It’s December 29 and this has been the most mild of Decembers I can remember in the middle of the country.  We had some snow at the beginning of the month and people, as they always do, lost their minds about it.  Somehow that first big snowfall of the year doesn’t seem to jog the memory of the average citizen here to slow down and increase their stopping distance by two or three fold. Instead they get panicky and feel odd urges to get home as quickly as possible because they have 4-wheel drive and their Escalade does awesome in the snow, except for when they need to make their hunk of metal stop.

That snow didn’t last long as the temperatures crept back into October levels leaving copious amounts of sand and gravel and rock salt all over the streets. I pity the children who have been out on their bikes this week and have found their ability to stop impaired by all the silt. I remember that time I flipped over my handlebars trying to stop in the sand. It was less than good.

Thankfully, my children have remained safely on the right side of their handlebars. They’ve decorated our driveway with chalk. They’ve played the bean bag game.  There was a trip to a park and football in the backyard.  It isn’t quite sledding or shoveling or snow angel creating and there haven’t been any snowmen yet,  but I think it has been a fantastic trade.

The tiny drops of rain that are hitting the window now are welcome to fall as snowflakes, but I won’t complain about the rain either.

One of the things that is suggested for SPD is using crutches.  That has to be the stupidest suggestion I have ever read for pregnant women. Pretty much every single thing you read about giant lopsided bodies is that they should wear sturdy shoes and keep their feet firmly planted on the ground. Putting crutches under the armpits of third trimester waddling women is only a good idea if someone has a camera and is looking to wind up being made fun of by Daniel Tosh.

I did, however, appreciate the advice to move my legs at the exact same time when turning over in bed. Since it already takes a forklift and a hard hat to turn me over at night, I figured moving my legs at the same time might prove too difficult for me, but no. Accomplished!  And helpful!

Three weeks to go until I am officially full term and then I am going to follow every stupid suggestion I find on the internet on how to start labor. I have no idea if midwives are into membrane stripping, but I’m going to find out. For realz.

It’s reaching epic proportions.

I have laid around pretty much every evening while my uterus contracts. It has been awesome. I have consumed my own weight in Tums and Protonix while being pretty sure that my esophagus has holes in it. I have made suppers I cannot eat and watched my ability to use reason disappear down the garbage disposal. I have stressed out about nothing and shrugged over things that have meaning.

There is no snow on the ground and the weather is unseasonably warm. It just doesn’t feel a lot like Christmas and that seems rather fitting for 2011. It wasn’t the kind of year over which I’ll be nostalgic down the road. It was one of the hardest we’ve been through, really – lots of death (figuratively and very much literally), lots of uncertainty, lots of disappointment, lots of just straight up hard stuff. This would’ve been one bummer of a Christmas letter had I decided to write it all down month by month or something.

But it wasn’t all hard and it wasn’t all bad. We had visits from my incredible cousin Jackie and her hilarious husband Chris, Ronke, Allison & Dan, friends from overseas and more. We watched our kids grow into amazing, hilarious people that we like more and more every day. We watched great people get married, good friends have adorable babies and parents walk through the process of adopting their little ones. We went on trips and made memories that will one day, hopefully, be louder than the hard stuff.

I don’t know what your 2011 was like, but I hope that no matter the over arching theme (dramz or chill or love or death) you’ll be able to be thankful for the journey. I have been repeatedly reminded of Job’s comment to his wife in 2:10 where he says “Shall we indeed accept good from God and not accept adversity?” I suppose I should label it the verse of the year. The Lord gives and the Lord takes away. Blessed be the Name of the Lord.

Here’s to 2012! To new life, new adventures and the unknown of a year packed with possibilities.

Indeed he was not. By Sunday night, he was worse. He left the dinner table to go to bed and just collapsed by himself in his blankets. A fever. A horrendous barking seal of a cough. Croup had returned. The much hated, sleep stealing jerk that it is was back for another round. And why not? It has been visiting us at least once a year since 2007 and it wouldn’t be fall/winter/cold/flu season without it.

