Merry Christmas!

Everyone in the family now knows of our plans for missions. I still have not had a chance to talk voice to voice with all of my aunts and uncles, but they've heard through the grapevine, and I will make contact this week. Of course, the family has their concerns, but so far everyone has received the news with love and support. My aunt and grandpa are even working on connecting us with some missionaries to Peru that they know.

So the family knows, and everyone is continuing to love us through this big change. We have so much to be thankful for. As we celebrated this Christmas Justin and I kept chatting over the events to come. We wonder if we will have all of our support raised at this time next year and be ready to ship out. We wonder if we'll even have another Christmas in our house. We may have to sell it early to make sure it's sold before we leave. As we put away the ornaments (we had to put up the tree already to fit a VERY oversized gift from my family in our living room...thanks guys), we wondered if we'll be taking our ornaments or starting a new collection for our family in Peru. Do Peruvians have Christmas Trees? or will we have to have a Christmas fern??

It's an exciting yet unknown time for us. We have a large box from Food for the Hungry sitting in our bedroom right now. It arrived on December 23, so we decided to put it aside and focus on Christmas. The significance of the box: it's filled with everything to get us started on our journey toward Peru. It has everything from support raising materials, to spiritual training materials, to an introduction to Peru. We've agreed to breathe until next weekend. Then we will dive in. We're putting together our office in Alex's former nursery (it's been a catch-all room for far too long). It will be decorated with a Food for the Hungry calendar and a large wall map that I bought for Justin for Christmas. It also has just enough Mary Englebreit to give it Gillian charm :)

For today, though, we're just breathing. Our boys absolutely loved Christmas this year. We officially no longer have babies in our home. Today we took down the crib. It's been up since I was pregnant with Alex, and it's been in constant use for these three years. Alex went from the crib to the bed just one night before we moved Nathan from the bassinet to the crib (they're 17 months apart). Today at nap time we kept hearing the boys giggling and we found Nathan had crawled in bed with Alex three times. Tonight I heard the boys giggling after we put them down, and I paused for a moment outside their room listening. In an instant I was zapped back to my first house on Westwood Road. I could hear my sister's vague "mmhmm" as I kept talking long after she was done listening from her bed just a foot above mine (we had a trundle). During the summer we kept a black and white tv on an old nightstand (no tv during the school year) and we'd fix tin foil for an antenae and watch "The Arsenio Hall Show" from our beds. Shoot back even farther into our past and I see our bunk beds. The mattresses were so floppy that we could squish our heads followed by our bodies beneath the rail on the top bunk and dangle from our knees. Flash back a little farther to the double bed we shared and I see the window that was so drafty that ice formed on the inside. We'd have contests to see how long we could hold our feet to the window. The ice would melt under our feet, but they'd grow numb and we'd quit, not because of the cold, but out of boredom.

I eventually went into my boys' room and found them each standing in their own beds facing each other across the room mimicking each other and giggling with their new freedom. Alex, seeing my shadow on the floor, dropped to the pillow immediately and flung the covers over his head. Nathan, still new to this game, waited till I was half-way to his bed before he too dropped. I re-tucked them in, said a stern, "Night Night," and turned for the door stifling my laugh. My mom would have been proud (she had a weakness for adorable disobedience which I inherited). I quickly ran and told Justin so we could laugh together.

So, tonight is when God has given me the peace that even though we will be in a foreign culture, we can still help create a magical childhood for our children even when the outline won't be exactly the same as our own childhoods. Where we are together as a family, we can be as magical as we make it.

Much love to you and yours this Christmas.

Gillian