Lego and Sawdust

I’m getting a lot of hits for this article from google searches. If you came to this page via google and it was useful, leave me a comment! If it wasn’t useful, please let me know what you were looking for but didn’t find!

We are members of the Manitoba Living History Society, so we spend a lot of weekends during the summer out re-enacting the Selkirk Settlers of the 1812 time period. My kids see the guys who do military re-enacting and love running around pretending to attack our campsite and storm the gates of whatever pretend fort they can find. We have a set of play muskets that are cut out of 1×3 material, but they are just plain flat wood cut in the proper shape.

For Christmas 2009, we decided to have everyone in our family make a gift for one other member. I drew my eldest son’s name and decided to make him a more realistic musket. Here it is with a 1 foot ruler for scale:

(click any picture to see it larger)

I looked for a musket that I liked in Google Image Search, and printed it out in large scale. I traced it onto a piece of 1×6 pine, cut it out and the rounded the edges and shaped it with a rasp and sandpaper.

I mounted a 3/4 inch dowel onto the body using normal joint dowels. As an experiment, I used three dowels into the bottom of the barrel through the stock, because I couldn’t think of another way to make it strong enough to handle being tossed around by my kids. It seems to be rock solid, I’m definitely going to do this again when I make more. In this picture you can see the three holes that I used.

The trigger guard is a scrap of brass stock I recycled from another project, bent into shape and ground smooth. The lock/firing mechanism is actually a window sash lock that I found while wandering Canadian Tire one day. It cost a couple of dollars and I think it gives a really nice looking mechanism that actually works. It lets the user flip the lock up to “load” and the snap it closed before firing. It’s a solid strong piece that should last longer than the rest of the gun. The small brass plate in front of the lock is probably going to have his name engraved on it eventually, and is mostly just there because I had more scrap brass and I wanted more googaws on the musket.

The other half of the lock looked interesting too, so I mounted it on the other side of the musket. Again, I’m not sure what it’s supposed to actually represent, but it looks cool.

The stock is painted with super gloss brown polyurethane, and the barrel is painted with flat black rust paint, both of which I had in the shop. I bent the u shaped strapping around a leftover piece of barrel dowel and ground it to shape and smoothed the corners. The trigger guard is mounted with small brass screws. I mounted the strapping for the barrel with small box nails, but they are already loose. I will be replacing them with matching brass screws. The nails were far easier, but they haven’t even withstood indoor play.

Left to do are strap mounting swivels and replacing the nails with screws. But I have to pry it out of his hands to do that. It might be a while…

One of the biggest reasons that it took so long to move away from our faith was the loss of community.

If you belong to a church, it’s instant community. Just by entering the building you gain a group of kids for yours to play with, and (likely) a group of peers to associate with at events that someone else plans. Boom, instant social life. Chances are you find another couple or two that you click with and boom, instant friends. You already automatically have the shared experience of a few hours on Sunday mornings to fall back on for conversation if needed.

When we left the church though, we discovered an uncomfortable fact: we’ve never had to make new friends on our own. From the time we were married we’ve belonged to various churches wherever we’ve lived. There’s a base of support, of familiarity, and of help if needed. Suddenly we were without that, and it’s scary.

Our existing social group, including a sports night at a local gym, is mostly with a circle of Christian families, and it has been made reasonably clear that the group no longer wishes to have us as members. It’s been polite, but meetings (we’re staying until the end of the school year) are rather tense.

We aren’t fans of sports, so community clubs are out. We have 5 kids from 14 down to 4, so many of the usual events like Scouts are difficult to manage. Each child would be in a different group on a different night, which defeats our family-centered philosophy to life.

Our city isn’t that large, so the secular homeschooling community is rather small. There is a “secular” homeschooling organization to match the Christian association, but (oddly enough) the members are almost all Christian. It’s still uncomfortable to come out and say that we’re not believers.

