Are you familiar with the unreasonable excitement of a giveaway? When you just have a feeling that your name will be chosen from the thousands entered into a random drawing? Well, I am. I am excited each week to enter the big giveaway on Baby Gizmo's website. I haven't won yet, but I keep trying! It is fun to imagine the possibilities. Hey, it's free! And someone is going to score the prize, so why not throw my hat in the ring?!

Well, you can imagine how thrilled I was to see that Baby Gizmo is playing Santa in a big way, and doing 12 DAYS OF GIVEAWAYS- in a row! As in, daily! And the prizes are the sort that a mama of 2 such as myself would LOVE to carry home. You merely go to their website, register/ log-in, and your name is in the virtual hat!
As if all this isn't enough, dear readers, those of you who are bloggers, too, can post about the 12 Days of Giveaways that Baby Gizmo is hosting, and you will be, like me, entered into ANOTHER contest. Some lucky-duck blogger is going to win... wait for it... a $250 Visa Gift Card!
So hustle your fingers to the click button on your mouse and use my handy links to hightail it over to their site. But don't be bitter when I win a stroller AND the $250 Visa card, m'kay? ;)

Well, I finally sat down to work on my Christmas cards. I pulled the chair up to the computer, hot cocoa in hand. This task is a lot more fun than it was a couple years ago. I use Shutterfly now and it is the perfect blend of being a creative outlet for me, with none of the headache and hassle. I had my photos uploaded already- big shout out to Heather Barnes for the great pics she took of my family. My biggest problem is how carried away I got. I’m embarrassed to say that in no time at all I had made- ahem- nine different cards. And I love them all. You can laugh at me now- I know you are, Dad. I could have made it easy on myself and just chosen and made one, but I was having so much fun and… well, Craig will have to choose which one we actually make and share with you all, our family and friends! Here are a couple of my favorites:

http://www.shutterfly.com/cards-stationery/christmas-photo-cards

In the meantime, I also took a look at Shutterfly’s line of calendars. I love mine that I made this summer, and I am looking into making some for Christmas gifts this year. I like that you can choose from different sizes, personalize them with your own dates and celebrations, and choose from, like, a billion different styles. Here is a cute one:

http://www.shutterfly.com/calendars/desk-calendars

And I can say without giving anything away, that I am giving my mother-in-law a Shutterfly photobook this year. Maybe two. (They so often have sales and buy-one-get-one promos!) One for sure of a slim selection of her many photos from their South Africa trip. And possible one of the family at Cran-Hill this summer. I’ve made a couple photo books this year, and I’d much rather make them online and leaf through them to see the memories, than print out a frighteningly tall stack of individual photos and wrestle them into albums or feel guilty for not scrapbooking them in the wee hours when I have “free” time!

So there you have it. One evening and a couple cocoas later, and Shutterfly made my holidays that much easier. Because if you read my last post, you know that I want Christmas to be more about preparing for the coming of the Lord, and less about fighting materialism and traffic at the mall.

http://www.shutterfly.com/cards-stationery/holiday-cards

Hello again!

Thanksgiving has come and gone- and in its wake are memories of cousins wrestling, good food, calculated shopping excursions, and time off from the usual schedule. Tomorrow brings cleaning, grocery shopping, and more laundry. It also brings preparations for advent. I am determined to both be more deliberate in my own season of expectation, and in sharing those experiences with Grady and Finley. I want them- especially Grady- to FEEL excited and to SERVE actively as we look at Scripture and seek to help those that we can.

I want my kids to have "wow" experiences at Christmas- you know the kind- where they rip off the wrapping paper and their mouth drops open and they gasp or scream. I want them to be excited to hear that God is an even better giver than their mom and dad. To get that electric sparkly feeling on Christmas morning, and still know it is a silly faint echo of the real deal, the real gift.

Still brainstorming how I can help my kids experience abundance in a way that leads them to gratitude and generosity, rather than entitlement and greed. I know, I know- model, model, model. So... how do *I* keep from getting wrapped up in the list of things I want under the tree for ME? From caring more about how our house is decorated than how our hearts are doing? From getting more pleasure from compliments on the appetizers I bring to the parties than from the act of anonymous giving to the truly hungry? I think the place I need to start is prayer- getting help from the Spirit that raised Christ from the dead, to keep raising me up out of the pit of lifeless selfish materialism.

Oh come, oh come, Emmanuel. And ransom captive Israel...