Kids Live Here

W is for Worm

April 21, 2015 by Kathryn

Often when I come to pick Wanda up from school, I find her down in the craft area, rushing slowly and methodically to complete whatever craft project they’ve been working on that day. The other kids are at circle time or have finished circle time and are getting on their coats and Wanda is plugging away, gluing eyes on a penguin or covering her body in glitter on its way to a sparkly one-legged pumpkin monster.

She has one of those magical teachers who lets them do the crafts their way or not at all if they don’t feel like it and if Wanda just HAS to finish putting the spikes on her ninja slug, then Teacher Kira moves on to circle time without her. This pleases me.

Wanda’s not the only kid to take this creative license and run with it. A couple of weeks ago I was helping the kids make delicate spring flowers at the craft station and one little boy looked at me like I’d misplaced my mind, gestured at the supplies and asked, “Where’s the red marker?”

“I didn’t know we needed a red marker. What do you need a red marker for?”

Um… Idiot. “The fire.”

Obviously.

Because we must always draw flames enveloping our lovely construction paper spring flowers. Now I know better and next time I will DO better.

Well today when I picked Wanda up from school, she was the last man standing at the craft table. She sat carefully gluing segments of a slithering creature, each labeled with a letter, W, O, R, M.

“Cool, Wanda,” I said, and because I am the nicest mom ever, I added, “I like your caterpillar.”

“MO-OM! It’s a W-W-W-Worm!”

Apparently W is the letter of the week. Teacher Kira let them hold actual writhing worms today because writhing starts with W.

“Riiiight. A worm. Got it.”

She flipped over the last piece of the worm body and… AGGGG, like a puzzle piece in a survivor challenge, the last one did not fit. She had put the glue on the wrong side of the paper. So I voted her off the island. The end.

I kid. I kid.

She was distraught and threw the piece down in despair, her head flopping back in defeat. “I glued the wrong SIDE!”

“It’s okay,” I said, “You can glue it on like this.” I pinned the tail on the worm.

“Agh,” she said, “It looks weird.”

“I know,” I retorted, “That’s the point. W-w-w-weird. Weird starts with W.”

She shrugged, agreeing.

You can’t argue with alphabetics.

It’s Only Routine, Ma’am

April 20, 2015 by Kathryn

Brandon Mull obviously has kids because he’s using some quality subliminal messaging in the third book in his Five Kingdoms series. All the cool kids in the ultra-modern realm of Zeropolis use the slang term “tidy” to mean good, awesome, sick, buck, or super fly. What are those darn kids saying these days in the magic-deficient earthen-type world? Cause in Zeropolis they say “tidy.”

“Wow. Your new spikey blue hair cut is super tidy.”

“You are good at the techno-baseball. That was a tidy catch you made with your glove of catching.”

“Your room looks so good since your mom made you throw away everything that you hold dear. Tidy!”

I like Mr. Mull.

We made it through spring break with very few injuries although Wanda described her adventures as “discovering new kinds of scabs.” She says she doesn’t fall down on purpose and she doesn’t like getting hurt, but one good thing is she can always discover new kinds and shapes of scabs… “and that’s good!” Love the attitude.

Another thing that’s good is throwing out half your belongings and that’s just what we did in the kids’ rooms and with their stuff throughout the house. Their rooms look awesome and they actually want to be in them so everyone is happy but the mice who are looking for the crumbs and plates of food I found under their beds. The mice and bugs hate everything about our spring break adventures. P.S. We have never had mice in the kids rooms, but oh how they would love it there.

Now, the whole week wasn’t as epic as the 12-hour clean-a-thon day one. We slept in some and played a ton of games but we made it through every category of stuff and now I’m on to the rest of the house. Today I emptied every darn thing out of the freezer and deep freeze for the first time in the nine years we’ve lived here.

I found a can of frozen juice with an expiration date of 2007. We have purchased two new refrigerators since 2007 and the can of juice has moved from one to the other to the other. Yes. That happened. But now it is on its way to the happy landfill in the sky and I am left with only food I would actually consider preparing for my family.

It’s strange that I would keep horribly freezer-burned food for years because, “I don’t want to waste it.” But the truth is, if it’s got a greenish tint, is covered in frost, and I would never, even in a zombie apocalypse, consider serving it to my family, then it’s already wasted. Now, keeping it in there just wastes my energy and space.