We recently, on the advice of Dale McGowan from Parenting Beyond Belief, started attending a Unitarian Universalist church in town. The UU is creedless, and there are atheists, Muslims, Hindus, humanists, Buddhists and all sorts of other -ists that attend. It’s a church, but without any dogma. They do have the potlucks and events that we love, though. There are issues with the place, but there are issues with any place real people meet together, so we’re staying there for a while. I’ll post more about our experience with the UU later.

I’m not really asking for advice, and I’m not really whining. I feel like there are some things that we’ve been going through that I haven’t read about anywhere else and I want to share them. Has anyone else felt this type of loss?

*As a side note: if you want to comment, please don’t trash our old group or Christians in general for their response to our choice. We’re not here to bash where we’ve come from, we’re here to move forward into a new life.

Our post about leaving the church was recently discovered by a number of websites, and we’ve gone from 50 hits a day to 6000 hits over the last two days. My site stats are now useless because the scale is shot:

We got shoutouts from the following sites, plus a bunch of links from people’s facebook pages. (People we don’t know who shared our letter).

The Meming of Life – Dale McGowan is the author of Parenting Beyond Belief, which was a fantastic help after we made the decision. It’s a must-read for anyone who is trying to raise kids outside of religion. He’s a nice guy, too.

Reddit’s Atheism category – where there was a lengthy discussion on the matter.

Why Won’t God Heal Amputees? – Which is a rather fervent atheist site.

And my favorite headline, from Reason Weekly: Ex-Christian family announces leaving church and faith; disgustingly touching show of solidarity from atheists ensues

Thank you to everyone for your kind words and support.

Edit to add Ex-Christian.net.

As I’ve posted before, we’ve been looking into getting a dog for quite a while now. We finally picked her up on Wednesday.

Her name is Diva. She’s a labradoodle that was just retired from breeding. She’s going to be 5 in June.

Her mother is a medium standard poodle, and her father is an F1 labradoodle, so she’s 3/4 poodle, 1/4 lab.

She got a bath to get her smelling like a dog instead of like a kennel full of dogs. Wow, does her hair hold water…

Then she spent some time soaking her feet, which are a little raw (we’re guessing from the concrete floors at the breeder).

Here she is!

She’s always that mellow. We’ve never heard her bark. She will let us examine her paws, play with her food while she’s eating, examine inside her ears, just about anything without a fuss at all. She already walks on a slack leash (no dragging us around!). She sleeps through the night in her crate at the foot of our bed. She never jumps up on anyone or anything. We can’t believe how great she is.

Now if we can just get her to “do her business” in the right place in the backyard…

Kids: 5
Wives: 1
Great Tuesday Date Nights Spent With Wife Eating Indian Food: 1
Length Of Typical Vomit-A-Minute Stomach Flu Case: 2 Days
Wives With Vomit-A-Minute Stomach Flu on Wednesday: 1
Kids With Vomit-A-Minute Stomach Flu on Wednesday: 2
New Dogs Picked Up From Breeder On Wednesday Morning: 1
Kids With Vomit-A-Minute Stomach Flu on Thursday: 2
Visits To Vet For Checkup: 1
Kids With Vomit-A-Minute Stomach Flu This Morning: 2
Nights Spent Nursing Vomity Kids In Bathroom: 2
Hours Of Sleep In Last 2 Nights: Maybe 5.
Times New Dog Walked: 15
Attempts To Get New Dog To Poop In One Place In The Yard: 7,834
Times New Dog Has Pooped: 3
Times New Dog Has Pooped In The Right Place In The Yard: 0
Times New Dog Has Pooped Outside The House: 2
Kids Who Are Feeling Mostly Better: 2
Kids Who are Feeling Sorta Better: 1
Kids Still Not Eating For Fear Of Instant Alimentary Rejection: 2
Wives Who Are Feeling Mostly Better: 1
Dogs We’ve Fallen In Love With: 1