Advent in the Year Of The Baby

There’s an old truism that says, “Man plans, God laughs.” The entire later part of this year, we have shaped the future around one day: December 15^th. More than one person got wide-eyed with my self-assurance about this date. There’s that “Murphy’s Law” thing, you know. And my insides wiggled uncomfortably, because I know Murphy’s Law quite well…but all reason told me I was being paranoid. After all, I’ve never gone into labor.

And so I planned our family life around a December 15^th delivery. We had all our big Advent calendar activities planned for the first two weeks; as of December 11^th, all the major commitments were done, and we planned to take it easy the rest of the month, stay close to home, do nothing stressful.

On November 29^th, when I picked Alex up from piano lesson, I said, “Um, honey, we may be having a baby this week.”

Alex threw both fists into the air. “YAY!” he said.

“Well…” I hesitated. “You need to realize something, Alex. If we have a baby this week, we’re not going to be able to do all the Advent calendar activities.”

He paused. “Why not?”

“We just won’t,” I said. “Trust me. We’ll do as much as we can, but if we have to have a baby this week, we aren’t going to be able to do it all.”

He pondered for a minute, then shrugged. “Okay.”

I missed days 1-10 of the Advent calendar altogether, and although Christian tried valiantly to make the activities happen in my absence, the reality is that Advent Reclamation this year is a poor shadow of its real self, and the little ones—pardon, the middle two—have pretty much no idea what’s going on. It’s an Alex show this year, because he’s the only one who’s made that “tradition” connection so far. But I’m not really upset about it. In the grand scheme of things, it’s only one year, and the excitement of a new baby more than makes up for the loss of the daily anticipation. I mean, let’s be honest: how can making St. Lucy buns compare with this?

Or this?

Or this?

Or this?

(I know. I saved the best for last.)