What We're Reading and Stealth Santa Year 2

In the spirit of Oscar Wilde's epigram from the Importance of Being Earnest -- "I keep a diary in order to record the important secrets of my life. If I didn't write them down I should probably forget all about them." -- I thought I would just capture a few memories as really, I will forget all about them if I don't.

First of all, reading in our family. Fer has become a more and more engaged reader this fall. She is loving the Beacon Street Girls series, a series about a group of friends in 7th grade. I think it is helping her imagine next year, when she transitions from elementary school to middle school. She also bought Diary of a Wimpy Kid, and seems to be dipping into that between the Beacon Street girls. She and her friends love the boy band One Direction, and she has a big book about them that she also has read and re-read. Wendy is loving Geronimo Stilton and Thea Stilton -- I read to her every night and we have read 3 Geronimo Stilton Kingdom of Fantasy, a Thea Stilton Journey to Atlantis, and we are now in the middle of another Thea Stilton mystery. The vocabulary is relatively very advanced in these books and she is so curious that she will stop me whenever she hears a word she doesn't know to ask. I confess I sometimes substitute words that I know that she does know so as to encourage her to settle down to sleep! I have been too busy to read anything for fun recently, just the newspaper and magazines, but I hope that after Christmas I'll have some time. Chris is always reading a book from the library, usually non-fiction about sports or music (most recently Bruce Springsteen).

And, Stealth Santa 2012. Not as funny as Stealth Santa 2011, but so far (knock wood) very effective. Basically I had a brainstorm a few days after Thanksgiving that many people, especially Facebook friends with similar adoption stories to ours, who had decorated their houses to the nines the day after Thanksgiving, were experiencing much higher levels of anxiety and stress at home due to their children going bananas (the clinical term) with Christmas anticipation. So, though it has been kind of sad for me as I have enjoyed in the past putting up the tree and creche and stockings and playing Christmas music all through December, this year we have done very little about Christmas at home as a family. The kids watched the Grinch at our Advent Tea, we have a little Advent calendar with windows for each day that they have been opening, some holiday cards have arrived, but that's about it. And, they continue to sleep through the night (which they have for a few months now, thank God), there have been no meltdowns or tantrums, and things feel pretty normal. Compared to last year with all the managing of expectations and constant talk of Christmas gifts, it has been overall a lot less stressful. Now, it's still 2 weeks til Christmas, so we keep our fingers crossed this will continue, but it seems to me that not having the constant visual reminder of the tree, the lights, the stockings, etc. has really helped with keeping things calm. And we like calm. We like calm a lot. I think our tree and decorations will go up on December 23, and I'm working to be OK with that.