Last Year At This Time...

...I was in Montana.

...I was pregnant and impatient (ergo I was not sipping champagne, feeling retrospective).

...I was cold.

...I didn't have a book published.

...I had never made gumbo, jambalaya, catfish, or BBQ spareribs.

Amazing what can change in a year, and how we always think we can pretty well predict it...until we can't.

It's immensely comforting to think that God is in charge of all of our destinies, whether that is to grow old and accomplish many things, or have our lives snuffed out tonight to awaken in heaven.  Here's to living 2012 in the awareness of His presence.

Cheers,

Breanna

Christmas in Texas

Our first Christmas in Texas has been a roaring success.  It was the first year the kids picked presents for their parents.

They got Daddy a booklight.  And helpfully fell asleep on him while he was opening it.

General mayhem pervaded while we opened presents (the kids got me a scarf).

The day before we made enough Christmas cookies to supply Norway.

And decorated them.  Thoroughly.

By hand.

By both hands.

It was great fun, but Buddy isn't always thrilled to have stuff stuck on his hands, and he gave up before his sister did.

Here he shows you the different colors of sugar we used.

Here you see Miss Boo carefully making a giant pile of all the colors and smearing cookies through it.

Here you see the naked cookies, including the ones that the dog eventually got.

Hardworking Grandma pulling cookies out of the oven.  (We made three varieties.)

More hefty decorating.

Meanwhile, the grownups ate the cookies and played Pathfinder.

We also covered this table with turkey and the trimmings, but we did move the books and things first.

Our beautiful tree...

An actual bough of holly... (and a self-satisfied camel...)

A baby and his Opa...

They look like each other more than you'd think.

A baby who discovered that he knows how to say "cheese".  (Comes out more like "NEEE".)

Every time I pulled the camera out: "NEEEE."

And the wrinkled nose.  "NEEEE!"

"NEEEEE."

"NEEEE."

I couldn't get a normal picture.  He even started saying "NEEE" to the cam lighting in the ceiling because he thought they were camera flashes, I guess.

No, he wasn't saying NEE, but he does make faces nowadays when I pull out the camera.  I don't know why.

NEE!

The last touches on the decorating.

Hope you all had a wonderful, blessed, merry Christmas!

Love you,

Breanna

Christmasing

Just a quick note to let you all know that we're 1) cooking yummy things 2) doing last-minute shopping and wrapping 3) watching DVDs with lots of songs and chimes and 4) hugging each other a lot.

Love you all!

Breanna

Grateful

Tonight Buddy almost died.

That sounds melodramatic, but it's true.  The Husband offered to go get take-n-bake pizza since neither of us felt like cooking.  We'd been to church, and were sitting around the living room.  The kids were playing in the kitchen.

We've been having a problem recently with getting Buddy to stay inside and wait until Daddy comes inside when he gets home from work.  Normally the Husband will pull into the driveway, stop his car, and then open the garage door.  Buddy can detect the sound quicker than Patrick, and comes running from wherever he is in the house to open the door and sprint to his Daddy.

Only tonight the Husband took my car, which is parked in the garage.  And it was dark.  And I was in the living room, and I couldn't get to the back door fast enough when I heard it open.

Praise God that He gave the Husband quick eyes and quicker reflexes.  He saw the door opening and knew Buddy would be right behind it, and stopped the car.  Then he sprang out of the driver's side door to catch the little boy who continued running out of the house and down the driveway, to the street.

I think we must have scolded Buddy for a full ten minutes (after the swat).  A few minutes after we'd all stopped soberly hugging each other I set the kids up at the kitchen table with a half a glass of pop apiece, and picked up a few toys.  Then I sat on the floor in the living room and sobbed while my husband put his arms around me.

It only takes a second for something to happen, and your priorities instantly snap into alignment.

I don't need anything else for Christmas.  I have my son.

Thank You, Jesus.  I don't think I can say thank You enough.

Cheers,

Breanna

Discernment

I wanted to include this video about the dangers of over-romanticizing motherhood.

Motherhood & Work: The Conservative Tendency to Over-romanticize Motherhood from Canon Wired on Vimeo.

And I really enjoyed Jankovic's book, Loving the Little Years.  But all is not cool in the neighborhood.  As I watched the video something kept tickling in the back of my mind.  "Doug Wilson?  Moscow, Idaho?  Don't I know these names from somewhere?  And not in a good way?"

Yep.

You'll notice she's being interviewed by someone--her dad, I believe--a gentleman named Doug Wilson, who has the dubious distinction of being one of the few people who will say that slavery was probably not that bad, not really, not if you made the Alcotts shut up, among other foolish statements (like, for instance, that we should give homosexuals the death penalty).

I actually saw this video on another website, watched it, liked it, posted it on my Facebook wall, and then decided I better Google Mr. Wilson.  Whereupon I yanked it off my Facebook wall and decided to write this post.  And in case you're wondering, yes, I read his side of events, too--it was not encouraging.

