Catching up

We had a wonderful Christmas. Happy kids. A wonderful husband leading our family in a prayer of thanks before a single gift was opened. Lots of gorgeous white snow all around us. No packing up and heading out. Great friends for a lovely evening of food, food, games, gifts, more food, pies, and a rousing game of Life. Happy sighs as delighted and exhausted children fell into bed. Four little ones to share the day with this year for the first time. Really a wonderful day.



And now I'm ready to get back into the swing of things. Our first birthday of the year is in a week and I've gotten ALMOST all of the Christmas decor down. I'll hopefully get the rest out tonight or tomorrow. I like to have it as clear as possible so my boy feels a little more special for his day and it's not so cluttered with Christmas stuff still around. And my poor husband is helping drag furniture all around. I'm just ready for a clean house and a new arrangement of stuff. It'll be good to get back to normal(-ish).



The holidays are so fun. It's so nice to spend the month anticipating the celebration of our Lord's birth. I even like a lot of the plain old fun stuff that is not particularly Holy. It's nice to have a change of pace and some fun events, activities and outings.



But it's also really nice to put all that away and just get back to life as we know it. School each day. A more open, clutter free house. A husband back to work for the most part (I love him being around, but is it just me or does having your man home for much longer than a weekend just make everything a little bit crazy and chaotic?) and four kids ready to have back their routine.



So that was all. A little update. Now if I can just clear this room out to move the dog's kennel in here so I can feel like our family room isn't such a zoo... then I can plan out a bit of school for this week. My oh my. I am so terribly disorganized this year! I didn't even attempt to make a resolution to reorganize. I'm just doomed to fail again, after all.



But I digress.



So Happy New Year! I'm off to tidy, move, clean and plan.

Oops...

Ok. So I apparently misspoke. I looked up the records and according to our local news weather site, there was snow on the ground for Christmas once before in my lifetime.

I was 11, and it was a previous snow that had not melted by the time Christmas had rolled around. So technically I guess this will be my second white Christmas in my life.

But still.

Let it snow...

Big happy sigh.

I am 29 years old (and as a side note, I'm still in a bit of denial that I have actually celebrated my last twenties birthday...) and I think I can safely say that this will be my first white Christmas ever in my life.

And I am so happy about that I can't even find the words for it.

I know it's a silly thing in the big scheme of life. But living in the Great Northwest since I was five (California before that so no snow for sure there!) has meant many a chilly, wet, gray and green Christmas morning. We've had snow the day after Christmas and snow the few days before... But not once that I can recall have we actually had snow on the ground for Christmas.

Now we have more snow than anyone knows what to do with! We still have 8-12 inches of accumulated snow from the past two weeks' worth of snow storms, and as I look out our office window right now there is the lightest, prettiest snow falling on top of the already thickly coated white roof tops of the neighborhood.

Granted no one can drive anywhere and even our annual family Christmas afternoon at my husband's parents house (only a 40 minute drive away) has been postponed to New Years day. Sure the plow guys have run out of places to shove the snow from the roads. And yes, it's treacherous even walking to get the mail since the snow is so thick you can't tell where the sidewalk ends and the street begins (I fell flat on my behind a few days ago while carrying Girly Pie to check the mail... I thought I was on the sidewalk but I was actually on a neighbor's driveway as it sloped into the street and the ice under the thick snow was slippery and SPLAT! I have the bruised bottom to prove it!). We're not making it out to town for the Christmas Eve church service and we're hopeful we'll even be able to make it the 3/4 of a mile to Mary Grace's house to celebrate Christmas afternoon together!

But all the modern inconveniences aside, I am still just tickled pink that there is snow on the ground as Christmas arrives. I know our savior was not born in anywhere near snowy weather. But I do have to say that I have always dreamed of that old-fashioned classic white Christmas.

And then on Friday it can all melt and I'll be just fine. I'll have had my fill of white for the winter.

Hehe.

So Merry Christmas to you all. I hope that your special day is filled with the warmth of a loving family, the peace of a safe home, the awareness of God's gift of grace and love... and sprinkled with the laughter of happy children, the smiles of eager anticipation as your little ones await your reaction to a gift they've worked so very hard to make or buy for you, the memories of your own young Christmases full of warmth and joy... and maybe, just maybe, a few inches of white stuff covering the still world around you as you celebrate the birth of our savior.

Adventing, Benny-style

Last year I decided it would be fun to just skip “school” for the whole Advent season and just do Advent activities instead. I’d never celebrated Advent before myself, but was very excited to start this new tradition with our family and try and really bring the meaning of Christmas back to Jesus and the gift of His birth (and life and death).

So I put in a few hours at the computer Googling Christmas crafts, baking and activities. I put holds on a bunch of Christmas classics on video from our library’s great hold system (after all, what Christmas is complete without watching the stop animation version of Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer a few dozen times?). I ordered a Jesse Tree book and cut out the ornament circles for the season. I also found a whole Bible reading calendar for Advent online.

