December Bits and Pieces

Oh December December. I should like very much for you to be all music, and Christmas books, and gingerbread cookies, and lights, and kids anticipating presents wrapped and waiting to be opened, and older kids all home from college, and Mike here with me, and snowfalls, and favorite Christmas movies ... without all the wet snow boots and gloves and muck tracked on the floor, impossible work hours for Mike (and husbandlessness for me), clutter of more new toys filling our house, laundry, fevers and stomach bugs, dishes, and small kids arguing and throwing tantrums (Starling's sob/yelling over having to share the couch during most of our special [or so I'd hoped it would be] Family-Night viewing of "The Christ Child" last night was only one of many similar moments). 

In fact I might have shot up a sighed prayer the other day suggesting that if only there wasn't so much mess and so many demands I could make Christmas perfectly magical for my children and get all the right focus of the season perfectly in all of our hearts and all of our interactions.

But, "he counseleth in wisdom ... over all his works", and I've long known that a significant part of mortality seems to be ... everything good and of value playing itself out amidst much that is mundane, tedious and distracting. And, while at times, I fear that all of those things are only causing me to fail in grasping ahold of and recognizing the miraculous and significant, I do trust that there is some purpose and necessity in it. And that perhaps like Eve, who recognized that, had she stayed in tidy Eden, she would never have known "the joy of [her] redemption", the very things I feel are interference in my own joy and progress ... might somehow actually be facilitating more fullness.

In any case, mess and tantrums or not, I am awfully glad that so many things of happiness and tradition and family do exist throughout all of it!

And here is a hodgepodge jumble of December photos of a little bit of all of the above things:

Starling occasionally asks for me to peel her a little orange (yes yes, I know they are not oranges). Only then, she rarely eats it. More often she ... decorates it. She's quite ingenious about it all. In fact when she ran out of toothpicks, she discovered she could just lick the marshmallows and stick them on. 😳

(If you see a picture of her wearing something other than this pink sweatshirt or her yellow dress, or, if at any point you see her hair with any type of ponytail or braid, know that some miracle has occurred. I do wash laundry every day. So there's that bit of good fortune.)

Penny letting the kids help make gingerbread cookies one Sunday evening.

Watching the old claymation Rudolph.

Our first big snowfall! And we got loads of it over about four days straight! I do love fresh snow. I do! But with Mike not here, and with the older kids away at college and the useful shovelers in school all day ... it can get a bit overwhelming to shovel sidewalks and driveway and uncover cars; and when I walked out on the fourth morning of major snow and saw all my work undone again (especially the long stretch of sidewalk along the side of our yard that Pen and Jesse walk on towards school and the bus every morning), I actually started to cry. Haha. (But then our neighbor used his snow blower on the very stretch of sidewalk I was most exhausted by. So. Bless his heart.) 

I think Hans is such a cute little five-year-old artist.

Megan stopped by after coming to Ogden for some errands one day. She brought the kids treats and showed them some supposed recording of a Bigfoot's call. :) She's very good at making my kids (and all of her nieces and nephews) feel special and loved. I've learned a lot about confidently reaching out to my nieces and nephews through watching her. 

We had a few nights of thick fog early in the month. I like fog and how mysterious and unearthly it makes everything feel. Like we are living, for a minute, outside of real time. 

Summer bringing Skittles up to say goodnight. 

One of the kids found a hat version of Starling's precious "cat cat" stuffed animal at the grocery store the other day. We didn't buy it, but she was delighted to wear it for a minute all the same. 

(You can see her actual cat-cat in the picture below.)

We went over to my mom's to have her read the kids some of her many Christmas books one night. I feel so nostalgic in my childhood home at Christmas time I nearly cry.

With all the Christmas presents for ten kids finally purchased, I began the business of putting as many of them as I could in boxes labeled with code names so that I might have the older girls help me with wrapping. This plan isn't full proof of course. One year at least two gifts were opened by the wrong child. 😄 But it's still a pretty good plan! (I just wish I could ever remember to start holding on to cereal boxes sooner!)

I don't know who took this of Daisy. It just showed up on my phone (as many things do), but isn't she darling in shades of green? Yes. She is.

It was such a happy thing when all the college kids piled in last weekend with no plans of leaving us again for several weeks! Here they are playing a round of Scrabble. I love my kids playing games together (as they often are on Sunday afternoons).

This cute Hansie boy.

These pictures, it occurs to me, really aren't a fair sampling of all the happenings around here! Kids all readying for church and walking up to our ward house together, Mike calling everyone out to the car to carry in loads from Costco, everyone at the kitchen table doing homework after school, and me and Anders late at night when he suddenly recalls he has homework he forgot about and needs help with, Summer, who never falls asleep easily, sneaking upstairs to beg being allowed to stay up late with Jesse and Anders, etc., etc. No, these aren't a full sampling at all. But! They are a sampling all the same. And that's not nothing. :) The end.