It’s the same with any item I purchased and am just hanging onto because I feel guilty about wasting money. I wasted the money the minute I bought it. Now I get to choose if I let that poor choice determine the way I live indefinitely.

I have the same issue with food on my plate or in the fridge. I frequently overeat in the name of not wasting food. Truthfully, the food waste is even greater if I eat something my body doesn’t need or want. Would I rather waste the food in the trash can or waste it in my body as if I’m some sort of living breathing food disposal unit? Because it hangs a-ROUND once I place it in my body. And not in a good way.

So now that the kids’ rooms are done and the kitchen is done and my clothes are done, I start on all the rest of the house and as I start on all the rest of the house I feel the need to put some solid habits in place to care for the things I’ve been blessed with and the people I love.

I’m starting simple.

Three non-negotiables, as recently brought to my remembrance by StressFreeHomemaking.com.

1. One load of laundry from start to finish every day, folded, put away. It may sound strange, but I think my problem was I was cleaning too much laundry on any given day. Cleaning it’s the easy part. I couldn’t keep up with the folding and putting away.

2. Dishwasher run each night and unloaded first thing in the morning. I’m pretty good at this already but I’m going to try running it every night regardless of how full it is so I can start the next day with a clean slate.

3. Dinner planned and ingredients thawed every night for the following day. There’s something embarrassing about how shocked I am every single night that we need to eat something around 6pm. Again?! We just ate dinner yesterday!!

I’m also doing my best to follow a basic weekly cleaning routine. I’ve looked at several and this is the one I’m using for now because it’s simple and the printable is cute.

I’ll let you know my progress and how long the routines last. Consistency is hard, unless it’s consistently eating chocolate. I can do that.

*This post may contain affiliate links.

When All Else Fails, Discard All of Your Personal Effects

April 13, 2015 by Kathryn

When I was little my mom would make us clean our rooms. It was a bitter wind that blew on room cleaning days because… how dare she? She taught us life skills and we wept bitterly.

Now I have kids of my own and I’ve taken room cleaning to a whole new level. It’s a level born of necessity. It’s a level born of not doing a thorough cleaning or decluttering in the nine years we’ve lived in this house. It’s a level that combines the Grinch with Dr. Robin Zasio from Hoarders. On their walls I left nothing but hooks and some wire.

I recently read an AWESOME book about decluttering, nay THE awesome book about decluttering, I’ve read a few and this one is true. What I like so much about her approach is that it’s less about getting rid of stuff and more about choosing to keep the things that bring you joy and only the things that bring you joy. You can have something and it can be nice or useful but if it doesn’t spark joy, you don’t need it. She also talks about how to let go of things with gratitude once they’ve fulfilled their purpose in your life. It’s very Zen.

Thank you for being such a fun pair of socks and fulfilling your purpose by being on sale for a dollar. I had so much fun purchasing you and wearing you once. Goodbye.

Thank you for being a fun scarf that I received as a gift. I felt very loved and surprised when I received you. That feeling of love and surprise were your reason for existing. But that doesn’t mean I have to like you or feel guilty for not wearing you every time I walk past you in my closet. Farewell.

So, I’ve been decluttering for weeks, prepping for spring break when the real fun would start. And it started today. All of these steps are to be accomplished with the kids’ assistance.

Step one. Wash all the laundry in the entire world so we’d know what clothes we had.

Step two. Remove everything from my children’s rooms but their furniture and their clothes, which we heaped up on their beds. Books are lined up along the walls in the hall to be sorted later. Everything else is staged in various rooms throughout the house by category.

Step three. Deep clean every crevice and baseboard and vacuum under the furniture.

Step four. While moving furniture to clean, agree that the kids can put their furniture anywhere they want it, even if, especially if, that furniture placement is completely an ordinance of crazy town.

Step five. Sort their clothes one piece at a time, donating anything that doesn’t fit, doesn’t look good, or doesn’t make us feel happy.

This is where we stopped tonight after working pretty much solid from 9am to 9pm.

Steps six through a billion. Repeat the sorting process with one category per day throughout spring break, taking time each afternoon to do something fabulous as a reward. By fabulous I mean getting a free ice cream cone at Ben and Jerry’s on the 14th because it’s free ice cream day or buying new bedroom curtains at IKEA on Friday if we’ve gotten all of our cleaning done.

