DeerAngel: What is a Nanny State?

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Recovering from Our Miscarriage

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Last month, Christine surprised me with the best news I had heard all year: we're going to have another baby!  I was overjoyed as were all of the kids.  I knew I wanted another baby, but I didn't talk about it much because it wasn't something Christine and I had agreed on together.  I was perfectly happy having 5 terrific children anyway. But hearing that we were having another one got everyone in our family so very excited.  The kids were all cheering about it, and we made this cute announcement for Facebook: Several weeks later, we were hit with the horrible news that our baby didn't survive past 6 weeks in utero. We had never experienced a miscarriage before. In our minds, that was hardly even a possibility. And now it was a reality.  The hardest part for me was telling the kids. We told them each individually. Angel rushed into our arms and cried with us. Harmony sobbed and said through her tears "We were so excited." Chase handled it like a c...
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One Mention of a Church = Too Religious?

When I wrote Code for Teens , I set out to teach programming concepts in a way that was accessible to anyone, regardless of religion. Those of you who have read it know there aren't any religious messages in the book.  Still, I was recently turned down by a group of educators known as Secular, Eclectic, Academic Homeschoolers (SEAH) solely for having two paragraphs that reference a church. SEAH was excited to promote my book on their website until they found two short paragraphs that mention a church (no reference to the faith of this church in the book at all--just a mention of it).  SEAH asked me to rewrite this portion. I told them that I did not control the published book anymore (the publishers do), but I could make an insert that replaces the "church" with "summer camp".  So I rewrote those two paragraphs and submitted them as an addendum that they could distribute with the book or use any other way they wanted. Apparently, this wasn't enough. ...
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Coached My Friend Into a New Software Development Career

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