Saturday we visited the Downtown library (a favorite hang out of the hotflawedmama clan) to meet Santa. No cool words to describe this undertaking except to mention that it was hot as hell super warm there and that Tomas couldn’t believe his luck at seeing a man who will one day very soon bring him all of his hopes and dreams.

There was coloring as we waited in line.

Then we had them line up in order of youngest to oldest.

After that we spent some time with my gal Chrissy and her precious babes, renting library books and coloring some more!

The end.

Just got internet back after a few days of it being down.

THE ETSY WATER FOR CHRISTMAS SHOP IS NOW OPEN!!!

Go here to check out all of the merchandise. You have only until the 12th to put your order in if you want it before Christmas. Seriously, the stuff is amazing!

And remember, 100% of your purchase goes to WATER!

I knew you guys loved our Christmas trees but I had no idea how much! This last week I’ve gotten a few emails asking about our Christmas tree. Well wait no longer, friends. For those that are new to hotflawedmama, this post will give you a glimpse into why the tree is a big deal around here.

For the last 3 years we’ve just went out and picked out a tree from around camp. They’ve been interesting and unique and well, perfect, for our family. But last year we noticed there were virtually no more trees to choose from. So, so sad.

So this year we decided to do something different. We bought a tree. But not just any tree, we brought a little tiny one. One we’ll be able to plant come spring time. We loved the idea, of making memories then planting them (kind of) and watching them grow.

We still have our Charlie Brown Christmas, with a little twist.

There was still a selection process, of course.

And notice the almost week old dreadlocks!

Then we chose. It was terrrrrific!

Came home and promptly decorated. Notice the little Habesha tongues, love it.

And the end result. So beautiful!

So there you have it. Not nearly as unique as before but we still happen to think it’s pretty cute.

I LOVE this tradition of ours. Every year, as soon as December hits, we make our lists for Santa. We make our lists, they drink hot cocoa (as do I, but mine has just a squirt of peppermint schnapps involved-try it you won’t be disappointed, anywho…) and I watch as they giggle with anticipation. So fun.

Trysten, well he’s old enough to write an actual letter. Loved reading that.

Dailah chose instead to draw Santa pretty pictures.

And only after I saw this picture did I notice Dailah had put blue eye shadow on the babe of our family. We’re not afraid.

It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas!

Zach had a little photo shoot with Tariku and Tomas. So many good pics. Here are a few of my favorites.

Tomas

 And Tariku

None of Binyam that didn’t have a mouth full of food and a nose full of snot. next time, perhaps!

This right here, this is my 1,000th post. Can you believe that? Wow. That’s some kind of milestone. And it’s perfect for today.

Because I’m devoting this post to World Aids Day.

I was going to write something but I’m having problems finding the words. Because, truly, I want to yell. And I want to scream. I don’t want to be pleasant about the fact that so many people are still dying, that so many kids or orphaned because of this preventable disease.

So I’ll link you to Erin. I always link to Erin on December 1st. She has good words. 🙂

But then there’s Amanda. I love Amanda. I traveled to Ethiopia with Amanda when she was picking up Teshome and I was picking up my Tariku. She and Matthew are the same age as my hot husband and hotflawedmama-which is pretty young compared to most adoptive parents. Read this post of Amanda’s. I think every person can relate to her mama’s voice.

The truth? Zach and I were on our way to adopt a babe before we saw the two boys. This babe was going to be HIV+. For many reasons, this didn’t happen. But my heart’s still there. Because it’s all freakin loss. It’s all really ugly, really shitty loss. AIDS, malaria, malnutrition, pneumonia, dirty water (and the various issues that arise from it). It’s all loss. It’s preventable. Seriously, there should be no difference in the way you react to any kind of loss.

If you get pissed about water, you should be pissed about the AIDS epidemic. Plain and simple.

So it’s my 1000th post. And I’m so thankful you guys have come along with me. This blog is really fun for me. It’s so fun to read back on where our family was at any given moment (I started this when I had just one child! What?!?!?)

I’m really excited for the future.

When I can look back on this post and read in disbelief how far we had to go to remove the stigma, on raising awareness about AIDS.

I can’t wait for that.

But today we celebrate (the 1000th post) and we educate (AIDS). You can do both.

Thanks for coming along, thanks for spreading the message.

Thank you, thank you.