The trick here is that they love their newly cleaned and stripped rooms so much that I’m hoping they will be loath to add too much junk back into them and I think it’s working. A few choice quotes from today:

Wanda – “Hey mom. It’s weird. I actually like cleaning.”

Laylee – When asked to choose one thing she’s thankful for to add to our family prayer, she said, “I’m thankful for cleaning.”

Yes. That happened. I did not faint or cry. I didn’t even twirl my mustache or cackle with glee. I just added it to the ever-living prayer. We are thankful for cleaning. Yep. Because that’s a thing that average 12-year-olds say all the time.

Magoo – I want to add as few things back to my room as possible because it’s awesome right now.

To my credit, I was DJ-ing some wicked sick tunes while we cleaned and I let the level of silliness climb about 86.3% higher than I’m generally comfortable with. I also helped them move their furniture into (and I cannot emphasize this enough) possibly the weirdest and most-likely-to-make-Feng-Shui-certified-home-decorators-bludgeon-themselves-with-their-own-energy-cures configurations possible. Because I am the nicest and most chill mom ever and because I had the nicest and most chill mom ever who let me do wickedly stupid things with my furniture when I was a kid and because Laylee said moving things around would make it feel like a whole new room and I could not argue with that.

Twelve hours and one category in and we’ve gathered 2 big black garbage bags of trash and 3 big black garbage bags of donations. And Laylee is thankful for cleaning. So basically the apocalypse is nigh. Stock up on wheat and ammunition.

An Open Letter to Teacher Kira

April 12, 2015 by Kathryn

Dear Teacher Kira,

You don’t make the weather. The kids do that. I’ve seen them. You don’t even make snacks. That’s the moms. You’re really only responsible for one thing of importance as a preschool teacher and it’s making and distributing months.

You started the year with “Subtember” and that wasn’t bad. It rolls off the tongue nicely, Sub-tem-ber. There were those in your class who thought Subtember might just be the only month we’d have all year and they were okay with that, but after around thirty days things changed.

Wanda came home with an announcement. “Teacher Kira gave us a new month today! It’s called OCTOBER!”

Oh, that Teacher Kira. She’s so creative. And the hits kept coming. November. December.

Sure, things got a little boring when we got to the fourth BER month in a row. Yeah it was winter. BERRR. Cold. We got it. So I was glad when you changed things up in the new year and put a little more effort in, stepping it up to four syllable months.

January. February. Wait. We’re not getting in another rut here, are we?

Wanda was excited. “Mom,” she said, “Teacher Kira is going to give us another new month next week. I wonder what it will be!”

“March,” I said because I can see the future.

“What?”

“The new month will be called March.”

Her eyes got really big. “How do you know?”

“I just have a feeling. The new month will be called March.”

She laughed, marching in place, “Ha! March? That’s hilarious!”

It’s a verb. It’s a command. It is, in short, epic month creation.

Teacher Kira. You outdid yourself with March. What next? A five syllable adverb? The next month will be known as Undeniably? You amaze me.

But just when I thought you couldn’t possibly up your game, you proved me right. You knew you couldn’t top March so you gave up and hit us with April.

April? Really? Two syllables. It doesn’t even have an action that goes with it. April. There are still eight weeks of school this year and already you’re phoning it in.

What next? An ambivalent month that can’t even make up its mind?

Might?

Could?

Possibly?

May?

I sure hope not.

You’ve got three weeks left to come up with something amazing. Don’t let us down.

Sincerely,
The Thompsons

Wherein I Ramble About Pie and Loss and Being Apprehended by the Police

March 12, 2015 by Kathryn

I am blogging while I wait up for Laylee to get home from her evening activities and then I’ll sleep. I was going to wait up for the pies to cool but I don’t know that it’s worth it. Because there are no pies. Only pie soup with floating meringue. Two hours of my life in a dish with floating blobs of meringue.

And I’m good at pie. I SLAUGHTER AT PIE. But not this time. Because this time it matters. This time I’m making pie for two pie competitions, one at Magoo’s school that he desperately wants to win and one at Dan’s work that I desperately want to win because he’s in his new job with his new co-workers and I don’t know anybody and I have this irrational desire to win Stay-at-Home-Mom/Wife, Microsoft edition. It’s not a thing, but in my special brain-world it is and if I’m going to place in the top 3, I at least need to be able make a freaking pie. Right? Right?

I want to punch myself in the face for typing that because truly? Truly? Who cares? No one. And tomorrow not even me, I guarantee. But in this moment I’m epically sad about losing at pie.

