CHRISTEPHI

Shortly after moving to our new home this past winter, the kids and I noticed a squirrel that was different than the others because he had no tail! Or rather, just a stub of a tail left from some trauma he must have suffered. We have spent quite a lot of time speculating about what could have happened to him. Was he caught by a cat only to escape with his life? Did he get run over by a car? Perhaps he was caught in the crook of a tree? (This last theory proved more plausible after we found a different squirrel in January caught by its tail, dead, and frozen solid!) It wasn’t long before this unique squirrel was dubbed Dale No-Tail. During our bemused observations, we discovered which hole in which tree is Dale’s home and before long we noticed a female squirrel shares that habitation. When she came to the porch rail, we also observed that she is clearly pregnant (and has nursed kits before; nature reveals these things!). She, of course, has been named Mrs. Dale and we are eagerly...

Here on Sycamore Hill, we love audio dramas.  It probably stems from my own childhood memories of living without a TV.  There I’d be sprawled out on my back in the middle of the living room floor, listening to Children’s Bible Hour on the radio and watching the ceiling fan go ‘round.  I can still “see” many of the dramas that played out over the waves just as I “saw” them in my mind’s eye way back then. Nowadays we don’t listen to the radio much but we have plenty of options via CD, mp3, and internet streaming.  My kids especially love to listen to audio books and audio dramas as bedtime stories to help them wind down and prepare for sleep.  So when we received  Who Created Everything?  from Wizzy Gizmo  to review, we were ecstatic! Who Created Everything?  is a 36 minute audio drama about the events found in the first chapter of Genesis.  Professor Wizzy Gizmo puts the Bible on his Gizmovision machine and before you k...

Technology has been advancing at a fantastic rate. My dad likes to tell about how he and his brothers were convinced there'd by flying cars by the time they were adults. He jokes that he's been gypped and he wants his flying car! Those little stories our parents and grandparents tell say a lot about them and their lives.  They're familiar and fun to hear.  I can just picture my dad, a freckled red-headed boy with his nose deep in a Tom Swift novel dreaming of flying cars.  There are other stories told in our families too, important stories about how we became who we are.  And with the Saving Memories Forever app , these stories can be recorded in the storyteller's own voice. Saving Memories Forever is the brainchild of Jane and Harvey Baker who, after putting together a complete tree of their family, discovered there was a void that could not be filled by a mere knowledge of who married whom and who was the child of whom.  They had no sense of w...