Greetings from the Walker Family!

We’re delighted to share this Christmas New Year’s Valentine’s Day letter with you, just a little later than we originally intended.

On the final day of 2010, we found ourselves hurtling along the dark highways of Pennsylvania on our way to visit family, giving us some much-needed time to nap and to reflect on this past year. (Ken did the reflecting while everyone else napped.)

Joel

On March 29th, one day before his big sister’s birthday, we were introduced to the newest member of our family, Joel Tiernan Walker—our first boy, our first home birth. Mom and baby did great, and we loved the experience of being home together as a family, with a skilled and experienced midwife close at hand.

It seems strange to share with you news of his birth now almost a year later; it’s hard to remember a time before Joel was a part of our family. We’re grateful to report that Joel is a happy little guy, who is eager to eat and sleeps well. He’s always just a moment away from giving us his trademark goofy grin, especially for Mama.

The year with him has flown by: sleeping (almost) through the night, waving and cooing, eating solid food, even sprouting teeth! Joel isn’t crawling yet—he’s content to let his sister rush a toy to his side when he gets cranky—but we expect the new year will bring that development any day now.

Dahlia

In addition to becoming a big sister, Dahlia also had a number of milestones last year: kicking the pacifier habit, getting her first professional haircut, celebrating her third birthday, and embarking on her first year of preschool. Along the way, DJ transformed from a toddler into a little girl.

Her stuffed Elmo, whom Dahlia had loved since she was in diapers, was traded in for an entourage of three-inch-tall Disney princesses, who perpetually provoke, tease, ally, double-cross, and (inexplicably) marry each other in the wild narratives of Dahlia’s play—essentially playing out a daily episode of Jersey Shore right on our coffee table. Clearly, she’s already preparing for high school.

Our daughter has taken ownership of her role as a big sister and is eager to help out around the house. She’s vey patient, tenderhearted, and values order in her life. For her first parent-teacher conference at preschool, her teacher informed us that Dahlia used to cry when other children get in trouble because she doesn’t want them to “break my teacher’s heart.” On the frequent occasion Dahlia tells us that some children at school don’t listen, we remind her that there’s no need to worry: God is watching over her.

Sarah

Sarah continues to grow as an urban mom, filling her Facebook account with the joys of raising an infant and a preschooler. Her days start with walking the children several blocks to Dahlia’s preschool in Newark and are often full with helping manage an organic food cooperative, commuting to New York to attend a moms’ Bible study in Greenwich Village, or lining up dog training clients for the nights and weekends when Ken can be home with the kids.

Joel’s birth this year has given Sarah the opportunity to immerse herself in the world of cloth diapering, enjoying the satisfaction of environmental stewardship and diaper fashions. Sarah’s savvy with the growing cottage industry of cloth diapering has kept costs down as she scouts for deals and sells used diapers online, the demand for which never ceases to amaze Ken.

We celebrated Sarah’s thirtieth birthday this year with a surprise party at our beloved Chocolate Factory apartment building—which also marked our second year here. Seeing Sarah enter her thirties with her usual poise and grace was a reminder of how she is a woman of patience and wisdom beyond her years.

Ken

Ken reached his fifth anniversary at his workplace, a financial firm in Manhattan, getting a feel for what it takes to succeed in business in New York City. Work there hasn’t been as difficult as it was at the worst of the economic crisis (overheard from an analyst: “the end of the world is priced into these stocks”), and it offers the chance to build a career and keep us near family, friends, and a church community we love.

Earlier this year, Ken reached the halfway point of his three-year term on the session (kind of like a board of directors) at the Village Church in Greenwich Village. Church leadership has been stretching Ken, pushing him to take the burdens of others upon himself and grow in compassion, discipline, and faith. We believe deeply in the mission of our little church in Manhattan, and it is a joy for our family to give to this work. We hope for God’s increase in our midst 2011.