I did good things today. Drops of Awesome were everywhere, but I ended the day exhausted, with liquid pie guts in a dish and I say, “Serve me up a different day, please. Because I’m sending this one back to the kitchen.”

The weather was gorgeous.

One of my kids left the house this morning seething with hormonal rage, aimed at no one in particular but flowing in my general direction. My throat hurt. I had a writing deadline and the post was taking me forever.

By 9:45am, I had heard that someone I care about had passed away, I had gone out in public unshowered and with Wanda looking like a pajama-clad orphan and I’d been pulled over by the police for speeding on a street where Dan has told me no fewer than 30 times to slow down because I would likely get pulled over for speeding.

Preschool, road construction, baseball practice, errands, more road construction, lateness, tween rage, nothing for dinner, trashed house that was clean YES-TER-DAY, instrument practice, play rehearsal, homework, shoes and backpacks everywhere, WAY more shoes and backpacks than there are humans living in my house. Way more. Like I could start a shoe and backpack emporium for people who like shoes with shredded laces because no one under the age of 30 in this family will ever EVER tie their shoes. They just let the laces drag behind them until they wear down to the length they want. Like beaver teeth.

And then Magoo and I spent two hours that I didn’t really have making lemon meringue pies from zest-and-squeeze-your-own-lemons scratch and the lemon fillings wouldn’t set at all. It was like yellow water in soggy hand-rolled crusts. And I blopped the meringue on top and baked them anyway because I was so mad at those pies, I thought a good fifteen minutes in a hot oven would serve them right.

And while I was typing this rant, Laylee came home from her rehearsal and I told her about my day and I cried a little and I told her sometimes it’s hard being the mom. And she said, “Your friend died and you got picked up by the police. That’s a hard day for anyone.” And she hugged me and told me she loved me.

And I loved her more.

I feel better now and I considered letting this post die on my computer without seeing the internet light of day. Because I am Drops of Awesome lady. I’m an author and a public speaker. I think positively. I love myself fully and never ever want to put my kids to bed at 5pm and hoover all the chocolate in Washington State. But that’s not always the case.

Sometimes I’m Drops of Awesome lady. And I’m tired.

And I’m fed up.

And I’m not rational at all.

And I murder pies.

And I thought you should know.

My little tween mom-substitute told me I should go to sleep. I think she’s right. Everything will look better in the morning.

It’s Alive!

March 9, 2015 by Kathryn

Wanda has developed a taste for fruit leather. She loves it and she will have it and there is no limit to her insatiable dried fruit-squish thirst. The other day she ate four.

“Don’t eat four,” I said, my words like feathers in the wind. “Eating four is bad. Eating four will make you sick.”

She gave me a look.

I didn’t enforce the Don’t Eat Four policy.

Four were eaten.

Later that night I was using my magical lay-her-to-sleep powers by laying with her until she fell asleep and she lurched to a sitting position.

“AHHH!!! I just felt my heart beat!!!”

“Yes. That is normal. Because you are a human child,” I said.

“Woah.”

She laid back down.

“MOM!! It just did it again! HA!”

“Ha?”

“Yeah. Ha. You said I would totally get sick if I ate four fruit leathers. And I ate four fruit leathers. And my heart still totally did two beats. So. HA!”

Well, my heart is still beating today but so are my mucus producular glands. And my dizzy glands. And my lay around on the couch all day while building a mountain of balled up tissue glands.

I am a horrible sick person. I always tell myself that if I were terminally ill, I would be extremely positive and long suffering. But, give me a cold, hooooo mama. Call the wambulance. It’s not that I whine out loud, but my inner whino is super duper annoying. It’s like I can’t remember ever having energy or functioning sinuses or a head that wasn’t full of liquefied slugs.

My kids were sick today too.

And they weren’t annoying. At least not about being sick.

Maybe tomorrow will be better. HA! My heart just beat THREE times! I guess I’m fine.

Crazy Hair

January 21, 2015 by Kathryn

They sleep in their clothes most nights. Wear-Pajamas-To-Bed-Like-Normal-People-Gate 2014 did not end in my favor. I decided to cave and save my fight for fights worth the fight, knowahmsayin? I still put my foot down hard in the face of their desire to wear the slept-in clothes the following day. If you sleep in them, they become pajamas until they go through a washer reset.

