An Adventure in Reading

We read a very fun book over the Christmas break called Rover Saves Christmas by Roddy Doyle.  Rudolph gets a cold and can't drive Santa's sleigh one Christmas Eve, so he calls on the next best thing:  some Irish dog named Rover.  Rover has all these kid friends who join in to help, and the whole thing is quite hilarious.

One of the chapters starts out with a suggestion that readers get their hats and gloves on because the book is heading to the North Pole.  Here we are obliging:

It was so funny and had us giggling through the whole chapter.

Nora's debut at Lessons & Carols

Our Service of 9 Lessons & Carols fell on the 4th Sunday of Advent, which was 12/23, just one day before 12/24, Christmas Eve. For the choirs of Good Shepherd, that meant pulling together all the carols and then all the Christmas Eve music within 24 hours of each other. Those are two very important services, but John and his singers pulled it off beautifully.

Here's the lovely Nora just before singing at her first Lessons & Carols.  

Bampa and Grandma Ginny came down to spend the weekend with us to see Nora sing and to celebrate an early Christmas with us before heading on to Chicago to spend actual Christmas with Cousins Katie, Louisa, and George.  They were rightfully impressed with Nora's performance, and we spent an enjoyable weekend together.

Mr. Linker posted the below pictures on Facebook.  There's the sweet little Nora just peaking her head out.  She is the youngest and smallest chorister, but it doesn't stop her from singing her heart out.  That night she sang songs in not only English, but French, Latin, and Old English.  She sat and stood, and sat and stood, and sat and stood some more as only an Episcopalian can...and sang, and sang, and sang (as unfortunately not all Episcopalians do)!  We were very proud of her.

Here's the whole choir.  You can see Daddy/Josh in the upper back left hand corner kind of next to Mr. Linker.

Christmas morning

Christmas came upon us rather quickly this year. The kids' first day of break was Friday, December 21. That weekend we hosted Josh's parents for our first round of Christmas, and Josh and Nora geared up for Lessons & Carols on Sunday, December 23. The next day was Christmas Eve, and then suddenly, it was Christmas morning.

Despite the whirlwind of activity, we still had a very good Christmases. Our best really.

Three of our family members - Josh, Nora, and Clare - contributed their beautiful voices to singing in the choir during the Christmas Eve service, and James made it through the nearly 2 1/2 hours remarkably well out in the congregation with me (we got there at 4 to get good spots for the 4:30 prelude, and the service didn't finally wrap up until 6:30). Josh took the kids home for a very elegant meal of leftover pizza while I went to stop by a Christmas Eve party at a friend's house. We tucked the kids in with promises that they'd stay in bed until 7:30, and then Josh headed back to church for the 11:00 service while I played Santa.

 The next morning I got up at 7 to put my homemade pecan sticky buns a la Julia in the oven and out came my Clare Bear. Not 7:30, but pretty decent for a Christmas morning. Nora quickly followed, but to their credit, they held off opening presents until about 7:45 when we were finally able to drag James and Daddy out of bed (Daddy didn't get home until almost 1).

We didn't take too many pictures, but I was very pleased with how pleased the kids were. The presents were appreciated and not just glanced over. We were even able to take turns opening, so the process didn't seem like an orgy of materialism.

James got 2 new pairs of pjs; put on one immediately; and wore one of the two constantly over the next week and a half.

Nora got among other things a new bathrobe and a chest from her Daddy like Harry's to keep all her treasures in.

One of Clare's favorite presents was an Agility Gymnastics t-shirt from her Daddy.

And then to top it all off, James got a GIJOE jet from Uncle Stephen and Aunt Jennifer.  It has made him very happy.

Hope everyone else had a very Merry Christmas as well!

Decorating the tree

Christmas letter 2012

To save paper this year, we have decided to post our Christmas letter on our blog this year:

Dear friends and family.

I recently read somewhere that with Facebook and other social networking tools the holiday letter is an endangered species. I guess the idea is that if a thousand or so of one’s closest friends and family members are up to speed with the day-to-day headlines of one’s life, there isn’t much need for an annual accounting of the sum of those days.

Far be it from us to be old-fashioned. Thus the blog post replaces the mass-printing. But we haven’t forgone the holiday missive just yet. In the first place is the simple fact that although all of you are on the web, many of you are not on Facebook and probably never will be. More to the point, I do think that an “annual accounting” is a valuable internal exercise. If nothing else, it helps to remind ourselves what is important to our lives and what, as the individual days move by so quickly, we can allow to let pass along with them. 