I still don't have a problem with what Jankovic said in her book--or in the video, actually--but her willingness to be associated with a guy who hasn't backed down from his bad opinions doesn't speak well for her discernment.  (Even if he is her dad, she doesn't have to do public interviews with him.)

It doesn't speak well for my discernment that I nearly left the video up without doing my research.  I wanted to actually not mention the whole thing, but I did review Jankovic's book favorably here on the blog a while back, so now I am posting this as a warning.  If you read her book, do it with your eyes open, and a critical watch on the theology underpinning her essays.

Which are good essays.  But Stephen Jay Gould and Isaac Asimov were also very good essayists, and their theology was not exactly Biblical.  I think I have the responsibility of warning you, just as I think I have a responsibility to refrain from forwarding the latest vaguely religious paranoia spam.  (I.e., Madeline Murray O'Hare, who's been dead for years, is somehow sponsoring an evil bill in Congress--sign an imaginary petition.  Costco might be selling halal chicken which is somehow meat sacrificed to idols--don't buy it--sign an imaginary petition.  Harry Potter is making kids into Satanists.  And so on.  Please do not forward these.  They make you look stupid.)

We've all been given discernment.  Especially at this time of year, when a lot of pseudo-Christian stuff floats around, we need to exercise it--and make sure that we are not dishonoring the name of Christ in our communities.  Take a lesson from my mistake, and spend the ten minutes it takes to make an informed decision about what to support, repeat, or be associated with.

Here's hoping you all have a blessed Christmas.

Cheers,

Breanna

Christmas Picture Fails

Because, biased like I am, I think my kids are really cute even the pictures which I'm not going to distribute as Official Kid Pictures of the year.

As you might guess, picture day with preschoolers and babies is interesting.

And blurry.

For instance I have one who really doesn't approve of wool sweaters.

Or maybe he's checking the quality of the stitching.  I don't know.

So eventually Daddy (see the fingers?) tried to get in the act to encourage stillness, but...the itchiness.

Also trying to get a picture of the baby, who wanted to go to sleep, proved...

...less than productive.  I'm still trying to catch him in a happy mood so that I can come up with one good picture.

Because I refuse to settle for fear I will be that holiday family in Awkward Family Photos.

Alas.  Sometimes things strike Daddy as funny which Mommy finds merely infuriating.  It is one of the perils of marriage.

This one turned out pretty good, though.  I just need to figure out a way to blur the Ted Dekker book in the background, which of course I didn't notice until I began editing pictures.  Just because Dekker tends to be a bit...less than sentimental?

Meanwhile Buddy was not in a smiling sort of mood, at least not while I was snapping the photos.  He would smile before and after.

During he either moved (blur) or made these odd faces.

Like, in pictures, you're supposed to contort your face, right?

I mean, come on.  Everyone smiles.

He's going to do the big arms thing.

Or maybe a little pose to show you how well he can climb the couch.

Or how quickly he can make a masterly escape from his sister's overzealous hugging.

This is his Cool Dude face.  Again, I said "Smile!"

"Mom, have you considered how wasteful it is to take Christmas pictures when we could be spending the money on a flock of ducklings for a family in Zambia?"  Actually, yes...but I'm not going to spend as much on pictures as a flock of ducklings costs.  But if you have extra cash, ducklings are cute and mighty tasty.

Oh, the writhing, blinking, talking, wiggling, lengthiness of Picture Day.

And of course, being female, we needed multiple outfits, too.

This is really just bad timing and a blink.  But I think it expresses his opinion of multiple outfits pretty well.

Of course, sometimes a sleeping baby makes for a pretty cute photo.  But I was also kind of afraid if I used this for an official photo, he'd look dead.

But never you worry!  There are good pictures.  You will get them on or around Christmas.

Cheers!

Breanna

TMI

Men reading this blog, continue laboring under the delusion that we girls look this way naturally and go read some sports.  (And don't forget to set up your fantasy team, because there's a game tonight.)

Ladies, get in here close while I share a tip that you must tuck into your mind, because not everyone can find a replica of my grandmother's Big Face Mirror.

So when I got pregnant with Buddy I notice that I suddenly had one enthusiastic whisker on the underside of my chin.  I had never had this problem before and so I didn't see it until it was like an inch long.  Horrified, I asked the Husband why he hadn't told me about it--and he shrugged.  "I didn't notice.  If I didn't notice, I'm sure nobody else did."

I was sure anybody shorter than me did, but whatever.  Since then I've been vigilant about my chin whisker.  (In fact, its sudden luxuriousness was how I knew Littleman was going to be a boy before the sonogram confirmed it.  Dang testosterone.)

My whisker is (thankfully) now clear instead of a vibrant black, which is good in some ways but bad because I can feel it with my finger but I have a hard time seeing it in the mirror.  Then Heloise came to the rescue--something that is strangely often the case.

The tip?

Touch the whisker with a mascara brush.  Voila, you can see it and grab that thing with the tweezers.

I told you all it would be TMI.  But in good conscience, with everyone's Christmas card pictures coming up, I have to share.

Cheers,

Breanna