If only it were this easy.

I expected him to be a little less formal though.  I was hoping for a “Hey, Dusty!  What’s up?  You okay?  Let’s just chat for a while.  How the kids?  You haven’t posted pics of them in a while.  I know you’re busy, but, man, I love seeing pictures of your kids.  I know they bring you so much joy and I love to see you like that.  My dad does the same thing.  Every chance he gets, he’s telling people about me.  It can be embarrassing sometimes, but I know he means well.”

And on and on.  You get the picture.

The other morning I was running with a friend of mine and the conversation went to what we thought it would be like when we got to heaven and were in the presence of God.  I said that I imagined I would crawl up in God’s lap and just sit there for a while like my girls do to me.  And now that I think about it, I would love to have conversations with Jesus like the one outlined above.  What I’m still learning is that I can have those conversations now.  I just have to clear away the clutter so that I can hear his side of the conversation.

That and shut up long enough so that He can get a word in every now and then.

(P.S.  Yes.  I know this is probably some Hispanic guy who’s name is pronounced “HAY-zeus.”  But when you click on a “Live Chat” button to talk to customer service, and you see that you are “chatting with Jesus,” it kinda makes you smile and write fun little blog posts.)

Sex

Source Sex Addiction

Money

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Food

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Substances

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Internet

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Check them out.

My Beautiful Family

Everyone is doing great at the Kennedy household.  I’m still working at Acxiom and am enjoying the teams that I’m working with.  The commute still sucks, but it beats having to drive to West Little Rock ever day.  (Although, I do miss my carpool partner.  Mark is a great guy.)

Amy is doing a great job at being a stay-at-home mom.  Simona tends to want to eat ALL…THE….TIME.  Amy has been a trooper at handling that.  Hopefully, Simona will start sleeping through the night longer (we found out today that she has started teething….yeah, just now…at 9 months).

Iliana (Sweet Pea)

Iliana just finished pre-school and is about to enter Kindergarten in the fall.  She also just finished up her 3rd year of dance (the pic above is from her dance recital) and her first semester of gymnastics.  She loves everything to do with being a girl (princesses, makeup, and dresses), but she also loves to run barefoot, play in the mud, and catch frogs, grasshoppers, and anything else that she is faster than.  She enjoys playing games on the computer (gee, I wonder where she got that), coloring, painting, scrapbooking, and watching movies.  She is also a great big sister.  She is always trying to help out with Simona and is very protective of little sister.  (Evidently, Iliana is the only one that can poke and prod Simona.)  It took a little getting used to, but Iliana is settling in just fine as big sister.

Simona (Squeaker [but her sister calls her 'Mo 'Mo])

Simona is a very happy baby.  She is happy to see everyone and loves to move around.  Not that she moves herself around, but she loves to be carried around.  So, she fits in nicely with the rest of the princesses at our house.  At 9 months old, she’s not crawling yet, but looks like she will skip that and start with walking.  Some days she’s perfectly content to sit and play by herself and some days she wants to be in the middle of everything and not miss anything that’s going on.  One of the things that encourages me is that Simona adores her big sister.  It doesn’t matter what’s going on, when she sees Iliana, her face lights up and she gets so excited.  She could’ve been woken up from a “all too short” nap…by Iliana…and still be super excited to see her.  I hope to encourage that love and relationship throughout their life.  I hope they will always be close and lift each other up when “mom and dad just don’t understand.”

The girls and Gramma

I cannot express how much happiness my family brings me.  I simply look at these pics and I am flooded with joy.  As I sit here writing this, I can’t wipe the giddy grin off of my face.  I am fortunate beyond anything I can imagine.  My wife and my children are as important to me as the air I breathe.  Anyone reading this that is either single or does not have children may not understand this feeling.  It’s not really something you can describe.  It’s something you have to experience.

My family got me this magnet for Father’s Day:

I look at it and smile because that is how it feels to be a dad.

Question:  Why have we as a society become so enamored with telling everyone what we are doing and where we are?

Think about that for a bit.

With applications like Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare and others, we can let people know what we are doing every second of the day.  I’m not knocking the technologies.  I’m a member of and take advantage of them all (except Foursquare…haven’t gotten into that one yet).  I just find it ironic that we enjoy all of these things in an age where we scream at the top of our lungs about privacy and how Big Brother is always watching us or tapping our phone lines or spying on us through our computers.  Don’t get me wrong.  I don’t support any of those activities.  Fact of the matter is, Big Brother can save a lot of that “stimulus” money by cutting their surveillance budget.  Dude, all you gotta do is monitor Twitter feeds and Foursquare locations to find out where and what people are up to.

So, I guess the better question is:  Why do we complain about invasions of privacy when we so freely publish the minutiae of our lives?

Big Sister

Little Sister

So there you go.