And then – and this is the key thing here – I used a small three ring binder and some plastic dividers with pockets in them labeled one for each week of Advent and printed out some weekly schedules from Donna Young. Then I just sat down and plugged the stuff into the weekly schedules. I left a column for each activity and filled something in for each day. We had movies planned in, a Christmas song to learn each week, baking days, ornaments to make, gifts to make, outings to go on, and days like St. Nicholas Day marked with an appropriate book ready from the library and the right items set aside to celebrate the day in a fun way.

And all this I had done long before Thanksgiving rolled around.

And do you know what? It was GREAT!!! The boys were thrilled with the crafts and the baking. We had so much fun! I loved having everything all laid out ahead of time so I wasn’t trying to think of something in a pinch. The recipes, craft directions, coloring pages and advent and Jesse tree readings were all right there in my little book, even down the which movie was up for the day and what song we were learning for the week. (By the way, there is nothing cuter than three little boys banging on upside down jars and singing The Little Drummer Boy. I’ll always remember the endless rounds of, “Puh-rum-pum-pum-pum… rum-pum-pum-pum… rum-pum-pum-puuuuhhhmmmm.” It was pretty stinking cute.)

We made our annual salt dough Christmas tree ornaments. We made caramel corn (yum!) and home made gum drops (not so yum...) for the first time. We cut out gingerbread people and decorated them and made a garland of them to hang in our dining room. We made handprint Jesse trees and the boys colored the Jesse Tree ornaments and glued them up their each morning after our Bible reading. We made Fruit Loop garlands to hang on the tree. And the cutest little craft ever was this little wreath shaped frame made from puzzle pieces painted green with little red holly berries dotted on them, and then used as picture frames for my kids and hung on the Christmas tree. So cute! We learned at least three Christmas carols that we had not yet memorized before.

The list goes on and on. I have so many fun memories from last year’s Advent season. Yes, our house was a wreck for most of the month. Sure, I was just barely finished cleaning up one project before the boys were digging into the next one. Yeah, we had so much paper lying around it was undoubtedly a fire hazard. And of course we did not do every single activity I had planned out on my handy-dandy weekly schedules. But we did most of them, and we had a blast doing it all. This year my boys started asking about Advent and when we would start it up again around, oh, late September.

This year things are a little different. This year I have a six month old (almost seven months… Ack!) Girly Pie in tow and I am much less organized. This year Thanksgiving just came later than it seems like it should, so it snuck up on me that Advent was starting YESTERDAY!!! This year, I still have a handy little notebook, but I did steal much of what’s in the new one from what I had planned out last year. But I guess that’s kind of the point. I took the stuff we really enjoyed, I dropped the stuff that was less fun or just not worth doing every single year, and I added in a few new ideas that were better for my kids being a year older (or just easier for a Mommy with one more little one to juggle in the mix) or that just looked like fun.

So we’ll see how it goes this year. Today was Day One of the full crafting schedule. And it was a little hectic, I admit. We made the handprint trees and some popsicle stick angels, and did our Bible readings. But Goose didn’t nap, Punky has been sliding into disrespect lately so we had some teachable moments that interrupted the flow of the day, and Finny is in need of some sensory activated every 2-3 hours so I need to keep on top of our schedule more than I did last year (I’ll write more on the sensory stuff another time…).

And, much to my great dismay, sweet Girly Pie is starting to look like she’s got an ear infection. I know an ear infection does not sound like the end of the world to most people… but to a mom who has watched one baby boy go through years of chronic ear infections and fluid and has fought off ear tubes for four years with her darling Sunshine Boy only to be told by a new Ear, Nose, Throat doc that he needs to have tubes NOW, oh, and a tonsillectomy and adenoidectomy, too… just weeks after his fourth birthday and that he might have suffered some slight permanent hearing loss due to all those years of yuck… well, let me just say that I am not looking forward to going down that road again. It’s a little off topic, I know… but prayers are appreciated for anyone with room left on their prayer list that my Girly Pie does not share the same faulty genetics that her big brother Finny and her Daddy (and her paternal Grandma… the list goes on…) have with a really bad ear history. I just don’t know if I can take walking down that scary, pain-filled road again with another of my babies. But God’s will be done.. not mine.

Ok. Moving on. It might not even be an infection, after all. ;o)

So back to the point. The point is… Advent. It’s fun. It surely has brought us closer together as a family and made for some really great memories for us all. We made more time to study God’s word and really got a lot out of that part of the season… but we also just enjoyed the family tradition side of Christmas, too. And as much as I want my children to know the true meaning of Christmas, I do want them to really have a lot of memories of family time and fun, too. So we may not be the biggest shoppers this time of year, and we may also not be completely focused on Jesus’ birth in every activity that we do, either… but on the whole, it has been a really wonderful thing for our family.

And if you haven’t done something like this before, maybe you can give it a try this year. I don’t have time tonight to hyperlink all the resources I have used, but I’ll gladly pass along links that anyone requests in the comments area.

So Merry Christmas to all… and Happy Adventing, too.