finally i can let the cat out of the bag and let you know that i’ve participated in something called NaBloPoMo – a cute way of saying National Blog Posting Month. the challenge was to blog at least once a day.

i didn’t want to announce that i was going to participate way back on november 1, because that would just set me up to fail by the 3rd of the month if i admitted it out loud.

so this is the end of you hearing from my big mouth blog on a daily basis. it was a struggle some days to get a blog post in. kenny was extremely helpful, shuffling the boys into the living room and making up fun games to keep them distracted while i just needed 10 more minutes to blog…

december brings a lot of family advent and christmas activities. so the blog won’t be as active. but i’ll post from time to time to wish you a peaceful advent.

My brother Jonathan strongly recommended that I read Blue Like Jazz by Donald Miller a few weeks ago. I remember that my mom had a copy since she had seen Donald Miller speak at the Festival of Faith and Writing at Calvin College this past spring. So I borrowed her copy and read it in 3 days (mostly when the boys were sleeping!).

A few nuggets of wisdom that I really liked:
on community: “I was in San Fransisco recently staying at this bed and breakfast for people who are in the city to do ministry. It was a small house, but there were probably fifteen people living there at the time. The guy who ran the place, Bill, was always making meals or cleaning up after us, and I took note of his incredible patience and kindness…. One morning…Bill and I were having coffee…I asked him how he kept such a good attitude all of the time with so many people abusing his kindness. Bill set down his coffee and looked me in the eye. “Don,” he said, “If we are not willing to wake up in the morning and die to ourselves, perhaps we should ask ourselves whether or not we are really following Jesus.”

on worship: “Here is what I’ve started thinking: All the wonder of God happens right above our arithmetic and formula. The more I climb outside my pat answers, the more invigorating the view, the more my heart enters into worship…. “Wonder” is that feeling we get when we let go of our silly answers, our mapped out rules that we want God to follow. I don’t think there is any better worship than wonder.”

I’d love to write a huge book review about it because I have a lot to say. Mostly, I’ll encourage people to read this book who:
– have ever thought christianity was weird/hypocritical/worship of a mean God
– know christians and think they are weird/hypocritical/worship a mean God
– are christian and admit to not having all the answers, but are crazy in love with Jesus. who is God.

One minor thing I will say negatively about this book…the guy either needs an editor or if he has one already, he needs a new editor. There were more than a few misused words, or overused catch-phrases like “to be honest.” BUT…it’s totally a worthwhile read.

i can’t tell you how many times i hear the comment, “boy, you have your hands full!” when i’m at the grocery store, the library, church, or any public place, really. they see me trying to balance three young boys and a grocery cart, or a stroller, or a husband (i’m kidding, babe).

i know what most of them mean when they make this comment. they imagine my days at home…trying to do whatever it is i do (clean, cook, or work an outside job, perhaps) all the while trying to make three boys who are three years of age and younger happy, fed, and sleeping well. yes, that sounds like a huge amount of work. and yes, it is a huge amount of work.

but i don’t do this alone. i have a husband who is just as hands-on (if not more) than i am.

i regularly read a few blogs of women who have large families – 5, 6, or 7 kids and even more. one of my favorites of these blog is Owlhaven not only because i envy the blog name…but because Mary’s posts on raising a large family are more than inspiring to me. her latest weekly question is this:

“When you think about enlarging your family, what are some of the questions and concerns that come to your mind? Was it or is it a difficult or an easy decision to declare yourself done with having children? If your family is already complete, feel free to share the questions you had as you faced the issue in the past. When you decided, did you decide once and for all, or did you find yourself revisiting the question over and over?”

it’s an interesting question to me because it’s a discussion that kenny and have a lot. and a question that a lot of people asked us after the birth of our last two boys (“are you done here? or are you having any more?”). and although i want to run and hide at the idea of having another baby any time soon…ultimately, is the decision REALLY, TRULY up to us?

coming into this marriage, we both wanted a large family – i actually told him i wanted 6 boys (we’re halfway there!). but right now, the thought of having 3 more kids (let alone boys!) scares me. so although the discussion happens from time to time, right now, all we can do is discuss, and just see what God really wants for our family.

yes, our hands are FULL…our hands are full of blessings.

