Doing something every day (even for a season) makes it a pretty big deal. An elf that reports in to Santa and plays tricks around your house? What message is that sending?

We don’t do Santa. There are lots of reasons, but primarily because gifts are not the focus of our Christmas celebration. However, I can see how Santa could be a fun part of a Christian family’s Christmas without taking it over. Santa could bring one special gift. You don’t have to emphasize the naughty and nice element. This is certainly an area where freedom abounds.

I’ve said before, and will say again for clarity’s sake, it would be weird if all a family’s traditions were religious in nature and had deep theological meaning. It’s good to have fun traditions and family culture. I am not knocking that at all.

But Christmas is about incarnation. God in flesh, who came to dwell with us. It’s an amazing picture of grace.

How does the elf on a shelf fit into an incarnational Christmas celebration? God doesn’t keep a naughty list. He knows how sin easily entangles us. I want my children to know God’s holiness and to strive to follow Jesus in obedience. But I also want them to know that God wants repentant hearts more than compliant exteriors. Jesus came to call sinners, not the righteous.

The things that we spend the most time and energy on during Advent and Christmas are going to be things that draw us to this great story of incarnation. The hope and longing for a rescuer, then the joy at His appearing.

That’s not to say that we won’t watch Frosty or drive around looking at lights or do a myriad of other things that are not Christ-centered. But none of those things are daily, central parts of our celebration.

Maybe I’m wrong and your elf is gracious and kind and brings your child a Jesse Tree story every morning. Feel free to share if you’ve figured out a way to reconcile the elf to your Christmas celebration. I’ve just spent several years a little mystified watching this trend explode.

Radical, self-giving love is hard to make into a formula or six simple rules to be sure your children follow Jesus. But it’s what we are called to, as parents and as followers of Jesus.

You are your child’s first view of God compelled me to find one sentence I really wanted to strive for in parenting. I chose “gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.” This is still extremely relevant with older children but I meditate on it much less.

One of the advantages of parenting older children is that they are trying to understand God and his character better for themselves, so I am able to talk about that directly and engage with them about who God is. When they were babies and toddlers, I did that, but the conversation was mostly one-sided. I was relying much more heavily on the indirect. However, I am also their first view of what it looks like to follow Jesus, so living out gospel principles (do justice, love mercy, walk humbly) is just as important as it was before.

You can not parent by remote control was huge to me with toddlers. I strove to follow up my directions with actions, helping them to comply without much fuss from either of us. e.g. if I said “Don’t touch that,” I would get up and move them away. As children mature, they are better able to listen and control their impulses, so I do not have to get up and make sure they do everything I say every moment.

This maturity makes my life a lot easier, but I think that the general principle is still entirely relevant. Even if they can do what I tell them to do, it is good for all of us to have accountability. I need to follow up and make sure what they can do on their own is done well. I need to stop and take time to engage them throughout the day, so they know how important they are to me.

I am really thankful for the hours we spent talking about children and parenting while pushing Kate in her stroller. These ideas have grown well with the girls, but they are more subsets of those bigger philosophies about what we believe about children and what kind of people we want them to be. Being philosophical about parenting has given me good lenses to evaluate practical everyday strategies, and also made it easy to take or leave those strategies as needed, because the bigger picture ideas provided continuity.

It’s probably time to revisit those big ideas and hone them. We have a long way to go on this journey.

*** There are still several days left to enter the giveaway for my new etsy store (see the post on November 1st) Yay, giveaways! ***

Just when you’ve found the perfect strategy or product or idea, something changes, and it doesn’t work any more. You have to try something new. Maybe even swallow your pride and do that thing you swore you’d never do.

Mothering in particular can feel like management, as we seek to control daily chaos. The trouble is that children are people, not problems to be solved. And people are dynamic. They change, the problem changes, everything feels askew.

Love, that ever fixed mark, compels us to go beyond. Sometimes it calls us to find another fixed mark, to figure out what we really want for our kids that circumstances cannot change. The sort of lofty idea that is hard to quantify or assess daily, like doing justice, loving mercy and walking humbly with their God.

Frankly that can be a little bit scary. Having children who eat vegetables is the sort of goal you might really reach and know you have, and there is a sense of accomplishment in that. But I hope to find a much greater joy at the end of this journey.

I included things we say all the time, lyrics from songs I sing to the girls, etc. So even though we didn’t come up with them together, they have a lot of personal flavor. Both girls said they sounded great. Now to get them printed and hung, probably in a different color, even though I like this grey a lot.

I have thought about it every day since, in a variety of different situations other than the one that prompted my tweet. We want our kids to be safe, happy, and successful by American standards: well-educated, socially adept, able to earn a comfortable living. The problem is when we value those things above everything else, that’s what we impart to our children, as their beliefs are shaped by our actions more than our rhetoric. More and more American Christianity has turned to Moral Therapeutic Deism.

The fact that most Christian teens in the US believe the central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself should be very sobering to the church. The good news isn’t that if you work hard, you will be successful and happy.

I’m not sure how this fleshes itself out in everyday life, but our children have to know that though they are loved and valued, their happiness, comfort and safety are not the top priority in the life of our family.