Even though both of those pictures are a great pick me up, I did have something else to say that caught me completely off guard today.  No…we’re not pregnant again.  That would be wild.  New job and new pregnancy in a month.

Oh, yeah.  I forgot to mention that I got a new job last month.  I’m now working at Acxiom in Conway.  Shorter commute and it seems to be more in line with what I want to do.  So far, so good.  I’m working with some really great people.

Man, I get distracted easy.  Anyway, for the pick me up.  Have you ever reached into your pocket and found 5 bucks that you forgot you had?  That’s awesome, isn’t it?  To know that you have money that you didn’t know you had.  Not much else is as satisfying as that.  I mean, you just made 5 bucks for reaching into your pocket.  I wish all jobs were that easy and rewarding.  That happened to me today.  Except it wasn’t my pocket and it wasn’t 5 bucks.  I reached into my email and found 240 bucks that I didn’t know I had.  Yeah, that’s right.  Two hundred and forty dollars.  WTF?!?!?!

Let me explain:  About 2 1/2 years ago, I ran the 2007 Chicago Marathon.  The exploits of that weekend can be found in great detail in this post.  You’ll notice in that post that Amy made up some shirts for the family.  Iliana’s said, “My Dad just ran 26.2 miles…What did your do?”  I thought they were really cute and fun. So, when I got back to AR, I made up a couple of designs for CafePress.com and SpreadShirt.com.  And promptly forgot about it.

Well, I was checking my email this morning, like usual, and came across another CafePress.com email and I automatically deleted it.  Well, as soon as I hit the delete button I noticed the subject line said something about a CafeCash balance.  So, I went to my trash folder and looked at the email again.  It said that I had a balance of $241.00 and that I need to log on and update my payee information so that they could send me payment.  My first thought was, “Phishing scam!”  Here’s a little web tip for you:  If you get an email requesting you to click a link to update financial or account information, hover over the link and look in the bottom left hand corner of your browser.  The actual address of the link will be shown.  If the link goes to an address that looks like a bunch of gibberish, then it’s a scam.  If it points to the actual website, you should be safe.  But you should actually just open another window and manually type the website address so that you know you are going straight there.

Okay, little bit of ADD going on there.  Anyway, so I go to my CafePress.com account and sure enough, I had a balance of $241.00.  There was also a message asking me to update my account information so that they could send me my commission check.  I thought, “No way!”  So, I started looking at all of the sales.  That was nuts.  The sales reports only go back 3 months.  But in the last 3 months, my stores have sold 28 items.  The commission averages about $1 to $1.50 per item or 10% of the cost of the item.  So, that means in the past 2 1/2 years, I’ve sold about 200 items and didn’t even know it.  How’s that for reaching into your pocket and pulling out some change?

So, what’s your best “I just found some money” story?

The Family on our traditional pumpkin patch trip.

My Little Girls

Simona and her Dolly

Sisters

Take care everyone and have a Merry Christmas!

Thanks Dustin!

Oh, and God forbid you actually ask him about his children.  If you do that, you just better get comfortable because he is going to ramble on about how great it is to be a dad.  He’ll tell you the most minute detail about what his kids are doing or saying.  I mean, just today, he was regaling us all with a story about how his oldest daughter really likes the song “Single Ladies” by Beyonce.  Evidently, she goes around singing, “If you liked it, you shoulda put a RAIN on it.”  What the heck does it mean to put a “RAIN” on it?  I swear.  This guy is driving me nuts.

If you’re reading this and you work in my office, then you probably know who I’m talking about.  You’re probably sitting there saying, “I can’t believe Dusty is going off on that guy.”  Well don’t worry.  You know why?  Because I’m about to tell the whole world (or at least the 3 people who read my blog) who this is.  This insanity has got to stop.  I’m on a mission to expose the “Proudest Papa” in the world.  You ready?  Here it is.

It’s me.

Two on the couch

Miss Priss

Simona up close and personal

Daddy’s Sweet Pea

Yep…she get’s it from my side of the family

I cannot put into words how much I love my girls.  Hopefully, one day, when they’re older, they can look back on this post and see that I was once awarded “Proudest Papa” in the whole world….even if I awarded it to myself.  These are MY girls.  Well, they’re my girls because God trusted me enough to take care of them.  So, with that in mind, I hereby declare that no man in this world, short of Jesus Christ himself, will ever be good enough for MY girls.

I love you Gooby and Squeakers!

Weight:  6 lbs. 13 oz.

Height:  20 3/4 inches

We are super excited to welcome her into our family.

We were finally able to talk Iliana into sitting still long enough to take a picture with “Little Sister.”

Can you tell that I’m a Proud Papa?

Please continue to pray for us.  Please pray that Amy’s recovery is relatively painless and quick and that Simona stays healthy.