Merry Christmas

Good morning and Merry Christmas! I am pleased to announce that Santa Claus did indeed accommodate us this year as he showed up sometime in the middle of the night on December 7th so that we could wake up to bulging stockings and presents under the tree (that we quick got and ornamented on December 6th!) This was a whirlwind of a Christmas for me and though I thought it was working out well for the kids, Jordan's recent behavior makes me wonder if it may have been a bit too whirlwindy for her. (More about Jordan in a minute)

We weren't rushed in our energy but we did go from a normal wintry day on Wednesday to a full-blown Christmasy house on Thursday including the arrival of my parents and brother, to a Christmas Eve celebration on Friday to a full-blown Christmas morning on Saturday. It was lovely, actually, though I'm not sure I'm communicating that well right now! We had fun picking out our tree together on Thursday and then reminiscing over the ornaments as we hung them--every year the ornaments get clustered a little higher up from the bottom of the tree than the year before. On Friday, we enjoyed the Advent Garden which is a celebration of winter at the kids' school. It is a beautiful way to start Christmas eve we discovered. Then we came home to eat our traditional homemade pizza dinner for Christmas Eve, complete with lighting the menorah as it is also Hannukah this week! We hung stockings, wrote notes for Santa to accompany the cookies and carrots and then kids went to bed.

Christmas morning was as magical as always with the excitement level through the roof. Santa really came, he really wrote notes back and he really brought presents and put them under the tree. "I knew it!" Gabe and Jordan announced several times that morning. After we opened presents, we had a great big dinner and had a very relaxing day. Mark asked me several times if I wanted to get up and do this or talk about that or make a plan for this and I kept saying, "Tomorrow. Today is my day to just hang out with my family and not do anything about Australia." It was lovely. I think Mark read more than half of his new book in one day.

Then Sunday we were back at it. Christmas was over and Australia was back in the forefront. We cleaned out another closet and some other nooks and crannies where we apparently stash things and then forget they exist.

And today is the 2-week until we leave mark and it is beginning to freak me out. I can't decide from one minute to the next whether this is feeling more real or more surreal. We got our visas in the mail on Friday, phew. We have our international drivers licenses. We have passports and airline tickets and travel vouchers for New Zealand. All seems to be falling into place very nicely. Now it's all the little stuff. Should we leave out our vitamin-B complex and kids ibuprofen or bring them with us or store them? Is there a right answer to this question? The nice towels for Prue and Kynan are getting washed and we won't use them anymore before we leave--we'll be using the old crappy ones that can just be thrown in a box after our last shower.

And then there's Jordan. She's been struggling for about 2 or 3 days now. You can tell she's struggling by her whining, screaming, arguing and biting of her mother. I'm not completely sure why she is having a hard time but we all suspect it may be a combination of the lack of normalcy in the last few days, the excitment, and the impending move. So we are struggling with her and wishing we could know for sure what is bothering her. Mark and I are a bit concerned that this move is not her idea of a good time. She is so connected to a few of her friends at school and so comfortable in her classroom with her teacher and her peers that moving her out of that can't make much sense to her deep down. She's shown us nothing but excitment when we talk about Australia and she mentions it spontaneously all the time. But we all know that sometimes we feign excitment when our insides are doing flip-flops or we are both excited and nervous at the same time. So we're intending to get to the bottom of this with her to help her figure out what is going on and to find a way to reassure her that we will take very good care of her no matter what that means. It's hard to see my daughter try to repel the two people who are the most dedicated to helping her through this. Why does being human have to be so hard sometimes??? I'll keep you posted on what happens for her.

Happy Hannukah and Merry Christmas to everyone! Please write and tell us about you!
Love, Nancy