Season Mosaic

I think it is like Katie said.... it's not that there's nothing to write about, more that:

... rather, I am filled, but with Christmas things that I want to hold close for awhile....All is comfort and joy.

So just a few little things that come to mind:

• The kids got the complete Jeeves and Wooster collection (DVD) for our communal Christmas present and have been watching episodes.
  
• I got up to 24, 000 in Geo Challenge (and told Liam "that log in the fireplace is shaped just like Finland" He blinked a bit). Maybe I had better give it a rest. I also dreamed about the shape of Argentina. I think I know more geography now than I ever learned in the previous 45 years.
  
• We are slowly recovering from our viruses. Liam is the sickest right now. Paddy was healthy all day but last night, after he went to sleep, started gasping and gulping a bit.... though his color stayed good. We sat him up to try to get him to cough, until he said politely, "I really would rather rest." It reminded me of the time soon after we got him home from the hospital on Christmas Eve 2002. He had been induced early and kept in the San Francisco hospital for three weeks. So it was almost exactly six years ago that I watched him sleeping in his car seat, still tiny (about 6 pounds) and looking somehow too soft and unready to be out in the real world. Then I reached over and took Aidan's oximeter pulse reader and wrapped it around Paddy's small finger. It read 99 -- about as good as you can get as far as oxygenation goes -- and I sat there for a long time with the oximeter's red light gently pulsing and Paddy sleeping, thinking about the miracle of breathing in such a tiny frail human being.
• Jeeves and Wooster is fun to watch while you're getting over a cold.
• We have several feet of snow outside, and Kevin found a site on the internet where he can see CHP reports of occasional cars stopping to put on their chains in the middle of the road, consequently blocking all the traffic around them, and once, four dogs out in the road. Interesting stuff : ).
• Aidan is having so much fun with his Doug and Melissa puzzles, and the tops he got at the dollar store.
• We have to go to Mass early this afternoon because Clare is going to be cantoring. Christmas is the one time in the year besides Marian holy days that we can count on GOOD music, sadly. Inheritors of an unparalleled music tradition, too often we sing the hymns of Haugen and Haas...sigh... but at least for two weeks we can sing time-honored Christmas carols.
• I have to go get the boys ready for mass.
• I just finished reading The Uses of Knowledge by John Henry Newman .... the last five discourses from the Idea of a University. I found it on our library dime rack which usually contains things like John Grisham or Tom Clancy, sometimes things by Victor Davis Hanson, sometimes things like old trade paperbacks of classics, and once in a while something like The Uses of Knowledge or Joining the Literacy Club by Frank Smith that looked like they were dropped down there just for me.