Jodilightful!

I’m not usually one for making New Year’s resolutions.  Sure, I’d love to lose that stubborn 15 lbs or so that’s evaded my post-baby-shape-up efforts for the last two babies, but why should January 1st be a better day to do that than any other?  Especially when I have a whole kitchen full of leftover stocking candy!

But there is one resolution that the Lord has been asking me to make for about three years now, and I think it’s time I stop putting Him off.

It all began with this blog post.  The faithful ladies at Girltalk have long been singing the praises of rising early in order to better serve your family, and I have long been sticking my fingers in my ears and La-la-la-la-la-ing at them in my head.

Surely they didn’t mean me.  I mean, for six years straight now I’ve either been pregnant or had a nursing baby waking me up at all hours.  Surely I wouldn’t be any use to anyone at 6 o’clock in the morning.

But now I am out of excuses.  June’s been sleeping blissfully through until about 7 each morning for months now, and there is no new little one on the way.  It’s time.

So…

Beginning Monday morning, I resolve to wake up with Trevor each morning (usually at about 6) and (this is the crucial part that I’m not doing already…) stay awake after he leaves for work to prepare for my day.   It’s big, and even as I type this I hate the very thought of giving up my extra hour of sleep in the morning, but I know this is something God is asking me to do, at least for a trial period.  Of, say, a year.

I will not be a true 5 AM Club member*, but I do believe it will be a step in the right direction, and that God will use it to make me a better wife and mother.  *Deep breaths.*

Proverbs 31, excerpt (emphasis mine):

10 An excellent wife who can find? She is far more precious than jewels. …15 She rises while it is yet night and provides food for her household and portions for her maidens. …27 She looks well to the ways of her household and does not eat the bread of idleness. 28 Her children rise up and call her blessed; her husband also, and he praises her: 29 “Many women have done excellently, but you surpass them all.” 30 Charm is deceitful, and beauty is vain, but a woman who fears the LORD is to be praised. 31 Give her of the fruit of her hands, and let her works praise her in the gates.

*This offer excludes weekends, and morning after nights in which I have been awakened more than twice by children needing to go potty, throw up or otherwise be rascals in the middle of the night.

Oh, and Happy New Year!

I’ve read a number of blog posts this year concerning the apparently controversial topic of Santa.   Some Christians embrace the whole North Pole mythology whole-heartedly, others avoid him at all costs in order to keep Christmas solely focused on Christ.  Honestly, I see both sides.  Here’s how we’ve dealt with the Santa ‘issue’ in our family.

What We Do:

Each year, usually at the insistence and arrangement of our very dear Aunt Junie, the girls make an appearance at some mall and sit on the lap of some Santa.  We dress them up and take their pictures, and it is a special tradition that they enjoy.  (Everyone, that is, but the resident two-year-old, who always seems to find him the most terrifying person she’s ever seen.)

When Pippa was a baby, I grumbled and rolled my eyes at having to do this.  We hadn’t planned on doing the whole Santa thing, and felt a bit painted into a corner by the whole situation.  A few years down the road, we realize now that this small part of our Christmas celebration that brings so much joy to our extended family is not really having any adverse effect on the truth we want to teach our children about Christmas.

What We Don’t Do:

We have never taught, and don’t intend to teach, our children that Santa is a real person who comes down our chimney on Christmas Eve to deliver presents to good little girls.  I realize that that’s what everyone does.  It’s what my parents did, and what Trevor’s parents did, but when it came to teaching it to our own children, it just didn’t feel right.

Up until this year, our position on the matter was really more theory than anything else.  It didn’t seem right to perpetuate the fantasy of Santa, but it was out there, and the girls picked it up, and we didn’t really do a lot to correct it.   But at the ripe old age of five, Pippa has started asking questions, and the rubber has officially met the road.

I forget what the exact question was: something along the lines of “How does Santa get into houses with no chimneys?”   And there I was, caught like a deer in the headlights of these innocent blue-green eyes that were hanging on my words, waiting for me to confirm or deny these rumors of a jolly red-suited present-delivery guy that she’d been hearing all her life.  It was all hanging on this moment, and in that split second before I answered, I weighed my options.  I’m a pretty creative girl, and I knew I could easily have come up with an answer to satisfy her, but I couldn’t do it.  I just couldn’t make myself tell her a story, how ever nice a story, that wasn’t true and let her believe that it was.

“Sweetie,” I said, “you know that Santa’s pretend, right?”  And there it was.  An unspoken cardinal rule of parenting tossed out the window.  I imagined the angry phone calls from Sunday school parents pouring in, and I waited for her face to fall and her heart to break.