Jocelyn is well into her graduate program in public health. She has recently weathered biostatistics with more skill than she likely gives herself credit for. Those aren’t the words of a patronizing husband; do recall I teach a close cousin of this stuff to other students in a similar professional program. I think she’d say that the more compelling development is her new work on a project designed to improve the nutritional habits of at-risk people in urban areas. She has found a good faculty mentor who has brought her onto that team and it’s nice to see her turn her considerable energy toward that serious public problem. In the meantime she still manages to volunteer at the girls’ school, James’s pre-school and our church’s Meals on Wheels. When I’m done with my work, it’s the couch that beckons.

As for that work, I don’t have much to add to last year’s update, which itself probably added little to that from the year before. That’s the life of a pre-tenured professor: just keep pushing. The work is going well, though, and I’ve got a good number of articles out and about. To be candid, I’m actually more proud of two leaps I’ve made out of my non-professional comfort zone. I’ve taken up running—two half-marathons in the last six months—and, far more frighteningly still—joined the church choir in Jocelyn’s stead while she focuses on school. I’ve been lucky enough to sing (or try to sing) alongside a group of current and former bass singers trained at UK’s well-known school of music. They are very patient and talented young men, and it’s been a true honor to spend time with them. 

This brings me to Nora who, among other milestones, has also officially joined the choir as a “treble”—or child chorister. Mr. Linker, our choirmaster (and Nora’s piano instructor besides) works her very hard, but he is a wonderful teacher. Although she grumbles about practice beforehand, she bounds out of each session like she’s just spent the day at a water park. She continues to enjoy school—more her mother in her than me—and to excel there. The two of us are on Book 6 of our venture into the Harry Potter series together, far enough now for her to hear as much about kissing (“ewww”) as horcruxes or apparition. I am beginning to think of her as our old soul—that she is 8 going on 38—but I know much of that is illusory, the product of being our oldest. I am trying to enjoy these years that she can truly be called a child, before my annual accounting has me writing about taking her off to college.  But maybe that’s getting too far ahead of ourselves. Perhaps it’ll simply be that next year she’ll want to write her own paragraph here in this space.

Clare. Clare Frances. For those of you who know her well, I could probably stop here and say simply that Clare has joined a gymnastics program. Knowing nothing else, you’d know what this means to a kid like Clare. Since she was about three or four hours old, Clare has needed a outlet for what seems to be her ceaseless physical energy. Last spring a teacher’s aide with some experience in the sport suggested that it might be something Clare would enjoy. Or like. Or some other word conveying moderate affinity. In fact she’s become obsessed. It wouldn’t quite be fair to the dozen or so stuffed animals in her bed, to her new and related skepticism of food derived from animal products, or the ease with which she seems to glide through her schoolwork to say gymnastics is the focus of Clare’s life. In fact the words “Clare” and “focus” do not on most days go well together. She’s a true free spirit, and still lives up to the line I paraphrased from a favorite song of hers when she was two: “the most wonderful thing about Clare, is that Clare’s the only one!”

On, finally, to our little James, who is blessed (or cursed?) with being the object of his parents’ unrelenting affection. At three, he has all of the fire we have come to expect from that age, but we experience this together with a sort of calm and joy that we might have missed the first couple times around when, with our girls, these moments were beautiful but frantic and exhausting. His favorite things remain songs—here is as good a place as any to tuck in the news that I’ve taught all three kids about 90 percent of the songs from Les Miserable—but now he’s also obsessed with the great matters of boyhood:  Spiderman, toy soldiers, Star Wars, and foam swords chief among them. As these do not generally interest his “stisters,” as he calls them, I’m often called into the happy duty of being James’ playmate. He is a sweet boy and a genuine homebody. I think all he wants to do in his little life is be with the four of us, and preferably here in our little home. You might think this is a product of having to endure countless car rides to his sisters’ events, and hand-offs between parents as we move from task to task. It is likely so, but I prefer to think of it as just a basic expression of a kind-hearted and content little boy.

There you have it. We remain healthy and happy, knowing that we are fortunate to be both and therefore grateful for it. We wish you the joy and the peace so hoped for in this season of renewal.

With love,

JJNCJ

Snow, Kentucky style

Introduction to The Hobbit

Saturday morning while Clare was at gymnastics and Daddy was busy grading, I took Nora and James to a special interactive Hobbit story time at Joseph Beth Booksellers.  A local Tolkien group came dressed up as some of the characters and read parts of the book.

Nora was quite intrigued...

...to see the various characters...

...especially the hairy feet of Bilbo.

James made it about 15 minutes, needed a little break of wandering around the store, and then finished up the last 5 minutes.  Afterwards, the kids made dragons out of toilet paper rolls and crepe paper. 

A fun little morning!

We stopped on our way to the car to do a little photo shoot.  I wasn't sure if I'd do individual shots of the kids for our annual Christmas card or one with all three together.  I thought I'd see what I could get out of Nora.  She hates posing and is convinced she doesn't know how to smile, but there are still a couple of nice ones in the bunch.