joe and jen's place: December 2008

huzzah! we have returned!

hi all!

well, it's been a dark and troublesome valley these past few weeks on account of the inability to post! but now, all is well with the world and we are in the clover.

so, Christmas and all that. it was awesome. let's just sum it up quickly, shall we?

Christmas cards (that was a jolly task!)
Christmas shopping
First annual church Christmas feast (for which joe and i hit the kitchen)
Caroling for the elderly
Christmas hymn sing
Freeman family Christmas
Christmas eve service
Christmas eve fondue
Christmas day with the Freeman and Carlson families combined, complete with a board game or two.

oh, and add in joe's 50 hour work weeks, my holiday work load, my candida food restrictions, and the cleanse regime of six packets of pills a day for six weeks, i'd say we were about full up on things to do.

but, God is SO kind, and we sailed through it all with great delight and only a few moments of insanity. :) and, we praise Him for His proclaiming that we should not be sick for these days. he has blessed us greatly.

the festivities can get crazy. but what's so neat about them is that they urge us to get busy living robustly and joyfully now that Christ has come! our life - our senses and experiences, our speech and our thoughts - becomes heightened because our Savior is now a reality! so it makes sense that our calendars fill up with all kinds of squiggles that tell us to go here and be there and do this and that.

we have pictures, so if blogger continues to be agreeable, we shall be posting them forthwith. happy new year to all you sweet friends!

"we have our hope set on the living God who is the Savior of all people."

this is another test

and we smile because all the world's aright. blogger doth work.

this is a test

dearest blogger,

ah, i've been having the devil of a time tryingto post lately. i mean to say, i haven't been able to! no words, no pictures for forty days and forty nights. almost. it is a boggle to the mind, and i do feel it considerably. o blogger! shall it be forever??

love and good deeds,
me

because we love jamie and we love bekah...

go here. you'll want to win this (i want to win this!): http://rebekahmerkle.blogspot.com/

advent puzzle, day one

advent is here! huzzah!

joe had the day off yesterday, and we spent all day decorating and getting the advent calendar together. (it's a lot of work, this calendar thing!) yes, i realize that advent started on sunday, but i hit a speed bump when i couldn't find my advent calendar that i made last year! but, thank goodness for cost plus! i had bought a little adventish stocking chain thingy back in october thinking it was cute but not intending to use it this year. well, God provides, even in the littlest things, and so the stockings are our calendar this year. i actually quite like them.

we tried to invent our advent activities based on the five senses (i.e., we are Christ's, through and through!). so we went through all our music, books, movies, and poetry (and scriptures, of course!) and constructed a new advent liturgy to go with our new calendar. and let me just say that A Sacrifice of Praise is chock full of advent and Christmas poems written down through Christian history, and it's wonderful! we've got a whole myraid of stuff included. some bach, praetorius, mendelssohn, and handel in the line up. and then there's some bing crosby, jimmy stewart, and charlie brown. ;)

this year, since i can't eat sugar, there are unfortunately no treats hiding in the calendar. i passed by all the perfectly sized candies at cost plus, and couldn't think of a single thing that would be small enough to plant in the calendar and that wouldn't rot! this was hard for me, as i feel as though we're missing something rather important about the coming of Christ. :) He has lavished upon us all things in His joy. not only did He give us everything that is necessary for life and godliness, but also everything unneccesary! and chocolate is perhaps the most necessary expression of the unnecessary! so, i'll have to just make things allowable on my diet, and last night i started things off with a batch of chocolate muffins.

we also decided to do a puzzle this year, as one option-elect for the "touch" category of the senses. i thought i'd document our progress, to see how long it takes us. since joe was home yesterday, we had a rather large pile of hours with which to apply ourselves to the task. :) i doubt our progress will be this significant every day. but it's too much fun, and super addicting. someday we'll probably be one of those old, hunched-over grandparents who've always got a puzzle going in the musty den. ;)