Leave It Behind > Brian Bailey

LoriBailey.com

My wife Lori just relaunched her blog, now available at LoriBailey.com. Even better, the new site begins with a post about her fantastic new professional adventure - working with the talented Life Church team to spread the word about open resources.

It's been an exciting year of change already and we know it's just getting started. Check out her new site and say hello, subscribe to the feed, and if you're a church leader and haven't already, start exploring the numerous and entirely free resources available at open.lifechurch.tv.

Introducing Family Reads!

Our new family project, Family Reads, is now live! We launched early this morning. Visit www.familyreads.com to get the scoop.

What is Family Reads? A fun site all about the best books for kids. Lori, Ben and I not only all love books, but we love reading books with each other and sharing them with friends. Finding the best books can be a challenge, though. Lori spends hours upon hours scouring Amazon, book lists, and catalogs to find the  truly special ones. It's like living with a children's librarian!

Over the years, we've often bought books for families and friends of Ben, and we inevitably hear, "How did you find this book? I've never heard of it!" or "My daughter doesn't usually like to read, but she loved that book."

We want to share those books and our love for reading with you, along with many clever ideas to help make reading a quiet refuge in your family's busy life. That's why we started Family Reads.

We would also love to include your contributions. We're even supporting a fantastic non-profit through the site. You can find all of the details and much more on the site.

Whenever I think about a blog, I always remember Scoble's idea that the best blogs are passionate and authoritative. We hope Family Reads is a fun, helpful destination for you and your family.

» Visit FamilyReads.com!

Coming Soon

On December 26th, the Bailey's are launching a new project. It's an idea that came to us over six months ago. From the first time the three of us talked about it, we knew we had to do it. We've been working on it on and off ever since and are almost ready to go live. We can't wait to share it with you.

The project has been a huge amount of fun, since it's something we've all been able to work on together. In fact, my 12-year old son, Ben, came up with the name and is doing much of the work. Actually, if I had listened to his advice from the beginning, we most likely would already be live!

So, what is it? I'm sworn to secrecy, but if you read this Publishers Weekly article, you'll start to get the idea.

More to come in just 3 days!

Pop Culture 101

This weekend, we exposed Ben to a piece of American cultural history. We watched the entire 3-part Happy Days episode in which Fonzie really does Jump the Shark, as countless television shows have done since. It was everything I remember it to be. We take our responsibility to expose him to the more troubling parts of our history very seriously.

Birthday season

September is always a crazy time at our house. The start of school is a big event and this year was the biggest of them all - Ben's first year in Middle School! The year is off to an incredible start so far. He loves the variety of classes and greater freedom and responsibility. The school is just a couple of years old, has great teachers, and is within walking distance of our house, so we know just how good we have it!

Just when we're starting to adjust to the new schedule, birthday season arrives - first Ben's, then mine. Ben's party this year was our favorite yet. He had a sleepover with his four best friends and they spent the night having a blast playing Wii games together. He's very selective about his friends, so it was a terrific group of kids. That was followed by a small family celebration on Sunday, where I finally gave him my favorite Threadless shirt.

And today is my birthday! Thanks to everyone who has sent birthday wishes via email and Facebook. It's been a great day, but that's just the beginning. We tend to spread our birthdays out as long as possible, so there are a lot of things just around the corner, starting with The Office premier on Thursday.

All of this leads us into what may be my favorite month - October. The weather finally cools off, things slow down a bit, the baseball playoffs start, and we start looking forward to Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. I love fall!

This September has been an especially eventual one, though. Look for more on that soon!

Super Smash fun

My son Ben has been very busy this summer. His capacity for creativity amazes me. In the course of a week, he'll work on 3 Lego ideas, the prologue to a book, creating 2 computer games, writing a few blog posts, while continuously developing his very own universe called Weird World.

One of his obsessions (along with his friends) is the video game Super Smash Bros. A new version comes out in December and he already has a countdown on his desktop. The people behind the game are doing a great job building hype for the game by releasing information about it every day on a blog. He's been having fun creating lots of things about the game. He showed me this Keynote presentation he made the other day that highlights all of the currently announced characters and locations. Check it out...

