Hey, where'd we go? -December Antics

Sorry, faithful blog people!  I know it's been forever since I posted!  Phew!!  We've had a whirlwind, crazy month!

Since St. Nicholas' feast day, we've had the Immaculate Conception, the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe (which is also my birthday) and several other personal engagements.  It's been wonderful, crazy and great!  But not so conducive to blogging. 

The face says it all- she's an effective alarm clock!

Also, thrown in there, Charlotte has completely given up her nap (meaning I don't have a break in the afternoon any more) and has also been waking us (ok, Joey) up at 5:30am every day.  I'm so grateful for my husband's willingness to Rise and Shine so early in the day so I can get a few more zzz's since I'm still up quite a bit with Beatrice at night.  (It's really cold in our bedroom- poor insulation above a garage and all, and she really just won't sleep unless she's touching me, and if she's touching me she thinks that means she has to nurse, and that gets to be a little frustrating sometimes).

But I digress.

In any case, something I wanted to tell you back around Thanksgiving and never got around to it is our family's Christmas Goal.  It's related to the original goal of this blog, but I think it's much neater.

Our goal for Christmas was to either not spend money on a gift, or buy them from non-commercial sources.  Bear with me, this takes a little explaining.

Bl Beatrice of Nazareth

So we didn't ban spending.  Which is good- who likes to get re purposed socks for Christmas?  Unless they're from my friend Logan, not me.  But we did decide not to purchase gifts from the big box stores or anywhere like that (Darn!  Another month goes by and I don't get to go to the new Ikea!  That I will save for January, I guess..)  Joey and I started off the month joining several other local, young, Catholic artists for our 2nd first Friday show and we decided that it was worth spending a little more to get beautiful, one of a kind, treasures instead of the same old, same old, that everybody else will have in their house (how suburban!).  The impetus was our friend Gwyneth who finished our commissioned painting for our second daughter, Beatrice, or Bl. Beatrice of Nazareth.  You can see her blog post about the painting here.  After you're done adoring that beautiful painting, don't forget to pick up your jaw.  Can you believe that we, a young family, can afford to have something so beautiful hanging on our wall?  We really can't either. Gwyneth is TOO good to us!

From Joey's November Show

So, for Christmas the goal is to make beautiful, and useful maybe too, objects for all of us.  My personal goal is to make one special thing for all the special people who live under my roof, and then to purchase 1 special thing from an independent source.  And finally, for the few items that we really couldn't find anywhere else, we went to a thrift store and found exactly what we were looking for!

I'll let you know after Christmas just how good we did.  I don't want to give away any surprises just yet!  But I will give you a hint- it's one of Charlotte's gifts, and since she can't read she won't have a clue.

Christmas is coming, little girl!