Merry Christmas!

 We made cookies.

Lots and lots more than are seen here, but I mostly didn't have my camera with me.

We did our family nativity.

I'm not including the whole performance.

It was a doozy!

This might have been our last year of a full nativity production because everyone has outgrown the costumes.  Lola barely fit in our Mary costume, and the arguments discussions it took to decide who would be whom were almost traumatic.

Maybe it's time to pull out a nativity set and have kids move the pieces around as we read together.

Over 20 years of acting it out in person will be hard to put away, though.

Maybe I should just sew some larger costumes!

We finished our Christmas picture book collection.  I didn't count them, but there were 24 gift bags and many of the bags had two or more books in them, so we might have read as many as 36 picture books together this December.

On Christmas Eve the weather was very mild, so we had a fire in the yard and roasted hot dogs and s'mores for dinner.

photo credit:  Little Princess

We put out milk and cookies for Santa, hung our stockings, and went to bed.

We had all 15 of us together for Christmas morning!

Here is an extremely curated set of pictures of the morning's activities.

Waiting on the basement stairs together to come up to the living room all at once

Nature Angel custom painted this picture for Mister Man.

Nature Angel also designed and crocheted the sweater that Lola is holding up.

Belle's gift to all of her siblings was tickets to see Wicked that afternoon.  For my youngest 6 kids, it was their first time in a movie theater--ever!

Belle gave them a run-down of what to expect and general movie theater etiquette.

In the van, on the way

Belle is circled in red.  I don't know why she was so far away, but there they all (except Super Star and Mr. E)

It might be hard to think of going to the movies as educational, but it was their first time, and they learned a lot of new things in this first experience.

And they LOVED the movie!

With new games and new books and a general sense of post-celebration exhaustion, we had a number of very quiet days that looked a lot like this:

And there was a lot of silliness and teasing, as well.

One afternoon, Pixie took the youngest 8 to the park where they played baseball (and other games) for 2 hours.

I stayed home where I took a little nap, folded laundry, washed dishes, and prepared dinner.  By the time they came home, all they had to do was wash up and sit down to eat!

It was a good afternoon all around.

In the post-Christmas evenings, we read a "for fun" book.

In spite of Lola's face in this picture . . . 

 . . . the kids loved the book, and so did I.  When everything came together at the end, the kids couldn't hold still or keep quiet for even a minute at a time!

Sometimes I'm irritable at being interrupted so much while I read, but that's definitely a mistake on my part.   I have to consciously remind myself to enjoy "interruptions" because they are how my kids express their engagement. 

*sigh*

Almost 25 years into this parenting gig, and I'm still working on learning basic lessons.

Here's a painting by Nature Angel that I forgot to include several weeks ago:

And then, because it makes me happy to look at, here's a photo she took outside one day:

Our school curriculum has us jumping into the Civil War next, and I was able to pull enough books off our own shelves to cover the month's reading--even if we don't have the exact books on the schedule.  My next step is to print the copywork and art pages, and we'll be ready to start school again.

In the meantime, we'll go ahead and start one of the scheduled read-alouds at bedtime to get us going.

It's hard to believe an actual new year starts in just a couple of days.  I find that I feel quite reflective, and I'm reading books and watching videos and listening to podcasts about encouragement to see goals through, setting new goals, and intentional mothering.  I may be in my final 8 years of hands-on parenting of kids/youth, but these are an important 8 years, and I don't want to fall into passivity--which I feel myself inclined to do.

With our relative stability at home, I'm just alert enough to want to do more than survive.