Last night was just one of those nights. One of those nights that Tomas felt like sharing about his life in Ethiopia. He has them every once in awhile. He’ll have days where it seems his memories come rushing to him, like a tidal wave of nostalgia. I don’t know what it was about last night that made it happen. We were all around the table as the kids drank hot chocolate and made their lists for Santa Claus. Maybe it was that I was asking him over and over again what he wanted for Christmas. Tomas would answer with just one toy and I would encourage him to keep listing. “More”? He kept asking.

So I don’t know if it was the juxtaposition of the overindulgence that comes with Santa Claus compared to his history that did it, but I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that was exactly the trigger last night.

But he told me many things, most of which we’ll keep private…part of his story that he will one day choose to share or not to share.

He did tell me again of water. How he used to have to fetch the water. By himself. At 3 and 4 years old. He remembers walking for so long. Putting the water on his head. He talked about it being so, so heavy. That it hurt his head the rest of the day. I have no doubts this is one of the reasons God put water on my radar so long ago.

Tomas talked about food, or the lack thereof. That “meals” would take mere minutes. “It started and then it was done.”

All last night and today I’ve been thinking about hope. More specifically, how in the hell do Tomas, Binyam and Tariku still have any? I thought about my miscarriage and how I was without hope for seemingly months. I thought about other situations in my past that have left me with little hope to grasp and how none of them compare to the situations in which my sons have found themselves in their short amount of time on this earth.

I have no idea how my boys are still full of hope and joy from some of the stories they tell us. I have no idea how they still look at me with hope in their eyes, that I’ll stay, that I’ll love them enough, that I’ll feed them enough. This amount of hope they have, well it makes no sense to me. But I am so, so thankful they still have that. So thankful when I look in their eyes I see hope and strength shine back at me.

Hope. It’s been on my mind the last few days. And then today I read this. Man, how it spoke to me! So I’ll link it and post it for you to read. Maybe it’s what you need to hear today too.

this saturday night marked the first week of advent leading up to christmas, a season we celebrate very intentionally at the refuge. it’s a hard time of year for a lot of people i know.   it seems like loneliness, depression, fear, and shame seem to set in a little extra.  in our community this year we are doing something i have wanted to try for years–a plan to have something to do every day from thanksgiving to new years.  we are calling it the “refuge no-suck holiday plan” & it includes a really great mix of community, serving others, movies, coffee conversations & more.  it’ll be a fun experiment.

for saturday evenings during advent, the refuge is doing a series called “making room for the unexpected”, focusing on making room for unexpected light, love, joy, and hope.  i kicked us off on saturday night (being up & out of the house that long really kicked my post-surgery butt, too, but i was glad i got to be part & now i’m back on the couch).  i challenged us to consider is to be open to the possibility of hope this advent.  but that hope can be dangerous, in a good and scary way.  i thought maybe somewhere along the line i had written on this before, and it turns out i had shared this little piece on the refuge blog in january 2009.  it is called “hope is dangerous” and i thought i’d just re-post it here in the spirit of the season of waiting, of anticipation, of hoping.

* * * * *

hope. it can mean all kinds of things for different people, but i think it mainly implies “expectation.” a possibility that maybe things could be different, that there’s more to this life than just what we see, that there’s something better ahead. many of us, for all kinds of reasons, are afraid to hope. we have seen many of our dreams dashed. jobs lost. relationships crumbled. addictions destroy. God-not-delivering-the-goods-the-way-we-had-hoped. so we hunker down our hearts and do whatever we can to protect it against believing that good is really possible—again, or maybe for the first time. we settle for loneliness. we settle for disconnectedness. we settle for going-through-the-motions. the thought of something more hurts too much. what if we make ourselves vulnerable and hurt again? what if we try and they all get dashed anyway? what if we risk and lose again? the “what if’s” mount, hope gets held at bay, and we miss out on the thing that Jesus kept pointing to over and over and over again—life now. love now. hope now.

and it remains utterly consistent that pretty much everything Jesus calls us to is quite dangerous. so why would hope be different? hope will require a risk. it will require sacrifice. it will require working against our reflexes to run, hide, self-protect, self-medicate. it will require believing in what it unseen. it will mean we will hurt. it will mean we will be afraid. it will mean taking steps on a path we are unfamiliar with.
it will require us letting God’s spirit move in a way in our hearts that is mysterious and scary and maybe unfamiliar. so how do we get over our fear of hope’s dangerous-ness?

here are just a few thoughts:

• admit what we’re really afraid of. is it being afraid to fail? are you afraid of your heart hurting? are you afraid that you’ll just end up mad at God again? what is it that freaks you out about hope? real relationship requires honesty.

