Christmas Recap 2009

Christmas Eve: hanging stockings with Mom.



Went to church and participated in the Christmas pageant. Re-enacted the part of the angel who ran around the church saying hello to people, made snoring noises at the baby Jesus, and clapped after all the Christmas carols.

Christmas Eve at Grandpa Keith and Gramma Karen's.

A wee bit hyper to be surrounded by all her grandparents. Oh, and presents.

Snuggles from Grannie Maureen.

Christmas morning at home.

A wee bit overwhelmed that all this present-opening business isn't over yet.

Anytime you want to make waffles with berries and whipped cream? Gwen will totally help you eat them. She just wanted you to know that.

Playing with Dad and her new puppy, Violet, which was her "big gift" from us.

The one and only picture of Gwen in the Christmas dress she got from Gramma and Grandpa - the girl is growing way too fast. She is frowning here because she has been refused chocolate.

Christmas dinner! That I made! (This is only part of it.)

Pretty dishes and cheap-ass centrepiece.

This is what a Christmas tree looks like after two weeks in a house with a toddler. Please note you can see exactly how high Gwen can reach on the tree: the top half looks perfect.

Christmas was exactly what I hoped it would be. Gwen got to revel in attention and love from all her grandparents, and not only did she get spoiled with gifts, but they are all gifts I heartily approve of and that will be fun for her for a long time to come. Auntie Sara got her a bunch of art supplies, Grannie and Grandpa got her a table and chairs, we got her the dog pictured above, Gramma and Grandpa got her a car playmat with some cars ... and much, much more.

Christmas dinner went well, though it was a lot of work and I am still not sure where I went wrong with the turkey (it turned out fine, but about 40 minutes later than it was supposed to be). Our dishwasher ran 5 times on Christmas Day and another 3 on Boxing Day .... how did people ever do Christmas Dinner without dishwashers?)

The past week has been heavenly as both Chris and I are off work. We've been tidying and putting things away, taking down Christmas and catching up on laundry, but mostly we've had a LOT of relaxing. (And a lot of stuffing our faces with leftovers and Christmas chocolates.) Tomorrow we are once again leaving Gwen with the incredibly generous grandparents and going out for New Year's Eve.

I hope your Christmas season is/was stuffed full of whatever delights you desire.

This Weird Thing Happened on Christmas Day

(More on Christmas will come later ... for now, a quickie.)

Since I happened to be sitting next to Gwen while she opened her gifts Christmas morning, I ended up in a lot of the pictures.

In many of them, I am making incomprehensible faces.

In some of them, I am doing things with my hands that I simply cannot explain.

And in one of them, I appear to be boxing an invisible opponent.

But the weirdest thing is that after looking through all of these pictures, rotating them and editing them for redeye, after perusing my image over and over and over again ... in not one single picture do I look at myself and think, "Whoa, I am fat." Not one.

(I mentioned this to my best friend, who told me he has not ever seen a picture of me and thought I looked fat. "Try to see it from my perspective," I urged him. "EVERY picture I see of me, I think, ugh, I am so fat. To see a picture - let alone a whole GROUP of pictures - where I don't think that? It's almost disorienting.")

(Stay tuned for my New Year's Resolutions, which for the first time in EVER will not include the words "lose weight".)

Dear Gwen: Month Twenty

Dear Gwen,
For twenty whole months, I have been hedging my bets on you. Several times a day, your dad and I discuss your two most prominent traits, which are your intelligence and your sense of humour. But throughout these discussions, whether in my mind or actually out loud, I tell myself that every parent sees their child this way, and that in actuality you are probably no different from any other kid. This era is now over. I, your mother, free from bias and hyperbole, am ready to declare you the smartest and the most hilarious twenty-month-old in the history of the universe. Guinness Records can relax, the search is over. GWEN FOR THE WIN.

As evidence: at twenty months of age, you can count to ten. I AM NOT EVEN KIDDING. For most of the numbers, it is rote memorization; however, we are confident that you do know what “two” means. For example, the other day we were looking at a picture with many items, including two angels, which appeared in different areas of the picture. I said to you, “Do you see the angel?” (SINGULAR.) And you pointed at them both and said, “two angels”. YOU ARE A GENIUS.

