Here’s a great opportunity to say “Thanks” to the men and women fighting for our country. The Glenn Beck radio program is selling AT&T calling cards at a reduced rate to help the servicemen & women stationed in Iraq and Afghanistan call home. The cards cost $15 each, provide 33 minutes of talk time, and half of the money will go to the USO. Call 877-522-7000 to order a card and it will be shipped directly to a soldier in the Middle East.

He said something on the show this morning that was directly to the point. “Can you imagine,” he asked, “if you were stationed in Iraq or Afghanistan for a year… can you imagine how fast 33 minutes on the phone with your wife and kids would go?”

It normally costs the troops almost two dollars a minute to call home. With this special reduced rate, they get 33 minutes, AT&T gets about seven bucks, and the rest goes to the USO.

[Ed. note: The phone system is a little odd and you might experience long delays between your entries. Just wait it out, it’ll work. ]

A US Marine fighting in Fallujah has killed another insurgent who was pretending to be dead. You probably haven’t heard about this episode, however, because this insurgent turned out to be armed and opened fire on the Marines. You can read a brief snippet about the incident on this Australian ABC News Online site. Does it seem odd to anyone else that you can’t seem to find this story anywhere else? Oh, for instance, like CBS, NBC, ABC… The first was a major story, yet this gets no attention at all. Seems odd to me.

Now, about the incident in the mosque a week ago… In case you haven’t seen it, the journalist who shot the video has posted a detailed accounting of the event on his blog. He’s careful not to pass judgment on the Marine, but he does paint a decidedly odd scene. Be sure to read it. By the way, did you know that this Marine had been injured earlier in the day by shrapnel from a grenade? Or had you heard that another Marine had been killed a few days earlier by a booby-trapped body of another insurgent playing dead? This incident, as described by the man filming it, certainly leads you to question either the motives or the thought processes of the Marine, but I think we must take into account his perspective. And his perspective, I shouldn’t need to remind you, is vastly different than yours or mine.

But that’s just my perspective.

I thought this was self-evident, but apparently it’s not. The fact that someone doesn’t agree with you doesn’t make them stupid. This can be illustrated with two brief examples:

1. Someone voted for the other candidate. Contrary to what many people on both sides of this issue would like you to believe, this doesn’t mean they’re less intelligent than you, it just means they have a different point of view.

   In this example, the person is not (necessarily*) stupid.

2. Overheard in a bakery, two high school upperclassmen have a conversation:

   HIM: I can’t believe how stupid Kelly is.
   HER: What do you mean?
   HIM: We asked her where the Empire State Building was and she thought it was in Paris.
   HER: You’re kidding!! God, she’s an idiot. The one in Paris is that big one… (she begins making sweeping steeple-like gestures with her hands). You know, that one… what’s it called?
   HIM: I don’t know.

   In this example, everyone was stupid, regardless of their point of view.

*They might actually be stupid, but there isn’t enough information to be certain.

Yes, I realize you’re probably as surprised as I am. But there I was, struggling with a screaming child, wishing for the first time in my life — and, God willing, the last — that I was sporting a lactating breast, when a solution occurred to me. This was not the sort of “meandering, eventually finds it way into your frontal lobe” sort of occurrence, this was more of the “slap in the forehead” type.

See, I was able to get Grace to take a pacifier for extremely short periods of time whilst I struggled to find another possible position with which to convince her that the bottle was actually her mother’s breast. (To completely no avail, by the way.) And then — SMACK! — it occurred to me that perhaps, perchance, just maybe, the problem was that she didn’t like being smacked in the lips with the hard plastic top of the bottle. “After all,” thought I, “isn’t this the basic difference between one of these Nuk pacifiers and the bottle?” Well, if you don’t count all the stuff that comes out of the end of one and not the other, but you know what I’m getting at.

So I grabbed one of the pacifiers (sorry, Abby!) and cut a whole in the middle of it. It now resembles something like a large rubber washer. I plopped it over the nipple so it would rest between the bottle and Grace and… (did I mention I might be a certifiable genius?) it worked like a charm.

Ah… the sweet sound of success: a happily (greedily) feeding baby.

Char leaves for three days in the morning, leaving me with all four kids (4, 2 1/2, and 5 month twins, one of which refuses to take a bottle.) And where is Grandma? One in Florida, one in North Carolina. Am I worried? You bet.

On the other hand, I’m the Dad, they’re my munchkins, so I can do this, right? I mean, I can do this. (That sounded a little more confident.) Ah, who am I kidding? The house will be destroyed when she gets back, but maybe we’ll qualify for disaster relief funds.

Looking forward to this like a toothache, but I’m reminded that Teresa Heinz-Kerry thinks that being a mother isn’t a real job. Maybe I should have her come watch the kids. Or, better yet, maybe I should just employ her cure for arthritis.

But I digress… my real question today is this: Does anyone have any tips for getting a baby to take a bottle? The answer might just save my life.