In my ideal world I would have darling Christmas pictures of all my kids in coordinated outfits, all smiling joyfully in front of a gift-laden Christmas Tree. I would be peacefully sipping Christmas cider right now, all the chores done and everything ready, anticipating the big night tonight.

Reality, however, took a different road this year. For the past ten days I have been woefully behind and overwhelmed. Between Baby Bear's normal night-time shenanigans (he doesn't settle down to sleep until 12:30 or 1:00) and Little Mister's battle with plugged plumbing, I have not gotten enough sleep for two nights, let alone ten. The dark snowy roads trapped me in my house preventing extra shopping and the house magically barfed an extra five loads of laundry into my utility room from who knows where. The gifts I have managed to procure sit in plastic bags all over my floor, as yet unwrapped. The packing for five people to go to Grandma's house has not even begun. The piece we're playing for the Christmas Ever service which should have been arranged and rehearsed weeks ago, just got written this morning.

So although it sounds trite and cliché, especially to me who has endured so many Christmas sermons over the years, this year instead of perfectly wrapped presents with shiny bows, I choose instead to think about the most important Gift, Jesus, who was given to the world two thousand years ago. Whether He came on December 25th (or the 8th of Tevet) doesn't matter. He came. He came from Paradise to our crippled old earth to bring a message of peace. Not a message of political peace but a message of inner peace, of reconciliation with our creator that we haven't managed to bring about on our own no matter how hard we try to live perfect, tinsel-wrapped lives.

As much as I would like to have my life all together, to have shiny perfect kids and a shiny perfect house and a shiny perfect life, I'm actually grateful for the reminder that Jesus came for those of us who will stoop to admit we're not perfect. He came for the ones who don't have it all together, for the ones who have messed up, for the ones who are tired and hurting and whose lives don't make sense. He came for me, to bring to me the thing I desire the most but can never obtain on my own: inner peace. Only in Him can that moment come when I can let all of the self-loathing and stress and inner turmoil go, washed away in His forgiving love. It's when I can finally receive God's love, not by being good enough; just the opposite. It's when I am the least worthy and finally let go to receive the gift of Jesus' forgiveness that all of the imperfections standing between me and a holy God get washed away and I can stand with relief, finally able to be Loved.

This year there are no color-coordinated pictures. No easy, stress-free holiday and no Christmas baking. But perhaps more than any other Christmas, there is Joy, so deep and strong it brings me to tears. For I am loved. I am blessed with three beautiful children, a husband who cares about me and most of all, I am loved by a Savior who chose to come to earth as a tiny, helpless baby, who grew into a man and died a painful death in order to shed gallons of His own precious blood as payment for every sin I have ever committed. And He would have done it if I was the only person in the entire world in all of history. I feel like the shiniest person in the world this Christmas!

My children would really prefer that I play with them. Poor, sorrowful, neglected little beings, with no creative direction in life, they constantly besiege me with requests to entertain them.



But I am doing more exciting things like cleaning the bathroom. And washing 467 loads of laundry, including the bed linens that the cats messed on yesterday. And finishing a bunch of computer work. And feeding the baby. And doing the dishes. And dreaming of a spa day where someone anoints my back with hot stones and lotions while soothing scented candles burn and CDs of mountain streams play in the background and where no one asks anything of me for approximately 12 hours.



Left to their own devices my pitiful offspring have to come up with their own creative diversions, make their own frogs from purple Play Dough and feed them imaginary food all on their own.



I recall being so neglected as a child, without even the benefit of a mind-sucking TV for entertainment. For some reason to this day I love creative hobbies, imaginative stories and even hard work. When did all of that childhood lonely misery transform itself into such positive character traits? Am I so sadistic that I would not even go back and trade it in for a more entertaining childhood? Have I come so far as to see that being forced upon my own resources for amusement might actually have been healthy for me?



My children, convinced that such a thing could never happen in their own lives, instead try to persuade me how deprived they are. They attempt to make me feel guilty for abandoning them to such a state of boredom that they actually have to think of something to do on their own.



Poor things.

It has always been a sort of dream of mine to have one of my babies play Baby Jesus at Christmastime. Since I was a child, I felt that it seemed somewhat like an honor or a blessing for a little one to get to represent the Perfect Baby even for a few minutes.

With the others, there was never an opportunity, but this year my sister's pastor asked us if we would play the Holy Family in their Christmas musical. Baby Bear would get to be Baby Jesus and I would sing Mary's solo in the cantata.

