We are just back from a Thanksgiving week vacation to see my husband's family.  We had a wonderful time.  Thanks, Renee, for the portable DVD player!  We didn't pull it out til day 2 in the car, but... wow, it was helpful.  We enjoyed lots of good books on CD/tape: Lewis's The Horse and His Boy and The Silver Chair, Ramona Quimby, Age 8, Book 3 and 4 in the Artemis Fowl chronicles (read by such a great reader!, though I can't remember his name).  I also knitted lots in the car: a few hats, and a purse for my neice.

I'm just sliding back into the groove.  I cleaned before we left, so it was good to come back to a clean house.  My husband has the Gift of Unpacking, and immediately did the laundry, so that was done the first night home.  (He's amazing, my man.)  But there was no work in the school notebooks this morning, and the kids, alas, do NOT have the gift of unpacking.  The contents of their backpacks seemed to explode all over our floor and could not seem to find their homes.

SweetP is a terror, though she's happy to have bookshelves to empty and stairs to scale.  As good as it was to be with family, it's good to be home.

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The Advent Carnival is now open!  Go over to A Ten O'Clock Scholar to check it out! 

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I cherish Advent as a church season for many reasons.  I love that it is a season of waiting, of expectation, and that the prize (as it were) is Christ, Incarnate.  We don't go out to shop much, but my kids still manage to pick up on the "__ days til Christmas!" fever around us, so I enjoy Advent as a time to focus on giving to others, especially to the poor.

Saint Nicolas Day falls on December 6, and he is a great figure of charity in church history.  We like to read about him for several days leading up to the holiday; there are good retellings of his story on the internet, as well as a few beautiful picture books.  The Real Santa Claus: Legends of Saint Nicholas by Mariana Meyer (the second on the left) features many beautiful classical paintings of the saint.

(A note of caution: the Demi book is a little gruesome, as it highlights the children cut up and put in the stew.)  Focusing on Saint Nicholas as a person has diffused the Santa Claus thing at our house-- he's an historical figure, rather than a mythical Arctic guy whose purpose in life is to bring me presents.

We then give the children many ways that they can give to others.  This has been harder than I thought it would be: many charity organizations are not set up for younger children to participate.  But here are some ways we have found to share what God has given us with those less fortunate:

• packing backpacks full of non-perishable food and things like band-aids and wool hats, to give to the homeless we see around the city
• participating in Operation Christmas Child , through Samaritan's Purse
• allowing our children to choose a gift to give to a needy family or child overseas, from  Samaritan's Purse Gift Catalog, World Relief's Catalog of Hope, World Vision's Gift Catalog, or The Heifer Project.  (The book Beatrice's Goat tells the story of a family in Africa who were transformed by the gift of a goat.)
• collecting coats and blankets from our neighbors for a coat drive
• hosting an Advent party and asking everyone to bring a food item for the local food pantry.

Four years ago, we also hosted an Advent party for our friends and neighbors to let them know about World Vision and World Relief's holiday catalogs.  We had a great time with food and fun, and they also went home with a catalog to encourage their own giving.  The kids had a great time making a poster of what they had chosen to give from the catalog-- ducks, or goats, or mosquito nets to prevent malaria.

These are the Advent activities my children are most anticipating this year.

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Wondering: how geese know which way to fly in their long, drawn-out V's full of noisy energy.

Grateful for: SweetP's signs: eat, more, milk (is there a theme here?), cat, and her first tries at words: Ma-ma-ma, Da-da, night-night, book (k-k-k).

Amazed by: Jupiter and Venus, both so bright in the evening sky.  How could Jupiter be so enormous?  The heavens truly proclaim the glory of God.

Enjoying: lettuce, from the farm's winter share.  The cold frame has satisfied my craving for salads again.

In the kitchen: lots of soups, though the weather has warmed back up into the seventies.

Searching for: the missing library books.  Hmmm.

Praying for: those affected by wildfires in California, and the hurricane in Haiti.

We had our first snow of the year last week-- just a dusting, but the children were thrilled to bundle into snow clothes and pile out into the snow.  M kept murmuring, "I just can't wait to taste it!"  When she got outside, she licked a tiny bit off the table on the patio, then off the trunk of the hawthorne tree.  There was just enough snow to make a few snowballs with which to play snow-baseball.  You can't see it in the photo, but both boys are wearing the traditional first-snow-of-the-season boots (a.k.a., tennis shoes with grocery bags tied over them, because they're both two sizes past last year's boots.)

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SweetP is killing me here... my house is a wreck. She loves to tip over trash cans, knock over anything even vaguely resembling a tower, and is starting to open cupboard doors.  I can't keep up with her... or rather, I could keep up with her if I gave up on the laundry, cooking, and Christmas crafts. Yesterday I found her covered in pencil shavings (from the overturned trash) and dry-erase marker.

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M had her four-year old physical recently and stunned me by failing the vision screen.

