How To Raise a Dew Baby

I had to hunt this down after one of the pictures was asked about on my Facebook page. I thought I’d go ahead and preserve it and share it for fun – though hesitantly, since I need you to know, it was in HUMOR, and I myself have been “cured” of my Mountain Dew addiction since 2009. (My name is Karl Bastian and I am a Dewoholic! But I’ve been sober for five years!) Also, please know, I never actually gave my sweet baby any Mountain Dew! But I did find it funny that a baby bottle nipple fit perfectly over the top of a soda can, and had fun freaking people out with that fact! HOW TO RAISE A DEW BABY: Here is one of my favorites. Luke sleeping with the Lion and the Lamb. (A gift from his Aunt Barbara.) This little baby started first grade today, hard to believe it: They sure to grow up fast!

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Build, Destroy, Build Again!

As mentioned on my podcast this week, my son and I spend a great deal of time each day playing Angry Birds… but not on an iPhone or iPad… but with real birds and pigs and blocks, and I might mention they are Star Wars themed too! We take turns building towers and placing our pigs, and then trying to knock them down with the birds via the little sling shots. There is a bit of strategy to how we build, but for the most part you are building something you know is going to be destroyed. So while we may spend a great deal of care and creativity building, we can’t get too attached to our masterpieces knowing the whole point of the building, was to knock them down! We have to remember the real joy isn’t in the building, it is in the playing together. In fact, the whole point of the game isn’t what we build or even the shooting of birds to knock it down – it is Daddy-Son time. At the end, when the floor is a mess, it is a sign that we had a great time. It’s kinda like kidmin. It reminds me…

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Teaching My Son Innovation at Burger King

So I was sitting at Burger King writing while my son was enjoying a kid’s meal and playing in the play area. He was delighted because his meal came with a cool Monster Truck! After a while, he noticed that there were two more Monster Trucks under the play area that had apparently rolled there. We discussed how some poor kids apparently lost their toys and probably left in tears. Luke said he wished we could retrieve them, but they were impossible to reach. One of them was extremely far away, and the other had broken into the two pieces it originally came in, wheel base and top shell. The space under the play area was locked and only accessible by an employee. I said to him,“They are only impossible to get if you lack the will to accept the challenge and the ability to use the resources at your disposal.” Luke said,“Huh?” I replied,“Do you know what a challenge is? It’s when you decide to attempt something that appears impossible, using what you already have. Let see what we have available to us and try to get those Monster Trucks! The worst that can happen is that we’ll fail.”…

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The Gospel According to Darth Vader

Followers of my blog know I’m a Star Wars fan. People often laugh when they hear me say to my son in a deep voice, “Luke, I am your father.” He laughs, even though he doesn’t get the significance of the quote. Since he is only six, he hasn’t even sat through all the movies, though we have watched segments and he loves the original Clone Wars cartoons I have on my iPad before the freaky looking version came out that looks like a video game gone bad. (I’m not a fan of the current Clone Wars show – yuck!) Tonight, Luke had trouble sleeping so he was lying on the couch down in my office while I worked and looking at all the items in my Star Wars ‘museum’ – and noticed I have a lot of Darth Vader figures and collectibles and asked, “Why do you like Darth Vader so much, when he is a bad guy?” Good question. I answered, “Luke, Darth Vader is the reason I love Star Wars so much – because Star Wars is a story of a bad guy who was saved because of the love of a son, a son named Luke.”…

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What Matters in the New Year

This is a video I shot as the year changed from 2010 to 2011… in answer to the question, “What Matters Most?” for an online video conference I was participating in that year. I thought I’d post it again this year, since the answer hasn’t changed… Make sure you prioritize the relationships in your life in 2013.

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