(I’m sorry for all the shouting, but YOUR BRILLIANCE CAUSES ME EXCITEMENT.)

On top of this, you are hilarious. It's much harder to come up with examples of your humour that can be expressed in writing, but here's one: a few weeks ago, your dad was trying to coax you into showing off your incredible vocabulary. "Gwen, can you say I love you?" he asked. You looked at him with a perfectly deadpan face and replied, "YEAH." All that was missing was the eyeroll.

You are also crazy about the alphabet, which you call “ahbeecee”. You request the ABC song several times a day, and sing along as best you can. It sounds like this: “ … … cee, dee … … gee!” etc. You have great rhythm, by the way.
As for the written word, you can recognize several letters by sight, now: X, R, S, Q E, and many others. Your dad and I are really enjoying this stage with you: it’s like you have figured out how to learn, and are trying to learn as much as you can, as fast as possible! You seem so excited and happy about your learning, too, and so proud when you can show off.

You are putting together sentences really well. Your most common types of sentences are greetings and goodbyes: “Hello, Mama,” or “Night-night, Dada,” for example. You also like to point out who various objects belong to: when you see my water bottle, you will say, “Water. Mama water.” You haven’t yet learned the word “want”, so I haven’t heard the phrase “want orange” or “want milk” – when you want something, you just point and grunt, or sometimes whine the object’s name over and over until it appears. This? Is not my favourite of your habits. On the other hand, you have learned to say “I love you” and have even started to say it without being prompted. This ensures that we will keep you around for a little while longer. Well done.

This month has been full of changes and milestones. At the beginning of December, you took your first float plane ride, over to the Sunshine Coast to attend your first English Family Christmas (we missed last year’s due to excessive snow). You did fine on the plane: a little bit of fuss as we ascended, probably due to discomfort in your ears, but you settled fairly quickly. It was a real treat to take the trip in 25 minutes instead of 5-6 hours by ferry (including several hours’ wait at a ferry terminal).

In preparation for this trip, as we were forced to pack light, we decided to see if you could sleep without your waves CD. Sometime between moving you to your own room (July 2008) and sleep training (November 2008) we started playing a CD of ocean waves for you at night: it was on repeat all night long. We even ripped the CD to mp3 so we could take an mp3 player and a small set of speakers along with us when we traveled, to place under your playpen. Anyway, as I said, for a day or two before our trip we decided to try putting you to sleep without the waves, to see if we could skip bringing them along. And sure enough, you had no problem. So one more of your “sleep crutches” disappeared. It seems such a short time ago that we needed to swaddle you and plunk you into a wedge cushion so you wouldn’t roll over and smother yourself. We even had an Angelcare sensor monitoring your breathing. One by one, all these things have disappeared. Next you’re going to tell me you want to sleep in a BED instead of a CAGE. Pshaw!

(A flashback, the better to aid your memory. I think this was taken, like, a week ago?) (Just kidding. It's from July 2008.)

Another big event this month was you spending a whole weekend with your Grandpa Keith and Gramma Karen (and Fritz). Your grandparents offered us this as an anniversary gift, and your dad and I went away for the weekend to a B&B. You had a great time at their house, and didn’t cry or get cranky all weekend (I can only assume this is because they gave you everything that you wanted, at the precise moment that you wanted it, which is exactly what Weekends with the Grandparents are for.) We missed you terribly, but this didn’t stop us from having a wonderful and relaxing time. It was great to come back home at the end of the weekend and get back to our normal, crazy, family life.

We’re on the brink of your second Christmas, Gwen, and I think you are ready to dive head-first into all the joy and exhilaration of the hustle-bustle holiday season. We’re so excited to share this time with you, to see how you respond to stockings and presents and carols and having all your grandparents around you. We love you with all our hearts and are so glad you are our daughter.

Merry Christmas, Gwen!

Love,
Mama

The post where I alienate pretty much everyone

Right. So. Santa.

It’s pretty hard to raise a kid in North America avoiding all exposure to Santa. Though some people are bound and determined to try. Frankly, I am still in the “I don’t see the harm,” camp. But to explain why, I have to share a little bit more about my own experiences.

