Elf on the Shelf - Adams Style

Confession: I am relatively new to the whole "Elf on the Shelf" thing. I didn't even know it existed until last year at school, when I heard some parents and teachers talking about it. By then it was too late to really do anything, but I tucked the thought into the back of my mind for "next Christmas."

This Christmas was a bit of a Charlie Brown Christmas for us, but the one plan I actually followed through with was buying an elf (even if I did grab him at the last minute from a shelf in Costco as I walked past), and I managed to grab what I now understand to be the one non-creepy elf on the market.

Though I loved the concept of a magical elf visiting from the North Pole, there are three specific things I didn't like about the traditional Elf on the Shelf story. Namely:

1) I don't like that the elf is there to keep an eye on behavior and report back to Santa. I've never used "Santa is watching you" as a motivation for behavior, and I certainly didn't want to start that with an elf.

2) I don't like that the elf is purposely naughty and causes mischief. He's there to watch for kids' good behavior, but then he purposely gets into trouble? It makes no sense.

3. I don't like that the elf can't be touched or he loses his magic. Magical things are meant to be played with. End of story.

So, I bought the elf, and then I completely changed the rules. He first appeared on our kitchen counter in the middle of the day. Bella found him. Truthfully, he had been sitting there for a few days without notice, because Mama was over-thinking his grand entrance and, consequently, had done nothing. Fortunately, I had already written a note from Santa, so when Bella noticed him and said, "Why is there an elf on our counter?" I was ready with a legitimate answer.

"Oh look, baby! There's a note from Santa!" The letter explained that this elf, Jolly, was one of Santa's newest elves at the North Pole. According to Santa, it takes a long time to train elves in everything they need to know to prepare for Christmas, so he asked Bella to help. Would she be willing to let Jolly stay with us until Christmas, and let him participate in everything we do? With daily trips to the North Pole to tell Santa everything he had learned, it was a sure way to help Jolly learn everything he needed to know for Christmas.

Of course, the answer was an enthusiastic, "YAY!" She immediately sat down with Jolly and her writing board and started showing him how to draw candy canes.

After spending an afternoon drawing pictures with Jolly, Jolly (who doesn't need nearly as much sleep as a small child), wanted to surprise Bella by drawing some pictures of his own:

Hee hee. Oops. (I do not condone gratuitous elf naughtiness, but an honest mistake from a young elf is understandable. That's the purpose of him being with us.) Bella corrected his mistake, ever so gently. The next day, Jolly wanted to do something sweet for Bella, so he made her breakfast:

Jolly had NO idea that children can't eat plates of candy for breakfast. In fact, he was a little mortified that Bella couldn't eat it, and felt kind of sorry for her. We left it for him though, and it was gone when we got home that afternoon. 

The next day I taught Bella to make snowflakes from paper, and she in turn showed Jolly. When she woke up the next morning, we discovered that Jolly had been busy during the night. It may or may not have taken him four episodes of Dr. Who to cut them all out, but he turned out to be quite proficient. And Bella was absolutely delighted with her winter wonderland.

And yes, in all of this, Bella pretty much fell in love with him. She became attached immediately. An unexpected bonus: no pressure. I heard (and still hear) other moms talk about how stressful it is to try to remember to do something with the elf all day. Since their kids look forward to that once daily visit from the elf, they notice when he's not there. But since Jolly was with Bella all the time, there wan't any pressure. I could grab him any time she wasn't looking, and just move him to a different location. And when I had time, I'd do something special with him, but never felt guilty if I couldn't. Winning situation for everyone. 

One nigh we all stayed home and watched The Sound of Music together and drank hot chocolate.

When we had all the ice rain down on us, we caught Jolly staring out the window:

We guessed that he was probably thinking about his home at the North Pole.

Bella slept with him every single night. NEVER went to bed without him.

Any time Bella did crafts, she let Jolly help.

One night, she and Jolly watched the Curious George Christmas movie, and in the movie George has a tree shaped chart that helps him know how many days are left until Christmas. When she woke up the next morning, Jolly had made her one just like it.

Jolly even went to Arizona with us. One night Jolly disappeared, and the next morning Bella was ELATED to find him here:

And yes, she believes. I even told her up front that Jolly wasn't real...that he was just pretend, but that we were going to have fun pretending. But she is of a certain disposition, and at just the perfect age, where she can't fully explain some of the things that happened - and thus, she naturally believes in the magic of it. And I'm okay with that. 

Jolly will definitely be back next year. She wouldn't dream of having it otherwise.

Enrique, Who Lives In My Bathroom

Through the course of my childhood and well into my adult life, I have occasionally made friends with bugs. It usually happens when I give them a name, with ladybugs and spiders being the most common. I had a brief relationship with a cricket one year during college, but his legs fell off after only a few hours and the next day I had the unseemly task of vacuuming him up.

Spiders, though, have longevity, so they make great household companions. There is currently a Daddy Long Legs (should that be capitalized? It looks a bit odd capitalized.) who inhabits the upper left corner of the front of my shower. He always stayed in his corner and never bothered me, and since he won't bite me and is non venomous (unlike the black widows I have in the past killed in the garage), and since he will help take care of the annoying little fruit flies and gnats that show up, I have left him alone. He stays in his corner, and I don't interfere with him, and all is well. I feel like we were both happy with this arrangement. I dubbed him Enrique.