This morning, Magoo woke up in his basketball clothes with dark face-punch-looking circles around his eyes. He’d been up late reading like a disobedient literate. He looked awful and when he’s tired, which is most morning, re: he is my son, he oozes around the house wrapped in a blanket and running into things.

Suddenly his eyes brightened, “Oh! It’s pajama crazy hair day at school. I almost forgot.”
He shed his fluffy blanket and ran upstairs to change out of his slept-in clothes in favor of un-slept-in pajamas. I spent several minutes combing gel into his hair so it would stand up all over.

Oh how proud he was of this look.

The hair put us behind schedule so I drove him to the bus stop. As we were waiting, Wanda suddenly opened her sleepy eyes and gasped, “Oh mom! Did you see Magoo today? He looks sooooo HANDSOME!”

Yep. He does. Tall hair is good hair, says the eighties.

Lows and Highs

December 10, 2014 by Kathryn

I wrote this post a week ago.

This day could not figure out what it wanted. For a while things were great. The sister missionaries from our church stopped by and chatted and shared this amazing Christmas video with me and Wanda. Incidentally, Wanda cursed them in her prayer tonight by praying that they’d “grow big and strong” and “have great travels.” So she wants them to grow fat and leave, basically. Sad.

We got some stuff done. Men were no longer excavating my crawlspace and hauling hundreds of pounds of rock through my entire house to lower through a tiny hole in my hall closet. That was yesterday.

It was cold but not freezing. There was snow on the ground but not the roads. This strange yellow orb was sending magical light rays down on us from the sky. I spent some fun time chatting with a friend today.

And then things sort of unraveled. There is just this sort of brain-slamming chaos that happens sometimes in the hour after everyone gets home from school. We need snacks and we need to share the stories from our day and everyone wants to hear about everyone else’s day while simultaneously telling about their own day and if we are five-years-old, we need to yell, “MOM! MOM! MOM!” into the wind every few minutes in hopes that anyone will pay attention to us ever.

If it’s a day like today, people lose their homework and procrastinate the rest and they ask you for some wood and a saw to make a quick catapult… for science. Eventually you decide you have to skip Cub Scouts because the homework is too big and too deep and too wide. And everyone cries. Because Cub Scouts is where the joy lives.

And through the tears and the mania and the MOM! MOM! MOM!-ing, you work to make dinner for your family and the family up the street whose mom is sick, only to get a text telling you that the dinner didn’t come soon enough so the whole family has already left for their evening activities and you KNEW you should have asked what time they needed dinner but you neglected to ask and you just want to dump the coconut chicken curry and naan bread out in the snow.

And then you realize that your problems are actually quite small and that you should be grateful that you have lovely children and you’re all in good health and your marriage is going strong and your careers are going well. You realize these things, but you don’t feel better. You just feel guilty because you shouldn’t be frustrated, but in that moment the day just really REALLY eats rocks.

That was my day today. And when Dan got home from work, I stood there in my un-earned stretchy pants. No yoga happened today, even though I was dressed up for it in case it somehow snuck up and attacked me from behind. And I unloaded on him about each and every straw that had contributed to my camel’s back injury. He listened. And then he left for his band rehearsal.

My internal Magic 8 Ball told me that its sources said no good would come of this night. But its sources were wrong.

Laylee, who had been madly reading her scriptures all night in an attempt to achieve a very aggressive, bribery-induced study goal emerged from her reading with a happy glow about her. And she made peace in our house.

She listened to Wanda while I worked with Magoo. Then I took Wanda up to bed and when I came down, Laylee was tenderly coaching Magoo through a written assignment. There is such a thing as coaching someone in a way that lets them know exactly how big of a moron they are with sighs and eye rolls and repeated reminders of your own personal brilliance in comparisson to their pitiful nine-year-old pea brain. This was not that. This was kind, gentle, encouraging study help, the kind of study help parenting dreams are made of.

For a second, I considered relieving her and taking over homework helper duty. Then I listened to them for a minute more and chose to sneak away and let the magic happen.

“That’s a great sentence, Buddy, but you already started one with that word in this paragraph. How could you say it a little differently? Perfect!”

When they had finished, Magoo proudly showed me the paper.

“I wrote this whole thing myself,” he beamed, “With a little help from Laylee.”

And she stood behind him grinning and giving me a thumbs up. Um? Angel choirs! If I could bottle that moment and uncork it next week when angel choirs are far far from my thoughts as I look at the way those two interact, I would shave my head in payment.

