Soft Enough for a King

Happy December! We've been in full-on holiday decorating mode in the Montague house and have been pulling out all of our decorations since before Thanksgiving! 

Growing up, my family had a collection of special Christmas-themed books that magically appeared/only came down from the attic once a year when we pulled out the Christmas decorations. Every year we'd get a new book to read on Christmas eve, but we spent the whole month of December re-reading the previous years' books. In addition to getting us more excited about Christmas, the books seemed extra special because we only saw them for a brief period of time and maybe read them once each year (instead of over and over for weeks straight like some books our kids enjoy!) 

We started the Christmas book tradition with our kids when Miles was a newborn, and were super excited to add Soft Enough for a King to our collection last year. It's not only a beautifully illustrated book, but also includes a baby doll, manger and strips of paper "straw" to fill up the manger. 

The book tells the story of Abe, the son of Innkeepers who have to turn a special couple away when they don't have any room in their inn. Abe gets the idea to let them stay in the stable behind the inn, but wants to make sure the manger has fresh straw for their baby. On his way to the market to get the straw, he keeps encountering people who need his help, so he has to make the decision to stop and help or keep going to get the straw before the market closes.

Matilda is still working on sitting still for story time.

The creative retelling of Christ's birth is great, but what really helps this familiar story come to life is how it helps teach service in a way even toddlers can understand. Tying into the story and creating an interactive experience, the set comes with pieces of straw with a place for you to write and record acts of love. Your family gets to spend all of December filling the manger with hay through service just like Abe in the book! It's a simple, lovely little way to show how when you do something for anyone - you're really doing it for the King.

A perfect lesson for any season, but especially fitting for our family as we're trying (some days better than others) to make the holiday season about much more than getting stuff. 

As we add in new pieces of hay, this year it's also been fun for the kids to read and hear about kind things they did last year. 

It's gonna take some work to get Matilda to put the baby in the manger. She's gotten a bit attached.

We're excited to offer a special discount code for you to get your own set! Just type in montagueart at checkout through December 3, 2016 to take 15% off your order. We are also hosting a giveaway over on Instagram, so head on over to our giveaway post to enter! 

Halloween (or failed attempts in selfie family photos)

For Halloween this year we went as characters from Alice in Wonderland!

Miles found out I already had an Alice dress, so he picked out what each person would be. We ordered Miles' Cheshire Cat costume online, pieced together Brad's white rabbit from mostly things in his closet (I also made him a vest), and I made Matilda a red queen costume.

At the kids' current ages, the best we can usually do for a family photo is to take a ton of selfies and see if one might turn out. It also makes for really fun gifs. 

Brad bought a new small camera in October, and this was one of our first times to play with it (hence all the out-of-focus photos.) It has a screen that you can flip up so that you can actually see yourself when you are facing the camera. It works great for selfies. When he was setting up the self-timer mode, he found a way for it to take multiple photos in a row without having to press the button to set it off each time.

However, we didn't realize until we loaded up the photos that it also apparently was filming a video documenting the time in between each photo. It's super awkward but funny, so...enjoy.

How We Spent Our Summer

This summer, Brad took on the role as director at the summer camp where we met, worked as counselors, and even got married. Amazing, and so full circle, right? 

I feel like in some ways, maybe because we were married so long before we had kids, that we STILL have crazy expectations that things can be like they were before kids. Like, oh, we'll be able to both be out at camp, working on things together, and the kids will just tag along and be great and love camp, too! 

Hahahahahaha NO. Unfortunately, Miles is 3.5 and completely in the terrible 3's right now, and Matilda is 16 months and just wants to wander or run when we are outside, so basically this summer we worked on getting on a schedule of going out to camp and visiting when it made sense with the camp schedule and with the kids' schedule. We pretty much only went out to visit at breakfast and dinner, occasionally at lunch, and sometimes we would stay for a bit and play afterwards, depending on the kids' moods. Brad usually left the house by 5:30 am each day and didn't get home until 10 or 11 most nights, so it was rough on the kids to not be able to spend more time with him.

It was a great summer and we are so thankful for camp, and so excited our kids will be able to experience summers there starting at such a young age. And to be able to see their dad making a difference in so many kids' lives.

But it was also really, really hard. With Brad's hours, I was pulling single parent duty about 5 days a week. The kids had a hard time adjusting to the schedule and to make everything worse, it just seemed like one of us was always sick. Days before camp started, I had a stomach virus, followed by strep throat, followed by viral pneumonia, which I had actually caught from Miles, who has basically been sick all summer. He's still dealing with a bad cough that just won't seem to go away. The first day of camp, we had only been out there about an hour and he fell in the parking lot, busting up his knee. And then Matilda tripped on a step on the fourth of July and bruised and cut up her eye and forehead. Thankfully, Brad has stayed well all summer and didn't catch anything from us!

I've found that this season of life is super difficult for taking photos--Matilda is usually crawling all over me, and Miles hates getting his photo taken, so I have to be sneaky. I used Snapchat a lot, so while I have lots of vertical videos (ugh) of the kids, I mostly only took photos with my iPhone, and even then I didn't take a lot. I occasionally got some with my Fujifilm X100T, and then brought out my big camera (Nikon D3s) for the final week to get some in a last minute attempt to have some good photos of the kids in this moment of time. So, here's our summer in photos (and a couple short videos).

So many break pops were consumed this summer.

On Monday of the first week of camp, Brad took Miles out in a canoe for a few minutes and Miles absolutely loved it.

By far, the kids' favorite thing to do at camp was play with the milk crates. They spent so much time building with them, pushing them around the mess hall and climbing in them. I realized Miles had never seen them before camp when he saw some in a grocery store and excitedly pointed them out. He started laughing and said "Those aren't supposed to be here, they're supposed to be at camp!"

While I prefer horizontal videos because you can watch them easier on a monitor or tv, I do like that Vimeo allows vertical video uploads and how easy they are to watch on your phone. If you are reading this blog on your phone, the vertical orientation allows you to watch the video a lot bigger, but if you are on a computer, it's a bit difficult to fit the whole video on your screen. Try clicking the Vimeo logo to watch the video in a separate window.

The kids loved the new bellower and getting to help ring the bell.

Miles' standard reaction any time people talked to him or told him he was cute. Everyone was so friendly to the kids, and they were SO shy and uninterested in meeting anyone new :(