Tuesday dawned with the brightness of hope. It had been cold enough to sit outside with him when his cough was terrible in the middle of the night and he didn’t seem to be doing too terribly bad, but the stridor was undeniable. I called to beg for a steroid without being seen because this is not the kind of sickness I am wrong about. I am a pro at diagnosing croup. The nurse hadn’t called back by nap time and Gideon had been convinced that he would make it back to preschool if he could just sleep off the illness. But no one can sleep without oxygen and forty five minutes after he laid down, the kid was out of bed, gasping. Red cheeked, white chinned and blue lipped he had fear all over him as he went outside to suck down the coldness.

Pinked up lips and a calmer breathing pattern and I was on the phone to the doctor’s office. Steroid called in and we were on our way to healing.

But two kids means two rounds and she started in on Thursday. A slight cough but it didn’t quite sound the same, so I took her in and surprise surprise she has croup, but with a sinus and ear infection kicker. When she falls, she falls hard.

She is still there – somewhere on the ground oozing around like equal parts water and corn starch. Still coughing all through the night. Still begging to take a nap an hour after she wakes up. Still perking up for a few hours and then crashing back down into a puddle of awful that requires tears and begging for sleep. She is so tired and her throat hurts and I am so sorry. I wish I could make it all better and I am trying not to miss the lesson for me in the midst of it all – stuff like patience and sympathy and the sustaining power of Christ. Good things to learn, even when the lessons come wrapped in feverish tiny foreheads and raw red throats.

- Can you believe that the United States killed a man yesterday who was by all reasonable evidence wrongly convicted of a crime. Not an innocent man, by all accounts he was involved in law breaking, but he was convicted for the act of murdering a police officer and then someone else eventually confessed and just about all of the ‘eye witnesses’ admitted to being bullied by police interrogation practices and no one, not The System or the fail safe of a Governor would step in to stop it. I still think we have the best system in the world, but it presses in on me how flawed even the best things on this earth are.

- Speaking of earth! Don’t be alarmed about space junk falling and killing you. If you are, I have some chores for you to do because you have far too much time to sit and ponder things like the probability of dying from debris (odds: zero to you are not that important).

- Is the Big 12 going to finally implode? Will anyone take Oklahoma and OSU and the dread Longhorns? I’m starting to guess that nobody wants a team with their very own television channel to dork around with the balance of their other already committed and not so snotty nor self-righteous schools. Just a thought, but those white and burnt orange pants may be just a bit too small.

- I’m really tired of all the whining people are doing on Facebook about everything from the new layout (Waaa! I hate change!) to the cool air (Fall is here again?!) to the normal inconveniences of living every day life (I waited IN A LINE for LIKE 15 MINUTES!). I am sorry about how difficult your life is, but last I checked these things are best handled by properly evaluating your station in this world. Here’s your first world check list before you whine on FB:

1. Did I have to walk any distance outside of my house with a dirty container to get dirty water for my family to consume today?
2. Did I not enjoy the use of anything that required electricity or natural gas?
3. Don’t I own more than two pairs of clothing and shoes?

If you answered NO to any or all of these questions please feel free to complain. Otherwise, let’s all just attempt humor, catch up with people we barely know now and communicate things others will find interesting (oh now I’m whining about people whining. Good thing I live in the first world and had TIME to do it).

- I made some brownies and put peanut butter and chocolate chips in them. The rest of my brain power is engaged in a massive battle about those brownies. EAT THEM! What are you crazy? They are for tonight and you have already eaten some of them, you glutton! EAT THEM! EAT THEM! EAT THEM!

Now go. You’ve stayed your hour.

Lunch and nap times passed uneventfully and then we went to the park. What is it about some days when you are feeling so wonderfully benevolent to the small people in your house and they just have to take that benevolence in their four tiny hands and rip its face off with their teeth? Yeah. The park was a disaster. A disaster with an audience. My very favorite of its kind. We left. Their sweaty feet stunk up the van while we drove home (don’t judge me. I need an option other than walking if Gummi Bear over here decides to land a swift kick to my bladder). In the house the feuding continued and now they are banished until their father arrives or Jesus comes back, whichever happens first.

