I’ve had other families ask about how they could protect their home networks and filter their internet traffic like we’ve done. The problem is the method we’d used wasn’t simple, wasn’t easy to set up, configure, or even use for the average home user. Oh, and it required a separate, dedicated computer […]

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Joy and Pain…

For the past couple of weeks since Evanna’s gotten home from Seattle Children’s I’ve been thinking of this topic (Pain vs Hope) and how to express it. Today this picture popped up on Instagram as I was scrolling through…and there it was. So often it seems that we think that if there’s pain, there’s not […]

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Quality of Life: A Little Rant

This video is of our baby girl Evanna. For those who aren’t yet following her story (her Facebook Community Page is here and her website will be up soon and linked here once published), she was born with spina bifida, hydrocephalus, chiari II malformation, and clubbed feet. Here in the United States, only 36% of […]

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Has the Culture Shifted That Much?

I was recently paid a compliment on social media about how we’re handling our little girl’s issues and how we parent. (For those that don’t know, you can follow her journey on Evanna’s Facebook Community Page). I understood the intent–it was a very nice and sincere compliment, but I kind of brushed it aside. To us, […]

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It’s Not About Us…

For months I’ve been somewhat unsettled with the praise we’ve received with Evanna and her care, and haven’t been at ease in accepting (or heck, sometimes even believing) the compliments we’re received. Because here are my more internal thoughts: It’s not, and hasn’t been, easy. We’ve shed our share of tears in fear, worry, frustration, […]

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Not Enough Thanks to Give…

  (The first pic is Evanna on September 30th, the day after she was born. At that point, two surgeries down already. The second pic is her on November 8th, after having been home two days.) We’ve been home now for just shy of two weeks. And not a day goes by that I am […]

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Relevance and the Church…

Relevance. Churches (and people within) chase it, always looking for how Scripture fits into the culture, or how it speaks to this topic or that topic, or in what seems like increasing measure, how Scripture can be modified to make it relevant. All missing the mark. Scripture is always relevant, even if it doesn’t specifically […]

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Four Weeks Down…

The difference four weeks can make. After three surgeries, numerous IVs, a PICC line, two intubations, two hospitals, and a whole lot of care, Evanna is (realistically and medically) moving toward getting home. As of this morning, the remaining issue is which route to take for her feeding: ng tube, like shown in the bottom […]

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Following the Ark…

This is the first post I’ve written since Evanna arrived, and it’s not for lack of things to write, but because we’ve just been posting directly to the Facebook Community page. (So check there for all the things that have happened and all the pics posted…) For this post, I’ll summarize it in this: it […]

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Clock is Running Down…

Today was our final pre-Evanna hospital day of appointments. And while they’ve been pleasant visits, I can’t say that I’ll miss them. But it was one step closer to having her with us, so in that way, they’ve been worth it. She passed the non-stress test and the biophysical profile without issue, so there are […]

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