I was raised as a Christian (Lutheran, to be precise). But we believed in Santa, too. I never saw these two figures as opposed: they each had their place in the Christmas rituals. Another important aspect of my fondness for Santa is that the myth was not taken from me in a sudden, traumatic way: that is, there was no older, trouble-making kid who spoiled all the fun by telling me Santa wasn’t real. No one ever said that to me. I came to the realization myself, very gradually and gently, and this allowed me to form my own ideas about what Santa was and wasn’t. I decided that Santa is a symbol: a symbol of kindness, generosity, love. Going the extra mile because “It’s Christmas”. Santa is the excitement of knowing something secret and special is about to happen, the joy of giving gifts to people you love. The wonder of it all.

For me, Santa symbolizes the spirit of Christmas as seen through childhood eyes. I don’t think that spirit is a made-up fairy tale, at all. I think it exists in all of us, and this time of year brings it out in us.

There are a lot of arguments against Santa. One is that when children find out that their parents lied to them about Santa, they will decide their parents lied to them about Jesus, too, and conclude that he doesn’t really exist either. I think that’s an oversimplification. I think if your faith in God is shaken by a man in a red suit, it’s not the jolly old man who’s to blame. There are a lot of reasons why it’s hard to raise a Christian child in today’s world. Santa is the least of our problems.

Another argument is that the Christmas Story should be able to fulfill a child’s need and desire for magic at Christmas time. I believe with all my heart that all these things happened: that God came to earth and became a man; that Jesus was born of a virgin; that a star led the wise men over hundreds of miles to greet the new king; that a myriad of angels heralded his birth; that his birth and death saves me from my sins. I believe all of that – but it took me over 20 years of reflection, study, and discussion with others to get to that point. My daughter – forgive me – is not there yet. She can’t understand that it takes more than two seconds to turn bread into toast. I can’t articulate these abstract concepts to her yet. The Santa concept is a lot easier.

That doesn’t mean I don’t try to talk about Jesus’ birth with my daughter. We have an unbreakable Nativity set that she looks at and plays with every day. She knows the baby is called Jesus, and that the female figure is his mother and the male figure his father. She’s twenty months old. That’s a good start.

(To be honest, if you are going to take a hard look at the Christmas story, none of it really means anything unless you also understand and recognize the Easter story. So what? A baby was born to some girl who claims she’s never had sex. BIG DEAL, right? Unless you accept that Jesus is the Son of God, come to earth to die for our sins, the Christmas story doesn’t really contain any magic in and of itself.)

The post I referenced above asks, “I wonder if sometimes Jesus cries at Christmas.” I look around my world and I see so many reasons for Jesus to rejoice with his children on Earth. Millions of people raising songs of joy in His name. Shoppers giving coins to strangers ringing bells and wishing each other “Merry Christmas”. Children learning the value of giving, the importance of family. People all across the world making time for one another, gathering together to share fellowship and wishes for peace. Those are just the things I see – our all-powerful, all-knowing Lord sees so much more. You think Santa’s going to reduce Him to tears? What kind of God do you think He is?

So, yes. Gwen will be raised to believe in both Santa and Jesus. We will teach her about generosity, especially relational giving and giving to those less fortunate. We will teach her about Christ's birth, life, and death. We will teach her about the various meanings of Christmas - both religious and philanthropic - and eventually, when she realizes that the actual physical Santa is a myth, we'll help her to fill that void with her own conclusions about how she can still enjoy the things Santa represents. I believe in Jesus. I believe in Santa. And I believe in my daughter's ability to assimilate all of these cultural concepts and become an amazing, well-adapted person.

Movie Announcement

Something that makes me really, really, really happy is when a director I absolutely adore ends up making a film out of one of my favourite books. This does not happen often, but it does happen. And it has happened this year!

Check it out!

If I had actually seen the trailer for this while in the theatre, and having had no idea it was in the works, I probably would have completely lost my mind with excitement. As it was, I think I read about it somewhere and had to go searching for the trailer, so the screaming Beatlemania glee was avoided, but I am still stoked. And the casting looks awesome.