But you know what?  It didn’t.  She calmly and thoughtfully answered, “I guess so”, and we went on to discuss pretend other ways that pretend Santa could get into a chimney-less house.  It was completely fine, and I felt a burden had been lifted.  (Of course, I quickly briefed her on proper other-kids-and-Santa etiquette, and so far… no angry phone calls.)

My grandmother was surprised to find out that we are willfully depriving our kids of so much fun and excitement at Christmastime, and I wondered, are we really?  They still have the surprise of presents under the tree on Christmas morning (or at least they would be a surprise if Miss-Nosey-Pants didn’t peak a little  too long into a forbidden Target bag!) .  Does it make them less special to know that they come from the people who know them and love them best?  The people who know just how naughty (read here about the part of the whole Santa thing that bugs me most) they really are sometimes and love them anyway, unconditionally?  It just doesn’t seem so to me.

I suppose our kids will grow up enjoying Santa Claus the same way that they enjoy seeing Elmo at Sesame Place: sure, he might not be real, and they know that, but it’s still pretty fun to see a character from a favorite book or show brought to life to touch and talk to.  If we were raising our children in a vacuum, with no grandparents or great aunts around, I’m quite certain we’d be sidestepping Santa altogether, but in the real world it just isn’t a big enough issue to make it worth disappointing and potentially alienating dear friends and family.  Now Halloween on the other hand… but that’s a topic for another day.

I think I’ll have to follow this one up at some point with a post about our thoughts on the whole Santa thing, but for now, you can check out more Wordless Wednesday posts here.

Hope your Christmas was as filled with sweet moments as ours was.

Outtakes?  Um, yeah.  We’ve got those.  Most of them involve either what you see below, or things that ought not to be shown on the internet for reasons of propriety.

This was a photo shoot we did in an effort to cheer on my best friend Mary when she walked the Breast Cancer 3-Day in San Francisco this year.  Love all the faces in this one (all those you can see, at least.)

For more hilarious outtakes, click here.

I just had to share this music video by The Franz Family.  I saw it on a blog I read yesterday, and I can’t seem to stop watching it.  Totally mesmerizing and beautiful.  I love how quickly the sister can drop her fiddle and sing perfect harmony, and how much the big brother digs his sisters.  Makes me smile.  And sing.  Loudly.

Enjoy!

(Incidentally, after I showed this to Trevor, he spent the next twenty minutes or so watching more Franz family clips on YouTube.  I was surprised by this, and he said to me, by way of explanation, “Oh, I’ve always loved bluegrass.”  You think you know a person.)

For more Wordless Wednesday, click here.

We have been the very best sort of busy around here.  Our home has been buzzing with Christmas cheer and all the activities that go with it. 

A heavy pre-Christmas snowfall of about 10″ cancelled all our plans for last weekend, but God had much better ones in mind.  We had a sweet, rich time together enjoying the beauty of God’s magnificent creation… right in our own backyard.

Although the photos below don’t really attest to this, I really do feel like our thoughts have been focused mainly on the true Christmas story this year.  I’ve read dozens of great blog posts on crafts and activities to emphasize the true meaning of Christmas, and maybe next year I’ll do some of them, but this year, I’m happy just to have started one new tradition in our family.

We have about five plastic kid-friendly dinnerplates in total, so the one that happens to be red with a snowflake motif on it gets used all year.  A few days ago as I was putting  the girls’ plates at the table for dinner, on a whim, I called this one ”the Christmas plate” and instituted a new policy.  Whoever gets “the Christmas plate” at each meal must share some part of the Christmas story with the whole family.  It has turned out to be such a fun and simple way to rehearse the amazing events surrounding Christ’s birth, and to keep our focus where it should be during this busy holiday season.

Romilly pretty much sticks to “Jesus was born,” and Bea can now tell us that much as well, but Pippa has really gotten into it.  She talks about the wise men and the inn being full and lots of other aspects of the story, even suggesting ideas when her little sisters are stumped for new material.  My hunch is that it will be hard to persuade the girls we can stop doing this at every meal once Christmas is over, but then, why would we want to stop?

Miss Juniper, snug as a bug at Hershey Park.

For more Wordless Wednesday, click here.

I tried to catch a new shot of  our wee man this week for I *Heart* Faces’ weekly photo challenge, but he wasn’t all that cooperative, so I took a stroll through the archives and found this sweet memory.

Our flat in Scotland had a mail slot right through the door.  Every day that Gulliver and I were at home together when the post arrived, it was a race to the door when we heard the postman coming.  On this day, he won.  Here he is guarding the spoils.

For more sweet faces of the fluffy variety, click here.