Although nervous to sing, I agreed to do it because of the delight in having beautiful little Baby Bear play Baby Jesus. I spent a couple of weeks carefully memorizing the (easy) solo and this morning came the big day.

In a tiny church filled with mostly elderly people, I stood hooded in Mary's blue cowl and held my precious baby boy, singing to him the miracle story. Hubby stood next to me "being Josephy" as he put it, tickling the baby's toes. Although I don't have the greatest singing voice, I managed to stay on pitch for the twenty bars or so that was my part in the song. To me the experience was priceless, a dream come true and the best part, aside from my own personal joy, was to look out and see the audience dabbing their eyes as they watched Mary sing to her baby boy.

I made this years ago using a travel scrabble board where the letters conveniently snap into place, making it impossible to bump them out of place while reading the braille, which I carefully drew on the tiles using fabric paint. Last night, with friends to play with and my tired eyes on strike from having no sleep, we used the braille board instead of the regular one and had a great time.

A feature of Baby Bear's bouncy chair is a nauseatingly stimulating light-and-music bar that arches over him, dangling toys enticingly in front of his tiny fists. I call the bar "baby crack" because when I turn it on, he sits there mesmerized as it plays and blinks, until it shuts itself off.

Yesterday he found something else that was cool about the toy bar. If he reaches out, he can make the dangling toys swing and rattle. I don't remember my other two doing this at eleven weeks; I think they were more like 3.5 months. I continue to be impressed by Baby Bear's physical ability.

Even as I type this, the older kids sit at the table eating lunch and Baby Bear is laughing in the bouncy chair, batting his toys and laughing his head off at them. I think my day is improving, just hearing his laughter.

One of my biggest parenting dilemmas is how and when to ask for help. It's not that I desire to independently soldier through on my own; it's just that in the past I apparently ask at either a bad time or for something not deemed worthy of needing assistance, whereas the things that people seem glad to help out with don't really affect me so greatly. So when I do ask, I get an annoyed response that the friend or family member is busy or tireder or worse off than myself. So I shrink back into my own little safe, non-rejectable world and the next time I really wish I had someone I could call for support, I don't even try.

Today, for instance, Hubby and I were up the entire night with Little Mister who had an unexpected case of plugged plumbing. He moaned and screamed and cried all night, holding in what he knew would be painful to get out, while Hubby and I tried everything we could think of, from a warm bath to back rubs to calling the doctor, to storming the grocery store the minute it opened at 5am for suppositories and pediatric enemas.

This morning, then, as Little Mister and Baby Bear nap, I wanted to sleep too, but Curly, ever my demanding child, is miserable at being left alone and unattended. More than a worn-out Little Mister or a two-month-old Baby Bear, she is my dilemma.

Just to get a nap, I am sorely tempted to call one of our friends and plead with them to take her for a few hours. But I can't bring myself to do it since taking my perfectly healthy five-year-old who is capable of being quiet for a few hours wouldn't seem like much of a priority. Yet to me it is. Because as hard as she tries to be good, she has too much Taz in her genetic makeup. She bangs cupboard doors looking for markers. She stubs her toe and shrieks. She wanders around, bored and suffering. And I cannot nap.

How do I ask for help? Maybe she should suffer with the rest of us: Little Mister, who finally passed his giant BM at 8 this morning and fell asleep without even eating breakfast; Hubby who got maybe half an hour of sleep yet still insisted on going to work because things are so behind and stressful there that a missed day might spell disaster; me, who could fall asleep on a concrete floor right now, but not when my little girl is crying. A family together suffers together and her cross to bear is silence and solitude. If she would only bear it quietly!

So I don't call anyone. I can't bring myself to do it, to bother friends who are busy homeschooling, who have three and four children of their own who may or may not have slept last night. I almost never ask for help. I don't know how.

It occurred to me this morning that my procrastinating on Christmas shopping was going to get me into trouble. I'd been waiting for Hubby's help, or at least his babysitting skills, but he was going to be booked solid for the next five days, almost until Christmas Eve. Between his full-time job, our ailing pellet stove, (with which he has a date on Saturday to either fix it or demolish it) and the various musical events, he won't be around to help shop at all.

My heart sank as I realized I was going to have to face the crowds of strangers alone with three young children and make all the gift-giving decisions into the bargain. I'd been unwilling to face these facts until today; we just got done with the craziness of birthdays and I simply wasn't ready to tackle Christmas.