An early birthday

Ben turns 12 in late September, but this weekend we surprised him with an early birthday weekend. We love September birthdays (mine is just four days after his), but fall is always very busy with the start of school and numerous extra-curricular activities. The real deciding factor, though, was his present this year - Lego Mindstorms!

For those of you who don't know, Lego Mindstorms is a Lego kit that allows you to build and program robots. The original version was released nearly 10 years ago. The new edition, NXT, is now a year old. You can read about its development in Wired Magazine.

What's funny about this is I have literally wanted to get this for Ben since he was 5 years old. Each year I would try to talk Lori into it, but it just never made sense. In reality, he wasn't ready it. First, he wasn't terribly interested in Legos — that only started in the last two years when his love for Star Wars made Legos ridiculously fun. Second, as much as I hoped Mindstorms would help him learn programming, he only recently became really curious about that.

In the past few months, as we watched him do more and more advanced things with Legos and on the computer, we knew it was finally time. But with four more weeks left of summer vacation, we just had to give it to him now, when he'll really have time to learn and explore.

We announced the birthday weekend on Friday afternoon and it's been awesome. Lots of movies (we're off to see Harry Potter this afternoon), special breakfasts, pizza, and Mindstorms on Saturday morning. It's safe to say it's been a hit. Within an hour he had installed the software, built his first robot, wrote a program, and downloaded it via Bluetooth! Since then, it's been non-stop robots, including ones that talk, attack, crawl, and generally make our cat very uncomfortable.

Now I know how important timing is in the perfect present. I'm glad we waited!

15 years ago today

When you get married, you try to imagine what the future might be like. Of course, what makes life so much fun is you really have no idea, and the last 15 years are proof of that. If you had told us in 1992 that in 15 years we would live in Texas (a state we had never visited), have an 11-year old son (we always thought we'd have a girl), and have web careers (a year before the first version of the Mosaic browser), we would have never stopped laughing.

And the great thing is, through it all, we haven't stopped laughing!

There is not a man in the world who is more blessed than me (not that it's a competition or anything). Anyone who knows Lori knows she is a brilliant, beautiful, sweet woman who radiates joy in every situation. And everyone who knows Ben always looks at Lori and I like we've somehow found a loophole in the parenting charter that exempts us from having to do any work - he's the most creative, clever, content, and fun to be around person I've ever known.

In May, we actually celebrated the 20th anniversary of our first date! Lori and I were high school juniors in Lake Orion, Michigan. We went to see The Secret of My Success at Oxford Twin Cinemas (which apparently still exists, now with 7 screens). At the end of that night, Lori was convinced we would never be more than friends, while I told my mom, "This might be the girl I marry!"

I thank God everyday that I was right!

Summer is here

Today was the official start of summer in our house, otherwise known as Ben's last day of school! This is always a fun day, but this one was particularly special as it was his last day of elementary school. Twelve weeks from now he will be a 6th grader in a wonderful middle school just a few hundred feet from his current school and still within walking distance of our house. He's very excited and definitely ready for new challenges (we all are, in fact).

Ben spent his first six school years in the same school, which was a fantastic experience. In fact, he had three of his teachers for the entire time and the relationships he developed are truly special.

The day included an awards ceremony and a final walk through the school for the 5th graders, cheered like conquering heroes - no formality or pretension, just a lot of smiles and congratulations.

Lori and I are blessed with a truly amazing boy. I don't think any parents could have it easier than we do. With Ben rapidly approaching life as a teenager, we can't wait to see what fun, surprises, and, of course, challenges lie ahead.

Our tradition is to see a movie on the last day of school and this year it was Shrek the Third, which was a great time, but my least favorite of the three. We have a few more treats in store over our long weekend together.

Lori shared some thoughts on our big day as well.

Happy Valentine's Day

One year ago: Valentine's Day with Mad About You

This year, Lori and I celebrate our 15th wedding anniversary and the 20th anniversary of our first date! It was during our junior year of high school. I like to point out that our son Ben is just 5 years from the age I was on our first date. Lori doesn't seem to like hearing that, though.

We celebrated Valentine's Day on Sunday with a trip to the Dallas Symphony (a breathtaking experience featuring Hilary Hahn and a phenomenal Rachmaninoff piece) and dinner at one of our favorite restaurants. Thank you, Lori, for allowing me to spend every day with the single most amazing, beautiful woman in the world!