• seek courage in the small steps. we sometimes have such a high expectation of ourselves, that we’re supposed to somehow “take the hill” tomorrow, having conquered all that holds us back. that usually just leads to failure & shame & anger toward ourselves for our lack of faith and courage. small steps keep hope alive, especially when we celebrate them together in community.

• expect it to hurt. hope’s gonna hurt. it’s supposed to. it means we are still really alive. Jesus made very clear that following him would mean pain. hardened hearts do not hurt. but soft open hopeful ones are sure to. i think we need to get better at bracing ourselves for hope to hurt.

• recognize that hope in circumstances is not the same as hope in God. over and over in the scriptures the psalmists cry out “we hope in You, God…our hope is not in the world, but in You.” it is so easy to rest our hope in outcomes, tangibles, things-the-way-we-want-them-to-turn-out. this is why real hope is so dangerous, because it means accepting somehow that things may not be how we had hoped but that our hope in God mysteriously supersedes circumstances.

• strain to see God, feel God, hear God wherever you can. i really think we get so blinded by our pain, our fear, our busyness, our self-centeredness that it becomes difficult to experience God’s spirit moving, revealing, challenging, strengthening, encouraging, pushing. especially when hope is waning and our anger or ambivalence is getting the best of us, we will need to strain to see him in small wacky ways that might normally be missed. in the eyes of a friend. in a word of encouragement. in a song. in the mountains. in a crisis. in a scripture. in where-ever-we-feel-a-flicker-in-our-heart-that-reminds-us-God-is-with-us.

yeah, hope is dangerous. i am afraid of it, too, but i sense God nudging me in all kinds of ways to let him fan more and more of it into flame. to risk my pride, my heart, my safety on hope’s behalf.

i love romans 15:13 in the message:

Oh! May the God of green hope fill you up with joy, fill you up with peace, so that your believing lives, filled with the life-giving energy of the Holy Spirit, will brim over with hope!

this month, as we focus on hope as a community, i pray that we will be people willing to open ourselves up to its dangers. to risk on its behalf. to take steps toward life that scare us. to let God’s spirit move in ways that make our hearts come painfully alive. to let hope propel us to love.

[and in the spirit of this advent season 2010, i’ll add:  to make room for the unexpected.]

* * * * *

ps:  my friend craig spinks has a set of dvd’s for the advent season focused on the same theme as the refuge–making room for the unexpected. some refuge friends are part & you can watch the one we showed on saturday here.  these dvd’s include some really great discussion starters for small groups & are very inexpensive, too.

ppss:  some other advent posts i liked:  sarah at emerging mummy has alovely advent prayer, christine sine is starting a new series for advent calledjesus is near: how do we draw close, and brittany ouchida-walsh has a beautiful advent 1 piece.

Friday morning we headed to Des Moines to celebrate Thanksgiving with my side of the family.

We got family pictures taken (you’ll get to see those soon, promise). But my mom also cooked up a delicious feast.

We also had some time for a few at-home photo sessions.

And many naps (here my dad “grandpa” with baby Adley).

I got to see some of my oldest and dearest friends…and their hubbies and babies (Amber just had hers 2 weeks ago!)

I need to find a picture of us when we were just 9 years old and I was all teeth and bangs (picture Trysten with longer hair).

And today, today we got to go pick out a Christmas tree for my parents. The kids were so fun. I’m convinced everything is better with kids, absolutely convinced.

Last week the kids started begging (well I heard begging anyway, there’s a decent chance Trysten just asked once, I do so love the holidays) me to start setting up for Christmas.

Of course I obliged.

I helped Tomas put up the first decoration. Might not be able to do that for many more years!

Zach even (albeit reluctantly) helps with decorating. He acts like he does it just for me but I can see the smile behind those eyes. Oh, but he does love me that much too.

Me, on the other hand, I seriously love this stuff.

These guys? Yup they do too.

At least for a few minutes. After those few minutes, they wound up wrestling. They always do. What is it with boys?

These two, well they decorated and proceeded to break my heart into a billion pieces with their unlimited preciousness.

After decorating we turned our excitement into a dance party.

Their relationship (Dailah and Tomas), that is something I wasn’t expecting. But they are budding besties. I love it.

Doozie, being the only girl on hand not holding an expensive camera, was passed around readily. It was pretty obvious, though, that this was her favorite partner. And the feeling was mutual.

My favorite part of decorating this year was definitely Tomas. He was enjoying everything so much. I started holding his hand and he turned to hug me, “I’m so excited for Christmas this year because I have a family! And I love you guys so much!”

The feeling is absolutely mutual.