Day 161 | Bundled up for the Quebec Grand Opening, originally uploaded by tadnkat.
Although it was about 1°F in Quebec for the opening of the new Church of Scientology of Quebec, we had no problem bundling up Mackenzie sufficiently so that she could enjoy the festivities. About 1,500 other Scientologists were there (according to ScientologyToday) and it was great to see how excited the French-speaking Scientology community was at what this new organization means to the community.
Boy how time files! She’s 5 months old now as of this past Saturday.
State of the Baby address:
Vocalization Status: Favourite terms are “dag dag dag dag dag”, “glaaaaa”, “jai jai jai” and “aaaaahhhaaaaaah!!”. Very verbal, very cute.
Mobility Status: She still isn’t sitting up by herself, devotes most of her time trying to stand up if you’re holding her. Will stand up while you hold her hands, sometimes holding only one hand. Loves to jump in her jumper, or in your lap.
Rotation Status:Will turn over from front to back about 3 seconds after you put her on her stomach. Can turn over back to front as well, but not as fast.
Food Intake Status: Vaporizes approximately 10-15oz of breastmilk and 10-15oz of formula per day, and has started really taking to french fries, potato wedges, LOVES apple butter and grapes, and will obliterate a buttered english muffin.
Specific Gravity / Height: We don’t know, haven’t bothered to measure her in close to 2 months. At 3 months old she was in the 90th percentile on weight, 95th percentile on height, and she’s definitely outgrown a TON of clothes since then. 3 month clothes definitely don’t fit, 6 month clothes don’t fit 50% of the time, usually a good fit is 9-12 month clothes.
Health Status: Still hasn’t even come CLOSE to getting sick.
Laughing Locational, originally uploaded by tadnkat.
Any Scientology parent will tell you that one of most useful pieces of Scientology technology to have around a baby is the locational assist. This is an incredibly simple procedure in which one can take a person (or little person) who has their attention too fixated on something and make them able to unfix their attention and proceed on with life.
It works great on babies – we do it with ours any time she even gets a little fussy, with the result that our baby basically never gets to a state where she’s crying. She always has her mental facilities about her.
But this is just as important for the relief workers who are in Haiti, as when you have life problems cranked up to a massive order of magnitude (lost loved ones, collapsed houses, etc) it becomes of primary importance (after first aid of course) to get people back to square zero with all of their mental faculties about them and ready to move on.
Listening to the Dianetics Audiobook with the little one, originally uploaded by tadnkat.
I’ve got the baby for the night tonight, as Kat is in DC on study at the Church of Scientology in DC. So, I decided to do some study tonight as well, on the Dianetics Audiobook. She’s just been sitting there, interestedly listening ever since I fired it up. Great! She’s going to be more conversant with Dianetics than any other 4 month old!
Day 141 | She’s Become Part of Me, originally uploaded by tadnkat.
Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard once wrote,
“Affection could no more spoil a child than the sun could be put out by a bucket of gasoline.”
— Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health
I’m only seeing that be more and more true, the more affectionate this girl gets. She is just fantastic.
And the photo credit here goes to my wife, who’s just getting better & better at capturing the moment. Both of us are taking up a study of photography now. L. Ron Hubbard was a consummate photographer, who loved the subject, and wrote quite a bit on not only how to succeed at photography or cinematography, but why you go about doing it in the first place. He wrote once,
“This is the attitude you must have…’I'm the person who’s going to shoot this picture. This picture’s going to do you a lot of good. When I shoot them, they’re good.’” – LRH
Well, the photo above will definitely be doing Mackenzie some good – I already have people telling me to save it to give back to her on her wedding day!
Day 131 | Last Morning of the Decade, originally uploaded by tadnkat.
On the day of this photo, Mackenzie celebrated the turn of the decade, and her very first 1 January. Many more to come, I’m sure.
But one thing I wanted to bring to light with this post is that, at over 4 months old, Mackenzie has yet to be sick at all. We’ve been told over and over by various jealous parents that our first doozie was going to be “right around the corner”, but she remains totally healthy, with her absolute worst spat being a little runny nose about a month ago.
