Birthday Week Reflections

Our birthday girl is still sleeping this morning...at last exhausted from the week's festivities.

We're looking over all the photos, and noticing that in spite of our annual protests, we've hosted another big birthday party.

Why do we do this?

Well, after 4 years of resisting it, I think we're beginning to accept that we're OK with really celebrating birthdays. It's the one time of year that we're justified in really going overboard with our children!

Every year around the end of October, we begin discussing Christmas and how we'll make it purposeful. Eric sometimes calls me Scrooge, because I get guilty pangs if we have a certain number of presents under the tree. Christmas is not about our children, Santa, running around like crazy people at after-Thanksgiving sales, and not about accumulating more "stuff." (He knows this, too, of course--but he doesn't understand my need to quantify it. Me neither, really, but don't tell him...)

We're not quite sure how to celebrate around Halloween when everyone else is--without becoming real trolls ourselves by stealing all the festivity.

We are finally getting some Easter traditions into place that involve both the King of Kings and candy Peeps (thanks, Kacie and Kim for sharing ideas each year!!).

I don't know about you, but sometimes it seems that it's a challenge to incorporate fun and festivity with meaningful holiday celebrationg and training. What if we miss the whole point in favor of jelly beans or reindeer food?

OK, so resolved: no more birthday deliberations. This one's going to be pretty simple from now on for us. We celebrate our children because they are such incredible gifts themselves--joyful and grubby and beautiful and full of wonder and with a 12-hour expiration date...and we are simply crazy about them. Weeks fly by, milestones are met and pass, they change and grow and leave their old childish ways behind...and we just want them to know how very much we cherish them.

And now it's time to wake our little 6-year old and get her dressed so she can go to church and learn about the One who loves her soul so much more than we ever could, who can offer her a life that never ends with Him...and she can hang out with other children whose parents are trying to also figure out the balance between faith and frivolity when it relates to instructing their children...
and we will give thanks for another beautiful Sunday, and for life, once again.