Where I go from sharing the baby's name, to a book on demon possession. Yeah, I don't know either.

I'm tired of waiting for us to agree on a middle name.  If Garrett is any indication, then we may not have a name firmly chosen until May.  So, drumroll please, baby boy #2 will be Cooper.  Keith's only hesitation with that name was when we first asked Garrett to say it he said "Pooper".  I think I sense a future nickname.  But hey, there could be a lot worse nicknames than that one, though I won't be encouraging its use.  I would prefer Coop for a nickname, if you're looking for a way to shorten it.  Garrett doesn't have a nickname, except for the occasional instance when I call him Gare or Garrita.  But neither is used enough for him to assume they are his name or even an alternate name.  

This weekend we bought the rest of our painting supplies and completely cleaned out Garrett's new room, except for a train table sitting in the middle.  Keith vacuumed the floors and the walls and filled in the nail holes, so now all that's left to do is paint.  I've taken a before picture, but I'm currently on the Mac and I have no clue how to upload pictures on this computer.  So I'll share that picture later.  Just picture an empty bedroom with tan walls, a ladder, and a train table sitting in the middle.  I think Garrett already loves his new room.  Keith spent an hour or two scraping paint off of the bedroom door and Garrett was in there with him the entire time.  Picking up paint chips and having a lot of fun.  

On a side note, the bedroom doors in our house weren't painted worth a crap.  Does that sentence even make sense?  We've lived here for 6 years and the interior doors look like we've lived here more like 60 years.  The paint is flaking terribly on them.  Keith asked the Sherwin Williams guy about it and he said that they weren't primed before they were painted.  So now we (Keith) begin the fun task of scraping the old paint off, priming them, and then painting them.  But I think in the scraping process he'll also have to put some sort of paint stripper on them because our doors have a lot of little grooves in them and it's impossible to get the paint out of them with a scraper.  That probably won't be finished until the bedrooms are in some sort of order and have been painted.  But this time of year is definitely the time to do it.  So we hope to have it all finished by June, both because the weather will definitely start getting too hot for this type of work, and because Cooper will be joining the family.

Somewhere in the middle of house cleaning, a stomach virus, and grocery shopping this weekend, I was also able to read a new book.  I've had it for a couple of months but hadn't been in the mood to read it.  The book is called "Adam" by Ted Dekker.  If you've never read Ted Dekker's books before, you really need to read one.  I don't think there's a specific one I would recommend first, just be sure that the one you choose isn't a sequel to another book.  He has a few like that and I'm not sure if they're clearly labeled as being a sequel.  

Back to "Adam".  I won't say too much about it because most of my family are Dekker fans and I don't think any of them have read this book yet, so I don't want to be accused of ruining it for them.  But it was a really good book and I'll just say that it's about demon possession.  I would place it right along the same lines as Frank Peretti's books "Piercing the Darkness" and "This Present Darkness" but even better, in my opinion.  At the end of "Adam" is a transcript of a conversation between Dekker and John Eldridge, you do not want to miss reading that either.  Dekker explains his reasoning for writing a book about demon possession which basically says that today's churches don't talk about the very real danger that the devil presents to us on a daily basis.  As a Christian, you cannot be possessed, but that doesn't mean that you can't feel their presence or their influence.  He feels that most Christians just chalk Satan up to temptation and leave it right there, when he can and does do much more than just tempt people.  He also said that this was the hardest book for him to write out of all the books he's written.  His research on demon possession kept him up at night.  I don't even want to know what all he found when researching that, I'm sure it would keep me up for a year.  

So if you're looking for a good book to read, then I would highly recommend this one.  I read it in a day and a half around the other things I was doing.  And the book itself did not keep me up at night nor did it haunt me, in case you're worried about that.  

I'm not entirely sure how I went from sharing my baby's name to a book about demon possession.  I assure you that it's just my crazy brain jumping around from one topic to another on little sleep.  Last night, Garrett woke me up at 3:30 saying there was a monster in his room.  I assured him there wasn't, but then I couldn't go back to sleep because Cooper woke up and was being pretty active for the middle of the night.  He'd better stop that right now because there will be no 3:30 am parties at our house.  Atleast none that I will approve of.  I'm sure he'll have different ideas though.