Now, you could say, “we’ve been blessed”, or perhaps, “we’ve just been lucky” or any number of things which would put us as the silly, unwitting recipients of a wunderbaby. Well. we do indeed have a wunderbaby. However, being an effect and not cause is not the position anyone (much less a Scientologist) wants to be in, so my wife & I looked for what we were causatively doing as parents which precipitated this excellent state of affairs.
One of the most major causes of this which we’ve been able to isolate is a sane, calm and helpful environment for the baby to grow up in.
Many parents worry themselves sick about contagion with respect to their babies, but we’ve been ultra-sensitive to contagion not of the bacterial sort, but of another kind entirely. Here, I quote from L. Ron Hubbard’s masterpiece, Science of Survival:
“Insanity apparently comes about wholly by contagion. An enturbulated culture or environment can keep an individual in a continuous state of turbulence.” — LRH
In other words, if you know anything of Dianetics, and what insanity due to engrams can do to an individual, simply having an enturbulated space around the baby could massively increase chances of the baby becoming enturbulated, and then getting sick.
L. Ron Hubbard goes on to say:
“There is an apparent family line of aberration. It was previously thought to be carried genetically, but this is evidently not the case. It is carried on the thought channel of the family. The confusions of domestic life get into the moments of physical injury of the child. And the child, as a consequence, becomes liable for the family aberrations and will manifest them.” – LRH
So, plain and clear, if you keep the domestic situation calm, in control, and with everyone using crisp, sane communication with a lot of love, you’ll sidestep the pitfall outlined above.
There are a lot of other Scientology principles that we’ve used successfully to help achieve that calm household detailed above – it’s not just thinking happy thoughts and glossing over problems in life. But much of it boils down to two main simplicities, covered in the Scientology handbook:
Scientology: Assists for Illnesses & Injuries
Sorry that I’ve been remiss in keeping this blog up – I’ve been so busy keeping up with work, with my studies at the Scientology Church in DC, and with my amazing four-month-old, that I’ve had little chance to write!
Mackenzie has been getting more and more communicative, but has stayed serene, healthy and alert – much to the astonishment of other parents I’ve run across.
Wow – now after only 24 hours since she first asked to stand up, she now demands to stand up at every available juncture, and loves it! Prediction: I’ll bet she’s walking before she learns there’s even such a thing as crawling.
I can’t wait to show her Aunt Morgan and Grandma her new bag of tricks when we go down to Clearwater to see them for Christmas!
Today we had a wild surprise: an intense will to stand up!!
After she slept most of the day today, we took Mackenzie in to the Scientology Church in DC for our Monday meeting. She’s usually been fine with us carrying her around facing out, but today she all of the sudden started arching her back and complaining up a storm until I finally decided to just put her down on her feet and let her stand up — which was the exact item! And whilst we’ve never previously gotten her to put weight on her feet for more than 3 seconds at a time, she decided to just put her foot down tonight and stood up for several minutes straight on about 3 different occasions while we were there!
Awesome! Ability regained!
Now, she hasn’t yet even managed to be able to stay seated by her self, and needs major support to stay on her feet, but she definitely communicated today that sitting is over-rated and she’d prefer to just start walking around like the rest of us. 
Mackenzie the Landmark Lifetime Member, originally uploaded by tadnkat.
Mackenzie got her first commendation from the IAS, for becoming a Lifetime Member of the International Association of Scientologists at the 25th Anniversary of the IAS. She was a bit overwhelmed at all of the people clapping for her so wasn’t at her tippety top bubbliest, but certainly liked the idea of playing with & drooling on the fancy pin she got!
Thanks to @eringravitt for taking the photo. I unkindly just flung my camera into her hands as we went up to get the award, and unfortunately the settings were all messed up so the photo was taken with bizzarre flash & exposure settings making it look like we were getting an award in the Bat Cave. However, Adobe Camera Raw came to the rescue and luckily it came out looking just dandy.
Mackenzie flaunting her new IAS Pin
However, what I failed to get a picture of was the lovely way that the banquet hall was set up at the Founding Church. The new building of the DC Church of Scientology has a great chapel which was designed as a multifunction room, so that it could be set up for church services, and then reconfigured to host a swanky banquet like was held at this occasion. It was really quite nice, and just highlighted for me the outstanding attention to detail of this building.
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