Did I mention I can't be my children's doctor?  Here's why:

The assistant said, "She knows all the shapes, she just can't see them."  Her vision was 20/80. The eye doctor asked me, "Did you notice anything at home before the vision test?"

Uh, yeah.  Like when she said, "I can't see the pictures!" as I read a story book over lunch and tried to come sit in my lap to see them.  (I said, "Stay in your seat, you can see fine.")  Like when she stands right in front of the TV, and the boys complain.  I tell her to sit down, and she says, "I can't see from the couch."

I won't be winning any mother-of-the-year contests. 

Now she has her new purple glasses ("They're fuschia-- that's a fancy way of saying purple!") and her glasses case, and both have been lost in the few days we've had them. 

 (self-portrait photo)

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I'd like to share a tradition Jeanne at At a Hen's Pace and Kerry at The Ten O'Clock Scholar started last year: a Carnival of Advent Traditions.  Advent is a very precious time in our family, a time of waiting and preparing... two things our fast-paced culture tries to speed out of us, I think!  The Ten O'Clock Scholar will host starting on November 28, so check back there.  I look forward to sharing ideas with you all!   

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Wednesdays are poetry days.  Here's the Langston Hughes poem that is echoing in my head:

YOUTH

We have tomorrow

Bright before us

Like a flame.

Yesterday

A night-gone thing

A sun-down name.

And dawn-today

Broad arch above the road we came.

We march!

SweetP is markedly faster in these past few days.  She zips around the house, creating chaos everywhere she goes.  This is what things look like now:

The (big) kids love perler beads.  (Thank you, Betsy, for this suggestion ages ago!)  They used up our enormous bin and had asked me for more, but the school supply store I frequent was out when we last went.  Today the kids were looking for blank notebooks and found perler beads instead, so they spent most of the day making shapes.  I picked up a few large templates (just squares) which has sharply increased their creativity.  Here is a sample:

Costumes this year:

J: the centipede from James and the Giant Peach.  O: Darth Vader.  M: a princess. (For the record, she's worn this dress almost daily since I finished it two weeks ago.)   Our neighbor: the fabulous clown.  SweetP: Horton the elephant.  No mishaps on the stairs this year, though I stupidly gave SweetP my housekeys to play with while we made our way around the neighborhood.  When I got home, I found she had "misplaced" them.  What was I thinking?  I spent twenty minutes retracing my steps before I saw keys in the grass, shining in the dark.

I was fasting from sugar in my tea last week.  Oh my goodness.  I am seriously addicted.  I've fasted before (usually from NPR, or the phone, since I've been pregnant or nursing for most of the past 9 years) but this one was the hardest. 

On the CD player: Eric Genuis, Fantasia for Violin and Piano.  What a wonderful CD.  You can find a sample of his music at his website, www.ericgenuis.com. 

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Sam was out of town at a meeting last weekend.  Before he left, our cat (with me for 14 years!) sneaked out the door as he was chatting with a friend who'd come for dinner.  Usually she comes back in the wee hours, but it was nine days before she made it home.  I was almost sure that a neighborhood owl or coyote had a good snack.  (She's back now, weighing probably half of what she did.  She has a lot of eating to do!)

Saturday night, my neighbors let SweetP sleep at their house so I could take the big kids to a concert by Eric Genuis.  It ran later than expected, and on the way home, a policeman pulled me over.  How emabarrassing is that?  My children kept asking, "What are all those bright lights?  Are you going to jail, Mommy?"  I think I'll move to Australia.

I picked SweetP up and put the others to bed.  I went back to the car and couldn't get the CD to eject.  (I wanted to listen to it in the house.)  So I turned the car battery on to get it out.  In the morning, I put all the kids in the car for church and couldn't the car to start.  (The absence of the annoying dinging to indicate my door was open should have been a clue.)  Of course, I had pulled the car into the middle of the garage forward, so my neighbor had to push it out of the garage before he could even jump it... which availed nothing after half an hour, and I had to buy a new battery. 

Finally, I took the kids to the grocery store to buy fruit before our long Monday, and the car again wouldn't start.  The kids all started to panic-- "What about the groceries?"  "What about SweetP?"-- so I promised them that we would take SweetP out of the car with us, someone would come get us (though Sam had the cell phone in D.C.), and the groceries would be fine.  Then I prayed.  And when I tried to start the car again...

Nothing happened.  Initially I thought, "Ack... the starter."  And then I realized that the battery was probably disconnected.  Bingo.  I reattached the cable to the terminal, and presto-- it started. 

So thanks to Renee and Brian for all your help and encouragement-- and the pumpkin spice candle-- on my terrible, horrible, no good, very bad weekend.

I hear you can have those, even in Australia.

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"Darby McGraw, Darby McGraw!  Fetch the rum, Darby!"

Think we've been reading too many swashbucklers?

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