And then, about a week ago, the most peculiar thing started happening. Whenever I would get in the shower, rather than staying in his little web out of harm's way, he would meander down to see what was happening. Our shower is small. This was not exactly a pleasant situation.

The first time he did it, I was sure it would be the last. He made it halfway down the shower wall while I watched, stupefied, as his skinny legs would get stuck in the droplets of water. Have you ever looked at a Daddy Long Legs' legs? I mean, really studied them? They are impossibly thin. It's astonishing to me that there is even muscle in them. He would take a step, get stuck in a droplet of water which would immediately suction his leg to the wall, wiggle himself free, take a step, lose his grip, start over again.

We've done this every day for a week now. Shower comes on. Enrique runs from the top corner, heads down the wall. Gets stuck. Slips and slides, loses his grip and falls 6 inches, causing me to start violently and splash water all over in my panic. (I'm okay with him in my shower, but I don't want him IN my SHOWER.) At the last second he manages to grab onto the wall again with one scrawny leg, gets his footing, starts back up. Caught in a drop of water. Suction. Fall. Again, and again, and for literally ten minutes, he will do this, and not get anywhere. He's still in the middle of the shower wall.

It is to the point now that, when I see him coming, I groan aloud and say, "Really, Enrique? You haven't figured this out yet?" And I watch in exasperation and make sarcastic comments to him.

But you know what? After a while, compassion takes over. Yeah, I know he's a dumb spider, and I know you're probably thinking you'd just squash him and get it over with. But that's not me. Eventually I feel sorry for him, struggling and stuck. So I take my little rectangle pumice stone, and I hold it up underneath him so he can get a grip on it. Then I lift him up to the top, where the wall is dry, and he wanders back to his home.

I shouldn't make it sound that easy, actually. It's sometimes a but of a fiasco. The pumice thing is REALLY easy for him to grip, wet or not, and usually as soon as he's on it, he starts booking it across the stone, which puts him heading toward my hand. As I mentioned earlier, I don't actually want him touching me, so I sometimes panic and drop the stone or Enrique or cause some other sort of mild destruction. The other day he waked right off the side and fell in the water and it took all my willpower not to start thrashing around like the little elephant in Tarzan when he thinks he got bit by a piranha. When I fished him out I was sure he was dead, but after a few moments he forced his way to his feet and climbed wearily up the wall. (Yes, I said "wearily." If a spider can be described as "trudging," that's exactly what he was doing.) He has not come out of these escapades undamaged. He only has six legs left. I don't know how many legs a spider can lose and still function, but apparently at least two are superfluous.

Anyway. A week now this has been going on, and through the process, God used this weird life experience to teach me a lesson - and yes, I am the spider, and I will assert that so are you.

Really, we all climb down that blasted wall, don't we? There are areas of our lives that are a mess, and we keep going back to them. For some people it may be leaning on anger or unforgiveness as a crutch; for others it may be a physical addiction; some people have emotional issues or fear or arrogance or really nasty, bad habits that are not representative of a follower of Christ. For Pharaoh, it was one more night with the frogs. (Remember that story? Frogs covered Egypt, and Moses told Pharaoh to tell him when to pray for the frogs to be taken away, and Pharaoh said, "Tomorrow." REALLY, Pharaoh? Tomorrow? How about NOW?!? For whatever reason, he wanted to spend one more night with the frogs.)

And Enrique climbs down the wall, again and again. It does him no good. It only hurts him. And even though I have things in my life that do me no good, I go down the wall. I don't get rid of it. I don't walk away from it, and who know...I may be in the process of losing a metaphorical leg or two. And God watches us, his children whom he loves beyond measure, struggling with our skinny little legs stuck in a droplet of water, helpless in a situation that we had no business getting into to begin with...and he wants to help. He never turns his back, never gives up on us and always, always wants to bring us back into the safety of his rest.

The problem with analogies is that they eventually break down. There comes a point where you just can't make any more similarities and you have to take something for what it is. God's compassion is quicker than my own, he doesn't panic if we get too close and, in general, he doesn't accidentally kill us when he's trying to help us up.

But you get my point, right? God's goodness is unending. It's something that I've needed recently, because I feel like I'm caught in a perpetual loop of anxiety and negativity lately. I don't like it, I'm aware of it, I see it coming, and yet I never seem to avoid it. And God has used this spider, with only seventy-five percent of its legs, to help me understand how good and faithful he is. The reassurance comes in an odd package, I know, but I'll take it.

New Beginnings

There comes a time in a person's life when they must move on from the old, let go of what no longer works and start over fresh.

I briefly considered inserting a joke here about me and Josh, but quickly decided that could go very, very badly. Plus, I adore my husband and I realized that I don't even want to joke about us not being together. So that went out the window.

I just meant a new blog, of course. Xanga died on me, but they did kindly allow me to download all of my old content in html text, full of characters which make no sense to me and with no spaces whatsoever. 78 squashed pages of no spaces whatsoever. Thanks, Xanga.

As for the title...Josh and I had some slight disagreement. I wanted to call it "The Lone Dot," because of the comment my drum teacher made about me being the lone dot on the drummer demographic plot graph. Josh insisted that it made me sound like a lonely, neglected housewife. So we added the [Star], since I'm a transplanted Texan now, and that made us both happy.

So this is where my words will live from now on. And as for the design, of the page, it's a work in progress. It will come.