We are united to Christ in salvation, and so we share in the great work he is doing in redeeming the world. We share in his sufferings, so we can share in his glory. How can that define our family life? What difference does the gospel make in our choices for our children?

Even though Lexi tolerates the rock and pop standards I rotate into their playlists much better than she used to, she refused to include any of them in this list. I thought “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” might make the cut or something by the Beatles. Nope. Truly, these are her choices. I don’t loathe any of these songs, but none of them are on my list of current favorites, either.

2011.02
Say Hey (I Love You) . Michael Franti & Spearhead
I Gotta Feeling . The Black Eyed Peas
Whip My Hair . Willow
Shackles (Praise You) . Mary Mary
Hello Seattle . Owl City
Live Like There’s No Tomorrow . Selena Gomez & the Scene
What I Am . will.i.am (sesame street)
Pack Up Your Troubles in Your Old Kit Bag . Minnutes
Edge of the World . Mat Kearney
A Place in This World . Taylor Swift
More to Luv . Minnutes
Everybody . Ingrid Michaelson
Over the Rainbow . Jason Castro

I’m a trendsetter, apparently. Why the Next Pop Culture Wave Might Be Libraries.

After Haiti: The Chaos of U.S. Adoptions An in-depth look at some of the expedited adoptions post-earthquake that brings up some very important questions about international adoption I’ve been wrestling with for a long time. Why are people giving up their children in the third world? What is the best way we can intervene? For the record, “orphan” doesn’t necessarily mean what it does to us around the world. To the U.N. if you’ve lost (or never were connected to) one parent, you are an orphan. In some countries, it is applied to any child who is abandoned.

Parenting an infant is a baptism by fire. One day you have this tiny being with a stomach the size of his itty bitty fist, to feed and change and comfort all day and all night. One of the things that gave me clarity as we embarked on those early days with a baby was to think theologically about parenting, and come up with some ideas of family life that we could start to try to live out.

You are your child’s first view of God was one of the ideas I gleaned from Andrew Murray’s Raising Your Children for Christ. The one sentence I wanted to live out was “gracious, slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love.” (I still think of this daily.) I also meditated a lot on how the girls were not just my daughters, but my sisters in Christ through baptism, the least of these in God’s kingdom in many ways. Having a view of their identity in our family, and to God, helped me to filter different ideas of child rearing and care that I came across.

Sleep deprivation is a form of torture, and the parents of newborns know it well. I love sleeping. One of my methods for getting as much sleep as possible was keeping them full during the day. Our rhythm was eat-nap-eat-awake. Rhythms are great. A strict schedule was too much for me to handle, I don’t like everything that dictated, but having a general idea of what’s going to happen next is good for kids. Keeping them well fed also meant they were pretty flexible when we were out, and could miss a feeding. We also kept things pretty light during the day, dark at night. We used a miracle blanket for swaddling at night, also. On another practical note, I am a big fan of babywearing, slings and other carriers are great tools for getting things done and keeping babies calm and happy in the process.

But, even with all the tricks in the book, babies wake up. (They have those tiny stomachs.) Mine would sleep well for weeks, and then hit a growth spurt or start teething. Hyland’s makes a great teething tablet, but I still had to get up to pop the homeopathic tablet into the baby’s mouth for it to be effective. God had to have a purpose in the way he created babies, and my theory is that this waking and neediness and crying brings parents to their knees and forces every single one to admit, “I am not in control, I can’t will this child into doing what I want, when I want.”

If you have a baby who is extra fussy and you’ve followed all the rabbit trails of food sensitivities and reflux and what have you, take heart, I know many children who were extra fussy infants and are very compliant toddlers and preschoolers. A lot of that is physiological and they will grow out of it. That’s the beauty of infancy, it does not last forever. The days are long, but the years fly by. You will survive. Enjoy the rolls and tiny toes and delightful grins while you can.

LEXI’S LIST . 2010.01
I Got You (I Feel Good) – James Brown
Video Killed The Radio Star – The Buggles
What I Like About You – The Romantics
I’d Rather Dance With You – Kings of Convenience
Run With All You’ve Got – Jon Black
You Make My Dreams – Hall & Oates
Proud Mary – Creedence Clearwater Revival
When I’m Sixty-Four – The Beatles
Chicago – Sufjan Stevens
The Littlest Birds – The Be Good Tanyas
Wrapped Up in Books - Belle & Sebastian
Three Little Birds – Bob Marley
Peace Like a River – Elizabeth Mitchell
Lovely, Love My Family – The Roots
My Girl – The Temptations
Shoo Fly – Elizabeth Mitchell
Beautiful Girl – Andrew Peterson And Randall Goodgame
Great Big World - Pierce Pettis
This Little Light Of Mine – Elizabeth Mitchell
Bedtime Lullaby – Mark Kozelek

Parenting is one big adventure of shaping your children’s views of the world, life and everything, and doing things like this makes me consider how much we are exposing them to the arts. It makes me understand how people can get sucked in to over-scheduling with activity after activity because if you neglect one, you might miss a great gift or not develop a passion. I think we can all see how an excess of pursuits can tax a family in many ways, and distort a child’s view of his own importance, but drawing the line between good and too much can’t be easy.

How do you find balance in your family? Is it dictated by time, cost, number of pursuits per child?