The Right Time

Currently, Grig and I are struggling with a decision. With the passing of Dakota last October, we've been contemplating getting a second dog. When we prayed about it before, we felt like we should wait until after Christmas.

Then, a few days after Christmas, a friend of ours had us keep their puppy for a few days. It was so neat to see how gentle Arkhon was with the puppy and to realize how much easier puppy training is when you have a backyard. It was really fun to hold their fluffy little guy and to play with him.

During the same time, I discovered I wasn't pregnant. That realization was especially heartbreaking this month.

So, with those two things combined, I began to look at puppies again.

For a long time, we've been looking for Norwegian Elkhound pups, but there are no breeders on this side of the United States. We had begun to give up on owning them anytime soon. However, the day after the puppy left, I discovered some elkhound pups for sale on in a nearby town.

The timing seemed miraculous. Grig was especially excited. His first dog was an elkhound cross, and he loves the breed. He immediately texted the seller, and we made an appointment to come out and see the pups.

We went and looked at them last night, and they were the most adorable, fluffy puppies I've ever seen!

This isn't the pups we saw, but it gives you an idea of what they looked like. 

They are only four weeks old right now, so we were mainly coming to see the facilities and meet the parents. We were pretty impressed with the family, and the mother and father elkhound had great temperaments!

The pups cost more that we really should be spending right now, but we could do it, if we felt it was right. Things have happened in such a way that it is hard for us to feel like finding these pups is just a coincidence.

We feel like this is the right breeder and the right parents, but we aren't sure if this is the right time or the right litter. We've been doing a lot of praying.

Mostly, we just want to make the right decision. We don't want to do something that's going to financially hurt us, but we also don't want to miss out on this opportunity if the Lord provided it.

Decisions can be hard sometimes.

Especially when they're this adorable.

Again, not the exact pups, but still very cute. 

My Thoughts on the Santa Claus Thing *Age Restricted to Unbelieving Adults*

I'm writing this post with the knowledge that this is every individual's choice to make, and it's none of my business what you decided to do with your Christmas holiday.  

Having said that, I love the tradition of Santa Claus.  More and more of my peers nowadays are deciding not to have Santa Claus as a tradition in their homes.  One particular person I know has decided not to because they don't want to lie to their kids, so they have told them from the get go that Santa Claus doesn't come visit them on Christmas Eve.

Personally, I can understand, but I don't fully agree.  Again, it is every parent's choice, but I loved Santa Claus when I was a kid!  I loved the excitement and magic Christmas morning when presents appeared and it was fun to pretend that a big man in a red suit had brought them to our house.

I believed in Santa until I was eleven.  I'm sure there were kids at school who told me he wasn't real, but I didn't care.  I didn't really believe he came down the chimney, but I had a personal theory that he was like a catalog.  The parents ordered what they wanted from him, and Christmas Eve he drove around and brought the presents to all the houses, delivering them via the front door.  My Santa was unconventional and somewhat practical, but I still loved him.

When I was eleven, my parents pulled me into their room and told me that he didn't exist.

I cried.  I really did.

And then I got over it.  I enjoyed helping my parents stuff stockings for the younger kids after that and helping to make it magical for them.  The excitement of BEING Santa replaced the excitement of BELIEVING in Santa.  That kept him alive for me.

I love pretending, and in that sense, Santa is real. Santa is the joy of surprising your children and increasing anticipation.  It is the fun of imagination and trying to figure out a holiday tradition. Santa was a real person.  He once existed and the tradition of giving makes him very much alive in our homes today.  Santa definitely shouldn't replace Christ, but as a fun Christmas tradition, I don't have a problem with him.  

Finding out that Santa didn't really come to our house on Christmas didn't cause me to question everything else my parents had ever taught me.  Instead, it simply turned into a fun Christmas tradition for me.  It reemphasized the point that Christmas was about the REAL Savior, not a man from the North Pole.

For me personally, it was just a lot of fun.

However, I understand that for others, the realization that Santa wasn't real had a different impact on them, and I understand that.  Due to that, many parents have decided that they're not going to lie and pretend to their children.  They are going to be honest with them and tell them straight. 

However, before you tell your children that Santa isn't real, remember one thing.  There are a lot of other children that your child is going to make cry.  They may not do it on purpose, but a lot of other children out there are going to be believing in Santa, and your child is going to tell them that he is not real.  They will probably argue about it and it will probably cause a lot of hurt feelings.  Your child may also be hurt because their peers don't believe what they know to be true.  Other children will be hurt because it is fun to believe in Santa, and your child is removing some of the magic from their childhood.

I don't know what the right answer is.  Again, it's a very personal decision.  All I know is that what you decide does affect other children besides your own. Personally, I want my kids to enjoy Santa, at least for as long as they can. That's part of what made Christmas magical for me when I was a kid, and I want my kids to enjoy that too.  Maybe I'm wrong, but isn't it up to me and Grig to decide what we want for our children?  Just like it's up to you?

Do what you think is right for your family.