The triple challenge of family, career, and church has sidelined Ken’s entrepreneurial and journalistic plans for his local blog, the Daily Newarker. It was tough to set aside such a fun project; the blog had reached a level of respectability—having been featured in the Star Ledger and garnering Ken some radio interviews. Our optimism for our beloved city remains despite the silence, and Ken aspires to a more sustainable creative outlet in the new year.

Thanks for reading. We pray this letter finds you well in 2011, and hope you keep in touch.

With Love,
The Walkers
Joel, Dahlia, Sarah and Ken

Email

ken@kennsarah.net
sarah@kennarah.net
kennsarah@kennsarah.net

Tweets

@kenwalker
@flarmonster

Interwebs

http://kennsarah.net
http://sidebysidetraining.com
http://dailynewarker.com

Comments Are (Almost) Dead

Bold action from the thought-provoking Jeffrey Zeldman, Is This Thing On?

We’re not ready to say “comments are dead” (we’ll leave that for Wired Magazine’s next cover story) but we have noticed the smell, and we’re doing something about it.

Their new comments system, which lets you post replies on Twitter and have them appear inline in their blog post comments section is an elegant (and extremely Twitter-marketing-savvy) approach to solving this problem.

Hope for a Deeper Prayer Life in 2011

I had mentioned to a friend a few weeks ago that I was running dry on inspiration. She told me to run, not walk, to pick up N. T. Wright’s The Lord and His Prayer. When it was finally available in digital format on Google Books, I did.

It’s spectacular.  Wright is refreshingly pastoral, rather than airily instructive. Here’s a clip from the first chapter.

How do you set about praying? From our point of view, there is a fairly obvious order of priorities. We’re usually in some sort of mess, and we want God to get us out of it. Then we’ve usually got some fairly pressing needs, and we want God to supply them. It may strike us at that point that there’s a larger world out there. Again, we probably move from mess to wants: please sort out the Middle East, please feed the hungry, please house the homeless.

But then, once more, it may dawn on us that there’s not just a larger world out there; there’s a larger God out there. He’s not just a celestial cleanerup and sorter-out of our messes and wants. He is God. He is the living God. And he is our Father. If we linger here, we may find our priorities quietly turned inside out. The contents may remain; the order will change. With that change, we move at last from paranoia to prayer; from fuss to faith.

Photos: Morning Commute Through the Blizzard to NYC

Part of my job requires being available in case of an emergency at the office, so I was up early to prepare for my commute through the snow-covered planet Hoth to New York City.

Newark was covered in almost two feet of snow, with snow drifts as high as four feet.  The Path wasn’t running from Newark Penn Station to Grove Street Station (a first in our seven years in Newark), so I needed to take NJ Transit to New York Penn Station and ride the 2 train down to Franklin Street.

All in all, I only had to walk five blocks in the snow, but the streets offered such a striking visual, I thought it surely made for some good blog fodder. 😉

Alissa Wilkinson: Advent is Here

The inimitably eloquent Alissa Wilkinson:

That all said, Advent is here. The new church calendar started on Sunday…I still felt the newness of it, the anticipation. It’s no accident, I don’t think, that the darkness stretches wider and wider across the day until just about Christmas. So much to wait for. So much to yearn for, and anticipate. So much rejoicing to come.

A-Dubs was just featured in this month’s Christianity Today:

http://twitter.com/#!/jstephenlamb/status/11830094439911425

Coming Soon: Reeder for Mac

RSS Is Dead, But Reeder For Mac Makes It A Beautiful Corpse

Of course, users of Reeder on the other platforms will know that it is built on top of Google Reader. You log in with your Google credentials and all of your feeds (and starred items) are transfered over. But Reeder makes the experience look roughly a million times better.

Beautiful desktop app for the Mac that syncs with the (rather fugly-looking) Google Reader.  I found a “Draft 1” version here that downloaded and installed without issue. Highly recommended.