to sophie

I have started a couple posts over the last week but not much seems significant. About 10 days ago, Sophie Fellows, the 9 year old daughter of some good friends of ours, was diagnosed with a brain tumor. She is at Boston Children's Hospital and today will be going in for a 2nd surgery. The first one was on Friday and they didn't quite get the whole thing, so they are going back in.

Often at Christmas we get caught up in the business of pressure of buying gifts and sending cards and going to parties and giving goodie plates to the neighbors and a million other things. There is nothing wrong with that. We want our children to have wonderful memories of Christmas and the "magic" that seems to hang in the air every December. We want them to remember traditions and feel love and happiness. We want to keep in touch with friends and reach out to those around us. 

What matters most is love. All those little traditions, when done with love, add to the Spirit of the Christmas season. It's when we forget why we do them that we lose that Spirit. I hope the Fellows family feels so much love from across the country this holiday season. They have already seen so many miracles and I will keep praying that they can witness many more miracles this Christmas. Mostly, I hope they feel peace from the Prince of Peace whose birth we are celebrating.

Simon Dewey's Prince of Peace

You can follow Sophie's story HERE.

behind the scenes

Last night I felt super frustrated as I glanced around my house. I felt guilt over the mess.  I was emotionally drained after dealing with emotional needy children all afternoon. I was tired yet restless. My body ached yet I couldn't sit still.

This morning I woke up and got to work. I was determined to make a dent in the post-traveling and pre-Christmas state that currently held my emotional sanity captive. By 11 a.m. I had folded all 9 batches of laundry and vacuumed my entire downstairs (even the stairs themselves) which, of course, had required that I actually clean up the floor, too. All while Katie watched Team Umi Zoomi and played "family" with me. (Which meant she called me Katie and pretended to go to the store and buy stuffed animals for me.) (And by the way, I always called that game "house" growing up.  Interesting.)

Then we lunched and showered and Targeted and Costcoed. The kids' came home and got right to work on their homework so that right after dinner we could go up to the Zoo to see the lights.

And now the kids are tucked in and my front room still looks like this:

Which is about what it looked like last night. And my kitchen isn't any better.

And I am okay with it.

Mothers worry so much about how we present ourselves, our children, and our homes to others. But we forget that the majority of our work is behind the scenes. It's in folding laundry, grocery shopping and paying the bills. It's in trying to teach a 3 year old that when you dump out goldfish, or water or a bag of buttons (or all 3 in one day) that they need to clean it up. It's in trying to get your allergic-to-everything baby to eat something - anything - besides breast milk. It's in reading to your children, even if it puts you to sleep, or letting them do a craft all over the kitchen floor because that's where you are. It's helping your kids understand their homework when they are struggling to understand it.  Though very little of what we do is seen, it is always important.