I'm sitting here in the living room, lit only by the Christmas lights. It's 5 am. and everyone else is still in bed. I love this hour because I have the house to myself for a little while.

Advent began yesterday. This is my favorite season of the church calendar. So much expectation, so much encouragement from looking back to what our Lord has done and promises fulfilled. Margaret and I made an advent wreath at church last Saturday and we have that in the
middle of the table. The church gave us a little booklet with scripture readings and hymns to work on each week of the season. We're also doing the Jesse Tree as we do every year.

We bought a cute live tabletop tree from central market instead of a big tree. It's so cute and makes me happy because it doesn't take up so much room that we have to take furniture out to the storage. We decorated it rather simply with some round, colored LED lights, retro looking glass balls, and those cinnamon applesauce ornaments cut in the shape of large stars. So between the real greenery from the wreath and tree and the ornaments, our house smells really good!

We attempted a Christmas picture yesterday before church. Everyone but John cooperated. He was pouting the entire time, and no manner of threatening made any difference. Oh well, I guess we'll just use what we have and call it 'real'.

I've been getting in a lot of running lately, averaging about 35 miles a week. Pretty good for not yet training for a marathon. On Saturday Brian and i ran between 7.5 and 8 miles. Yesterday afternoon Margaret and I went running and she wanted to do the same route, so we did. She's fast, and it was a challenge to stay with her. I think she and Samuel will really enjoy having the chance to run track when they go back to school.

Hazel has been such a handful lately! She is into everything! She still doesn't sleep through the night. She'll go down in her pack-n-play at night, but wakes up at least once. She usually ends up in our bed for the rest of the night. She had her one year check up the other day. She's still average size, though to me she seems small. She weighed 20 lbs. her weight gain has slowed since she started walking in October, but I guess that's normal. She doesn't talk a lot, at least not real words. Just "mama", "dada", and what we think is "mine". She understands everything it seems. She has no fear of strangers, and walks right up to people and stares at them. It's really funny. She's a very girlie girl, and carries a purse and takes a baby everywhere. Margaret wasn't that way. She was more into animals and nature, not dress up and playing mommy.