Today, though, I decided it was time to face the inevitable. I just needed to "get tough or die" as my mom so eloquently puts it. Time to just git 'er done and if I had to take the kids, then so be it. At least I could get a Starbucks along the way.

So after lunch we began the hunt for socks and coats and boots. I changed two diapers and fed the baby. I felt tired before we even got out the door, but I doggedly pushed on. We loaded and buckled and drove to the mall where mercifully we found one of the few remaining parking spaces available. Heading in, we looked for all the world like a circus train with kids here and there, a stroller/carseat combo, coats piled, boots clomping, purse and diaper bag dangling haphazardly or stuffed in corners, with me frantically digging through my purse to find the correct glasses so I could read the signs and price tags.

It was in the first store that Baby Bear began to fuss. Although he was fed, changed, burped and snuggly warm, he still began to wriggle and fuss, drawing dirty looks from passers-by who wondered why I was not picking up my poor, hungry, crying baby. So I picked him up. I knew I would not be able to carry him for an hour and a half, along with pushing the stroller full of coats and packages. My twisty spine would protest and I'd end up in bed with a heating pad for the rest of the day. So I ducked into the bathroom and put him on my back in the African Baby Cloth sling. With him on my back rather than my front, I can carry him with relatively little pain, but the African sling (What is it? picture of us here) is so unorthodox in the States, I drew stares and dirty looks from the passers-by anyway. Baby Bear, unaware of the havoc he was causing, promptly went to sleep. He LOVES the African sling.

Curly, meanwhile, took the task of shopping and choosing gifts extremely seriously. She walked up and down the aisles ahead of me, suggesting things like a set of Hello Kitty dishes for Hubby's brother, who is graduating from high school this year. Yeah, Curly, Uncle E can use those dishes in the school cafeteria before football practice.

Wandering after us, Little Mister mostly wanted to hold my hand or told me his feet were tired. If he got more than two feet behind us, he would freak out and yell at the top of his voice, "Mommy, wait for me! Mommy! Wait! For! Me!" Since everyone was busy staring at us anyway (yes, I have a baby in a sling on my back, people. Get over it), I figured the fact that my son was being repeatedly abandoned was just one more point for the traveling circus. We saw some friends from church and he was absolutely enchanted with the idea that friends would be here, in a store at the mall of all unlikely places. He wanted to play hide-and-seek among the glassware and cooking utensils, an activity which mean ol' Mommy promptly put to a stop.

At one point, Curly needed to use the restroom. Because she is deathly afraid of the public toilets that auto-flush, I had to go with her (meaning Baby Bear, Little Mister and my purse and other junk had to go with her) to make sure the toilet was not going to flush unexpectedly and suck her down the drain. I assured her that it wouldn't and she went, much to my relief.

Gradually we collected more and more bags of goodies and the kids got tireder and more whiny. It was long past nap-time. At last, we had found something for everyone on the list and headed for the van, at which point Baby Bear awoke and declared his hunger to the world. I was a happy and exhausted mama when we finally herded everyone inside the houses and nap-time peacefulness descended. I have never understood the joy some women find in shopping, but I did enjoy a feeling of accomplishment somewhat akin to discovering that I am actually Superwoman and didn't know it. Only Superwoman, I am sure, never feels quite this tired.

Some babies just have that "look" in their eyes, as if they knew the wisdom of all the ages. Someone commented to me the other day that Baby Bear has it, the look of an old soul, the look of ancient wisdom in his eyes.

Curly is in the front row, second from the left (often behind the teacher). Hubby is the smokin' hot tux-wearing violin guru on the far left facing the kids. He helped lead the harmony group. Woo hoo! Tear it up, Hubby!

Perpetual Motion




Twinkle/May Song Duet

Both of the grandmas gave Baby Bear ornaments for his first Christmas. They are both so lovely and unique and special. I felt really blessed.



Hubby's mom gave him a little brown baby bear with his name when she visited last Saturday. (I erased the last name on the photo using PhotoShop, just because I don't want our last name on my blog. I rarely put first names on here just for privacy reasons.) I love the little sleeping baby bear!



This morning my mom came in shaking the snow off her boots and bearing her annual ornaments that she picks out specially for each person. Since I was born, she has made a ritual of giving a dated ornament to her children and grandchildren.

Baby Bear's first one seemed especially appropriate. She told me that when she picked it out, the sales clerk pointed out that she had a BLACK baby. Mom smiled sweetly at her and said, "Yep, our baby is black!" He even has a green blanket. Perfect.