Merry Christmas to all those who decide to be Santa and for those who decide not to be.  Either way, it doesn't change the magic of the season.  As we celebrate and remember the Christ child, there is a magic to that to, and it is a magic that never goes away.

In fact, it only increases as you get older.

Of Mice and Moving

Yesterday was a cray day.  It started out normal enough.  I spent the morning blogging, working on stories, working on the next Dragon and the Wolf video (which will be coming out on the 15th), playing with Kevin, cooking, and cleaning.

However, about 3 p.m. (I have to put the p.m., because this week I've been up helping Grig get to work at 3 a.m.), I got a text from our neighbor.  As a side note, this neighbor is the one whose daughter (Angela) we've been babysitting.  They were moving out and they needed help.  The mother is pregnant, and the grandmother who lives with her had knee surgery a few months ago.

Grig's brother, who is living with us, was the only help I had.  I put on my baby backpack, stuck Kevin in, and he and I went to work.  We started moving out all of their stuff.  Here's a neat thing that happened though.  A couple weeks ago, we pulled all of the boxes from our house that we'd used to move in.  We broke them apart, and put them in our trunk.  We kept meaning to take them to the recycling center, but it never happened.  Turns out, that was a blessing.  Our neighbors really needed those boxes.

However, Grig was at work until 3:30, so I told them that they would have to wait until Grig brought the car back home.  She said that was fine, and so my brother-in-law and I took out what we could until Grig came home.

Except he never came!  It was 4:00, and he still hadn't shown up.  Kevin was getting tired, thirsty, and sweaty from being in the backpack.  I was thirsty as well, so we went up to get a drink.  Do you know how hard it is to help a baby drink from a sippy cup when they're on your back?  We did a rather complicated dance for a while, and then I slipped off one of the shoulder straps, and we succeeded.  Luckily, once I get the cup to him, he can hold it alright.  At 4:10, I checked my phone.  Grig had texted to tell me he wouldn't be home until 4:30.  We kept working.  Finally, at 4:45, he came home.  My brother-in-law had needed to eat something and Grig had just come home from a twelve hour workday, so I told him to go shower, and I left Kevin with my brother-in-law while I went to get the boxes.

The boxes were stacked in such a way that it was easiest to carry them if you had two people because then you could grab the biggest one together and all the other boxes sat on top.  That's how Grig and I carried it out.  However, I didn't remember that until I got the car pulled up to the side of the apartment.  So, it ended up taking me three trips to get all the boxes up.  There wasn't much more we could do at that point, but I told them to let us know when they needed us to help haul boxes down again.

About a half an hour later, after Grig and his brother had left to run a couple errands quick, Angela's mother knocked on my door.

"Look what we found in my ex-boyfriend's shoe," she said.  She pointed down to the ground and there on our stairway were four baby mice.  She explained that her ex had some to get his stuff, and as he loaded his shoes, he'd seen something in the bag.  He'd opened it and a mouse had run down the stairs to the outside world.  Then he pounded out his shoes and out came the baby mice.

They were so cute!  Their eyes weren't even open, and they were shaking.  They were at that adorable stage where, when they try to move, they just kind of wobble.  Their skin was a light gray color and they were so tiny.

Here's the dilemma.  The mother mouse had run away.  I couldn't hand feed baby mice.  We didn't have the tools or money to provide for them.  If we didn't do something, they would just starve to death.  Or...we have a pet snake.

I was quite a bit torn about this.  They were really cute, and I really love animals.  I've killed very few in my life (one mink actually, and that is an interesting story that I will tell another time.)  However, these mice were going to die anyway.  I felt like at least if they fed our snake there would be a purpose to their death.  So, I scooped them into a tupperware that we use to thaw out the mice that we feed Oryx (our snake) and I left them in there until Grig got home.  I really hated to kill them.  I called my dad whose advice I trust and told him the situation.  He recommended that we freeze the mice so they wouldn't spread diseases, just in case.  He also said that freezing was a pretty humane way to kill them.

From what I've heard, it's really cold for a while, but then you feel warm and you just go to sleep.  So, when Grig got home, we talked it over and stuck the mice in the freezer.  Grig thinks we might need to boil them after to freeze them, just in case.  We'll see.  We both felt pretty bad about it, but it was comforting to know that their deaths would at least have some purpose.

Okay, so maybe we're weird for worrying about killing a couple of baby mice.  Or maybe we're cruel for killing them.  Regardless of your opinion, we were trying to make the right decision.  Maybe it would have been more humane to just smash them and put them out of their misery, but I couldn't do that.  I feel like we made the right choice.  The only question I had at the end was this:

Where's a cat when you need one?  

Anyway, when Grig and his brother got home they finished helping them move while I got the kids out of the way for a while.

So, it was a good day.  Crazy, but good. It's always nice to help out a neighbor, and we really appreciated the opportunity to help them.  We've been trying to be good neighbors and we're sad that they're moving, but she's pretty excited about it so we're happy for her.

And that is the story Of Mice and Moving.