(ps. i can see my email inbox filling up with friends and family asking me, “are you pregnant?” so i’ll quench that fire before it starts: NO!)

today is the first day of deer hunting season in pennsylvania. it’s also the first year that i’ve actually known it was the first day of hunting season and that’s because we live in the hunting mecca of western pa. there are woods all around us, and beyond those woods are the state gamelands. i can’t tell you how much bright orange i’ve seen in the previous weeks leading up to today. not to mention the MANY guns fired in practice all around us.

when we had this house inspected a little under a year ago, all the inspectors could say was how much they would love this house to set up their hunting stance from the back attic window since it faces many acres of woods. too bad non-hunters moved into this house.

and it’s not that we’re against hunting. we just don’t do it.

when we moved here in april, someone told me not to go outside on the first day of hunting season…which i thought was a bit extreme. it’s not like we’re living in the “little house in the big woods.” there is civilization (and roads!) all around us as well.

kenny had one last day off of work today, so we spent it outside completing the outdoor christmas decorations, trimming some bushes, talking to neighbors. on our drive to the bank this afternoon, i noticed two women sitting on their front porch wearing bright orange hats. perhaps i’ll get some orange hats on “clearance” in the sportsman section of walmart (which is really 99% hunting equipment and a few bikes) once deer season is closed. we’ll all wear them if we get another spell of good, warm weather the monday after thanksgiving next year.

i guess we’re slowly adapting to this life, where the first day of hunting season is just as big as thanksgiving. or christmas.

it’s an odd phenomenon.

out here in the country, people put up their christmas decorations sometime in early november, alongside of their halloween decorations. the halloween decorations disappear sometime right before thanksgiving, and then the full-blown christmas decorations have taken up their temporary residence in people’s yards.

and being the hardcore anglican that i’ve become, i think it’s preposterous. it’s not even advent yet. but when in rome….

today we started on our christmas decorations. one reason is that we have a HOUSEFULL of family coming for the most wonderful time of the year, and i want to create an atmosphere of cozy for them.

but the main reason we’ve started decorating 3 days after thanksgiving is because i have this need to teach my neighbors how to actually decorate for christmas. don’t you wish everyone had the same taste that you did in decorating? let me rephrase that: do you wish the person who created those giant plastic snowglobes and gianter inflatable santas, reindeer, and worse yet…tigger (or fill-in-the-blank-disney-character) with a santa hat had perhaps invented them in guam or greenland instead of the US? i apologize if you are fond of these lawn atrocities ornaments. i just don’t get them. but unfortunately, 90% of those who decorate for christmas, have purchased them and they’ve set up shop already on the front lawns of said 90% of americans.

so in protest of these plastic santas, we’ve hung our lights and wreaths and called it done. simple. elegant. very little electricity required.

…you pull out your old rusty push-mower to cut around the edges that your tractor can’t reach and it feels wrong. it feels like you should be sitting on your lawnmower, not pushing it.

i have a secret crush on black friday.

there is something really exciting to me about waking up before the crack of dawn, dressing warmly and driving out into the shopping areas with other sale-seekers. maybe i should take up fishing or hunting for those reasons…they certainly are safer than braving some of the people who take advantage of the sales (rather than eating up the sales – a completely different approach to black friday shopping).

i woke up a little over and hour ago (6:00 a.m.) to the beckons of adam, our 6 month old, and i immediately thought of all those people out there who have already had an hour of shopping under their belt. i do understand that i have the better end of the deal, all warm and snuggly with my 6 month old who is smiley and happy to see me every morning. but i secretly wanted to be at the department store with all the other shoppers.

ironically, department store shopping is not my style. and the majority of the gifts that will be given by our family won’t be coming from department stores. and i laugh (cringe, even) when the local news coverage of black friday morning is all about how full the parking lots are at the malls – oh, the praise and glory of america’s consumerism.

to me, black friday has nothing to do with christmas. sadly, it does to the rest of the country. perhaps i’ll post a separate blog about why christmas shouldn’t be about sales and bargain-buying and knocking down the next person to get the very last cabbage patch doll on the shelf (am i dating myself there?).

fortunately for a lot of people, that’s not what christmas is about. and black-friday is just another exciting day of shopping. someday, when the boys are sleeping through the night and waking much later than 6:00 a.m., i’ll find myself out braving the crowds while my boy-brood sleeps soundly in their beds.

until then, i’ll find my bargain-buying online.

today sawyer found a noah’s ark puzzle at nana and pop pop’s house. he took the puzzle piece of noah and found a yellow dune-buggy car in a bucket of toys. he decided noah needed to drive the car (i guess the ark isn’t good enough for sawyer’s purposes of getting noah through his errands).