I apologized to the kids because, oh, yeah, I forgot to mention earlier, I had snapped at and yelled at and snapped at them again earlier in the night.

Laylee, still bearing a halo, smiled and said, “Of course you did. Anyone would. Your day was really stressful, mom.” WHA?

I asked Laylee if she thought her time reading the scriptures had made a difference in how she treated everyone tonight and her eyes got really big with understanding. “Yeah… I really think it did!”

Deal. Sealed. I love watching my kids choose things that make them happy.

And to think, only a few hours earlier my scalp had been going numb at the thought of all we had to do and the frustration, stress and chaos of my home. Parenting is a bipolar realm.

Love Notes

December 3, 2014 by Kathryn

Wanda moves at her own speed, to the beat of her own crazy drum. Her awesomeness will not be rushed and she very sweetly and joyfully goes about doing what she does. Last night what she does did not include going to bed ever. She would come down and get a drink and come down and ask us to unclasp her unicorn helmet, an hour and a half after she’d been sent to bed. That’s the problem, really, the sending.

We’ve been doing a lot better lately making bedtime a social experience, taking her up, reading to her, tucking her in, singing songs, and snuggling. Last night we fell back into the lazy, “Go to bed” mode and she did not, in fact, go. Well, she went upstairs. And she growled. And she giggled. And she kept her brother awake. And she did some feat of bravery, requiring a unicorn helmet.

And then she came downstairs when she couldn’t take it off. What amazes me is the way she so calmly and sweetly approaches us at 9:00 at night, as though of course she needs help with her unicorn helmet deep into the sleeping hour.

“Hey. Can you please help me get this off?” She beams.

Dan helps and sternly reminds her to get the heck in bed and stay in bed… also the heck.

“Okay,” she says unconvincingly. Then she bops out of the room, the unicorn helmet unclasped but still resting on her head. I wait for the sound of the stairs creaking. Nothing. I peek my head around the corner. She’s walking slowly across the dark living room in her unicorn helmet and Snow White dress, weaving back and forth with her arms arching and curving around her body in a slow motion interpretive dance. She is silent and happy and in no hurry at all.

I just stand and watch, fixing the image in my mind. I love that tiny person more than my own life.

And things stay quiet. I’m assuming she’s gone to sleep. And two hours later when I head up to bed, I find a love note on my pillow, a love note made on the stationary I keep in the cupboard in my room. Dan and I muse about when she must have made the note. Then we see it. A unicorn helmet sits at the foot of our bed.

I add this to my collection.

Santa Sent Me a Letter – Discount Code

November 13, 2014 by Kathryn

I never wondered why Santa didn’t write back to me. I knew. That guy was WAY WAY WAY too busy to write letters to every single kid. Sure, Christmas Eve magic could allow him to break into the home of every kid in the world, reverse-robbery-style, but I thought letter writing would be a waste of that power. I didn’t expect a letter. But it would have made my DECADE if I had gotten one.

Well, things have changed. We’re in the digital age now and Santa’s got mad skills and communication tactics. For the past several years, the fat man has sent a free personalized video message to my kids using the PNP. When they’re 70 and I’m 90, I will still be making sure they get a video from Santa. We love these so bad.

This year I discovered a new way to hear from Santa and I’m excited about it. SantaSentMeALetter.com. It’s digital world meets old school Christmas charm, internet form meets sealing wax. The company let me go through the process and request a Santa letter for my youngest and it was a HUGE hit.

The girl who begs for mail every day and shouts with glee when I tell her that the political smear flyer with a picture of our state senator behind bars stomping on puppies is special mail for her was overjoyed to get a real letter addressed to her from one of her favorite superheroes.

It came in an envelope with a postmark from the North Pole and the letter inside was sealed with red sealing wax. She couldn’t rip it open fast enough.

Then the letter itself was personalized, talking about our family, her big life goal to stay in bed ever, our faith, and her favorite toys and friends. She proceeded to carry it around with her all night, periodically asking any literate person in her path to read it again.

It was sweet and we loved it. If you’d like to try sending your child a letter from Santa, they’re about ten bucks and well worth it, but you can get 15% off now through December 1st, if you use the code DARING2014. It seems early, but it’s really not if you think about prep and shipping time. Christmas is coming, you guys!!

So how do you best communicate with the fat man in red?

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