One day I am sure I will look back on these days and not be able to even recollect the depths of their depravity as preschoolers, but I’m guessing there will be twos in front of their ages by then.

For instance, I was prone to not showering before Piper’s nap time, which also meant I was prone to laying around all morning letting the hours somehow slip by me without being productive in any way whatsoever. This week I’ve been hitting the shower at normal people hours (in part due to the fact that I am not working out at all, blaming Gummi Bear for this laziness and thinking thoughts about how a heartbeat of 140 isn’t working out anyway), applying makeup prior to my 4:30 “Jud will be heading home in the next hour” preparation time, and in general finding out what I always knew to be true. When you get ready for the day, your day goes so much better. It sets the tone for engaging the world, the kids and the various machines around our home that help me out. I’ll probably never know why I need to be fully dressed to confront the washing machine and the loads of laundry sitting in front of it, but I can’t deny the reality that is our home when I am put together.

I had kind of counted on the idea that Gid would be gone in the mornings but very present in the afternoons. Piper and I would get some serious alone time while he was in class. Gideon and I would get that same alone time while she napped. But let me tell you about how tired he is after holding himself together for those 2.5 hours. Extremely. Insanely. He’s lash-out-and-randomly-kick-your-sister tired. I obliged him with nap time. He obliged me with sleeping. And now I have two hours in the afternoon to myself, to continue the productivity, to get some much needed rest myself, to work or pay the bills or prep supper. It is both wonderful and kind of sad, but I wouldn’t dare to keep the kid awake just to get to play with him, primarily because he is so out of his mind he can’t put a sentence together by 3pm and then all I do is correct and cajole for the rest of the day. He’s in bed directly after supper time and I really miss out on who he really is.

So we are saddled with nap time for both of them again, even if he doesn’t really take a very good one every day. In the meantime I’ll keep enjoying the days spent with both of them and looking forward to happy hours filled with pre-Kindergarten fun.

In spite of those patchouli scented fears, I will admit that I SOMETIMES, every so often, when everything is not aligned, think about it. Should I jump in and get a system? Should I be the only one in this house who diapers the next baby? Would this change how much sleep I get post partum?

These thoughts have nowhere to go. Scratch that. Had nowhere to go. For now, the incredible Amalah has written down her thoughts on it all. They are good thoughts. Thoughts you may or may not be interested in reading. If not, don’t click. If you are, here’s where to look:

Post #1 – the preamble

Post #2 – the dirty truth

Post #3 – yet to come

Yeah. These were so good that I am posting a link to the third installment that is yet to come. Sorry, it was that good.

Thought you might want to read for yourself and perhaps jump into the comments over there or here or whatevs. Kisses, hippies!

But my mom didn’t. She’s good like that. She poked at me a little to ‘have that checked out’ and I drug my feet a little. By the time I was convinced that something could maybe possibly actually be incorrect and finally called the pediatric eye doctor there was a two week wait. TWO WEEKS. Two weeks including a vacation where she claimed to not be able to see the mountains of Colorado. THE ROCKY MOUNTAINS. Yeah. I wasn’t going to cancel that appointment.

I woke Gideon from his nap (His NAP!! He took a NAP today and hopefully all of the terrible behavior of late will dissipate now that his will has been bent back to mine and he is getting rest in the afternoon) and loaded them into the van. Fantastic office. Great doctor. All of the staff commented on her shoes. The doc asked if she is always this cooperative (answer: for doctors? yes. girl loves to get checked out by medical professionals. She’ll need a job with great benefits some day). And then he pronounced her far sighted. The exact opposite of what I thought might be the problem. Huh.

Blinking? Guesses: She colors and writes ALL the time and perhaps does not blink so much while she is creating. Blinking when she is done is the overcompensation for her concentration. OR she maybe just likes blinking and got into a habit and since she is two she keeps doing it, without really thinking about it. OR there’s always that hair thing. If only she loved barrettes just a bit more.

Whatever the case, she doesn’t need glasses. Neither does Gideon. But they both complained about their eyes on the way home. I don’t have to guess at why. Licorice sticks as rewards convinced them both that getting their eyes dilated is worth the trouble.