House Rebuilt!

Recently, because of malware, I had to wipe out everything on all three blogs, restore a backup database, and reinstall WordPress. So new logo, new theme, same Gjertsens.

Well, sort of the same.

With every new child our family has changed, but after Glory’s birth came the most substantial feeling of change for me. For seventeen years it felt like our main mission was to figure out how to get the first or the next child, whether by birth or embryo adoption or fostering. When we finally got to four healthy kids after a journey that made that outcome seem so unlikely, the sudden absence of the main mission was a pretty big adjustment. And that adjustment might have contributed to our neglect of this blog, as that main mission felt like an underlying theme of our writing.

What about these four who survived? An update is overdue:

It seems more and more likely that he’s destined to be a computer programmer. One of his favorite hobbies is designing games on Scratch, a coding community for kids. He got a huge boost in digital popularity when Scratch featured his track builder “Choo-Choo Chaos” on their homepage.

View it at scratch.mit.edu

When he was old enough for an account, he joined Itch.io, a platform for independent game creators. Until today I totally thought Itch and Scratch were somehow connected, but unbelievably they aren’t. In any case, he regularly scratches his itch competing in “game jams,” which give coders a week or two to come up with an original game designed around a specific theme. He’s recently done pretty well, with 1st place in a game jam themed around “time travel“, 3rd place with the theme of “genre swapping”, and 1st place with the theme of “opposites attract.”

Percy is now 10, almost the same height as Valor, and weighs more. With such physicality, we’re trying to encourage some athletic expression. Not being the sort who follows the herd (which plays baseball in Georgia), Percy has tried on a few different things. For the past year he’s been enjoying volleyball, which curiously is not a sport many boys in Georgia play. “Co-ed” YMCA leagues are invariably 100% female plus Percy, but we’ve also found a great boy’s coach in Garrett Bitter, an assistant coach at KSU, who encourages Percy to love the game.

Last July, Percy trusted Christ and was baptized, not in the same church we were going to when Valor was baptized, but at our new church home, The Grove Church. We’re happy to have a new church home so close to our house (1.2 miles away).

Percy, like the rest of us, loves board games. We play some games where there are multiple pathways to victory: some which require virtue/justice, and some which require evil/deception. Percy reliably chooses the pathway of virtue, even if this predictableness deprives him of the win. I hope this attribute never changes.

Percy has also just joined Boy Scouts. This weekend he and Valor volunteered to clean up a mile of a stretch of road that the troop adopted and did it with a mostly cheerful attitude.

At 3, Glory is advanced at art, very accurate with both markers and watercolor. She also plays with Lego unlike any of her siblings. When she and Mystery got a massive Disney princess castle set for Christmas, Glory built it all with little assistance. At this point, our expectation was that the 698 pieces would remain in the castle form for a few days before being assimilated into the giant collection of Lego in our playroom. Instead, she immediately wanted to unbuild the castle and build it all over again. The joy for her wasn’t in the finished work but the process of putting the parts together using instructions. She made and remade this castle about five times before she tired of it.

She’s presently wearing a cast on her arm because of a little fracture in her elbow, the cause of which… let’s just say remains a Mystery. Although the first thing she said coming home from the doctor was “Mom, I want to take it off,” she has been brave and persevering, enduring the ordeal almost without complaint. It is scheduled to come off soon.

Abby is mostly exhausted by the many challenges of parenting, but she is so good at it. She’s really found some great friends with the Rocket Moms, the moms of the “Rocket Boys” that Valor does a lot of his homeschooling with. The first year they did a sort of pod homeschooling together, the English curriculum was “Rockets, Radar and Robots” and the name just stuck. Abby is the English teacher, and this year the theme of “Monsters and Moral Dilemmas” had them digging into Beowulf, Dracula, Frankenstein, and some Poe. They’re wrapping up the year with Lord of the Flies. All of this keeps Abby up very very late, simultaneously depleted (physically) and recharged (mentally). The wee hours when all the kids are asleep is the only time she can be alone to think about the literature and class preparation.

As far as myself, the biggest news lately is that three of my colleagues and I were recently invited to purchase a minority ownership of BlueSky Wealth Advisors. It’s definitely an honor, and stands in such sharp contrast to a memorable season in my life (a mere 7 blog posts ago!) when I felt my whole career was jeopardized by a side quest I took in Houston. It feels so good to be in a professional environment where teamwork thrives the way it does at BlueSky. It’s an honor and validation to be a partner in this environment.

I’m reminded of the fact that I used to post links to new blog posts primarily on Facebook, but late last year I got off that platform permanently. In part because it was a time-waster, but mostly because I found through the COVID-19 pandemic and the 2020 Election that there was a chilling suppression of speech and a coordinated effort by big tech to label any deviation from their orthodoxy as misinformation. Though I do miss hearing news from real-life, but distant, friends, I no longer wish to enable what felt like another technological innovation that was creating a speech-controlling dystopia.

And now we’re current. My goal is to be a little more regular about blogging than we used to be, but admittedly it’s more of an intention than a promise. The main mission has shifted a bit, and it’s requiring a lot of us. It’s no longer about creating any more new people, but rather shaping and guiding and modeling a counter-cultural pathway for the people we have. Our main mission is now is to be faithful to train their hearts to shine out like stars in a crooked generation, in the hope that God will create mighty men and women whose lives are shaped by the Gospel.