[the above photo was taken a couple days ago at her birthday party. yes, it was an alice in wonderland party and yes, olive was alice. ]

today, our little olive becomes a little bigger olive as she turns 3 years old. as much as one might tend to say, “i can’t believe she’s already 3″, i almost can’t believe she’s only 3. i really can’t remember a time when olive wasn’t here. avoiding all cliché, my life is deeply incomplete without hers.

for quite some time, i’ve been a relatively outspoken proponent of public education. quite frankly, i wish it was the only system of education we had (for many and varied reasons). my feelings have only grown stronger over the last month as lucy—our oldest child—has started pre-K.

one of the things i’m keenly aware of—relative to my advocacy of public schools—is that the public education system isn’t healthy. for various reasons, i certainly think it’s healthier than private or home school alternatives, but nevertheless, it’s a long way from where it should and could be.

i’ve never had an addiction. well, at least the kind that necessitates an ‘anonymous’ group. you know, the kind where you get up and say, ‘hi, my name is ryan and i bite the heads off of my little ponies or i’m an alcoholic or i like to lick concrete.’ never been to one of those.

but it might be good to reveal, publicly, to readers of this blog one of my lifelong dark not-so-secrets.

i’m a crier.

for the first time. in almost 8 years. christen and i are going on a proper(ish) vacation.

without children.

yes friends, we’re escaping. we’ve somehow brainwashed my parents into believing that they’d have a good time if our children stayed with them for 3 days (yeah, it’s a relatively brief vacation, but we take what we can get…). they bit and we’ll be dropping them off and heading to kansas city for a few days. (we’re very thankful for them and our kids are super excited…and i think my parents are also.)

just a couple weeks ago, i wrote a birthday note to lucy as she turned 4. no doubt, i laid on the sappy pretty thick. for max’s birthday, i wanted to take just a few minutes to tell him a couple things as he celebrates one year on planet earth. i can neither confirm nor deny the sappiness that may or may not flow forth in the remaining paragraphs.

it’s so hard to completely avoid cliché with these types of post. the reality is that many of the clichés are entirely accurate. yes, time has flown by. yes, it truly does feel like just yesterday you were born. and yes, it also feels like you’ve been with us forever. just a year later, it’s hard to imagine life without you, max.

i’m reminded regularly that blogging truly is a completely vulnerable, public diary. my thoughts—for better or for worse—flow forth in relatively unadulterated streams. sometimes it’s brilliant…and far more often, it’s pretty, well, not so brilliant.

recently i was thinking about the fact that whatever i write on the internet will be forever present. yes, forever. it will never. go. away.

my kids will read it.

and my grandkids will probably read it.

and, in the end, i’m ok with that. (i think?)

yesterday, i decided to try a little something different here on the blog and posed a scenario, asking for your response. here was the scenario:

A woman was near death from a special kind of cancer. There was one drug that the doctors thought might save her. It was a form of radium that a druggist in the same town had recently discovered. The drug was expensive to make, but the druggist was charging ten times what the drug cost him to produce. He paid $200 for the radium and charged $2,000 for a small dose of the drug. The sick woman’s husband, Bill, went to everyone he knew to borrow the money, but he could only get together about $1,000 which is half of what it cost. He told the druggist that his wife was dying and asked him to sell it cheaper or let him pay later. But the druggist said: “No, I discovered the drug and I’m going to make money from it.” So Bill got desperate and broke into the man’s store to steal the drug for his wife.

Should Bill have broken into the store to steal the drug for his wife? Why or why not?

i was pleased to get a handful of responses, both in the comments and a couple via email.