sawyer: “mama! yellow tar!” (that’s “car” in sawyer’s voice. and for some reason he always points out yellow cars on the road. it’s a secret obsession.)
me: “yes…and is noah driving the car?”
sawyer: mm…hmmm (one of his many ways of saying “yes”)
me: where is noah going?”
sawyer: ummmm…to church!”
me: “oh! to church. anywhere else?”
sawyer: “ummm…to the grocery store!”
me: wow. he’s got a busy day.
sawyer: mm…hhmmm. ummmm….to target!

so now you know we go to church, the grocery store, and to target frequently enough that a 2-year-old knows the routine.

even though we’re not in charge of the big dinner this year (whew!) we had our own thanksgiving dinner preparations today.

we’ve been reading thanksgiving-themed books with the boys (richard scarry, bob and larry…) recently. i can remember being in kindergarten and having a “thanksgiving feast” of our own. we made indian and pilgrim costumes and ate things like apples, raisins, and marshmallows around a big table. i think i might even have a picture of it somewhere. in these little books we’ve been reading with the boys, there is always a picture of a pilgrim hat. and rowan always asks about it.

so i decided we’d spend today making our thanksgiving costumes. this morning, all 5 of us trekked over the michaels and picked out the perfect felted material along with some feathers. this evening, we spent a good part of an hour putting together pilgrim hats and native american “hats” for the boys.

i do realize that the feast that the pilgrims and the indians had way back in the 1600s wasn’t technically the first thanksgiving (although it makes for a nice, romantic story). and that it wasn’t until late in the 1800s that lincoln declared the last thursday of every november to be set aside as a day of thanksgiving. so perhaps it’s not “historically correct”…but it’s just a cute way of making the day more tangible to the boys.

each day is a day of thanks for rowan and sawyer. in their goodnight prayers just before lights out, they each spend about 5 minutes thanking God for MANY things (including the maps on the walls, the colors on the maps on the walls, each of their aunts and uncles, their mom and dad, their brothers, their toys, their books…). but they can’t WAIT to wear their hats to dinner at nana and pop pop’s tomorrow,

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i know exactly what my mom is doing today. she has started on the thanksgiving stuffing for dinner on thursday. she might also be cooking up the sweet potatoes so they can cool properly for the candied yam dish that we all love (except i think my brother andrew is still not a fan). we like our stuffing simple: bread, sage, poultry seasoning, butter, onion, and celery. we don’t like nuts and dried fruits in our stuffing. or sausage. or cornbread. although we are known to boil the turkey giblets and add them to the stuffing that’s not in the bird for added moisture and flavor.

when kenny and i were first dating, he wanted to make thanksgiving dinner for his parents (i think to impress me?) and couldn’t find a good stuffing recipe. i told him that i had the perfect recipe, handed down to my mom from her mom (and probably from a great-grand-mother to her). i guess it was my way of impressing him: entrusting him with a family recipe.

we bought a few loaves of bread and opened the packages a day in advance (probably what mom did yesterday) so it would dry out a bit (too moist of a bread would make for too mushy a stuffing). then, on the tuesday before, you cube the bread and put all the cubes into a big white trash bag, along with the melted butter, celery, spices, and cut-up onion. kenny is still a bit uneasy about this step. he has wondered from the beginning why we use a garbage bag. if i were to ask my grammy, i’m sure she used the garbage bag for our family thanksgiving dinners at her house as well. and the answer is: because it’s the only thing big enough to put in all that cubed bread and mix it up with the onion, celery, butter, and spices. it’s a simple solution.

that year, i had dinner with my family while he prepared the meal for his parents and one of his brothers. i joined them for dessert later in the day. when i asked them how the stuffing turned out, the whole room fell silent. kenny answered with a question, “how much sage was i supposed to add to the garbage bag?” when i answered a few tablespoons at most, depending on the amount of bread, the silence was met with laughter.

“i guess i went a bit overboard with the sage.” he admitted.

his dad said something about it tasting very earth-like (which is a nice way of saying that it tasted like dirt) and then kenny admitted to adding the entire jar of sage. which would be pretty potent. i was slightly embarrassed, but went out of my way to explain that it was kenny’s mistake, and not the recipe itself that made it taste…”earth-like.” yes, i chose to defend the family recipe over defending my boyfriend’s culinary skills.

so there you have our traditional family stuffing recipe. i’ll leave the measurements a secret for now. at least you know the secret ingredient: the garbage bag.

or is it the perfect amount of sage?