Wonky Feeling Christmas

This Christmas was rather weird and wonky and heavy.  I feel like I have about zero words lately…hence my absence around these parts.  I just don’t know what all to write, but I miss this space.  I miss you guys.  I miss pecking at these keys.

So how was your Christmas?  I hope it was grand and magical and lovely.  If it didn’t feel like those things, I feel ya and we’re going to make it and survive and maybe even more because God sent this baby and He changed everything.  Like everything everything.  This is the good news.  This is the hope.

When Christmas break kicked off we enjoyed some solo dates with Kelley kids.  Last year everyone chose Josh to go out with except one kiddo.  This year I got picked twice.  My odds are getting better. Harper and I got her hair cut, shopped for her siblings at Target, ate Mexican food and desserted (it’s a real world) on Starbucks cake pops and cookies.

Solomon and I ate an appetizer’s only meal which included cheesesticks, pot stickers with slaw and mini sliders.  He got a fruity bright blue drink to wash it all down.  We shopped at TJ Maxx for his peeps and went with ice cream from Sonic for dessert because it was only 24 degrees outside.

Amon and Hudson chose Josh… Traitors! 🙂  Our littlest is well, too little to do any sort of shopping.

We spent the rest of our days leading up to Christmas doing our kindness advent, baking, watching movies, suffering through crazy cold temps, working a bajillion puzzles including a 1000 piece snow one that Josh Kelley finally abandoned because #ALLTHOSEWHITEPIECES  We ate yummy food, Christmas partied with friends, stayed up way too late and wavered between joy and sadness…resting in His peace and questioning everything.

Christmas Eve arrived and the temps spiked and our kids wore shorts and tees.  It was 64 degrees last night and 70 degrees now.  Not exactly the white Christmas we were dreaming of…break out the Bermuda shorts.  We saw every single cousin in less than 24 hours.  We opened Santa presents with our littlest’ family early in the Christmas morning hours and chatted over sausage balls and canned cinnamon rolls.  Then we ate, ate and ate some more with Josh’s family.  I broke into tears while trying to decide between fudge or buttermilk pie and filled out a giant pile of new adoption paperwork.  I emailed our caseworker and the grant supervisor who is overseeing one of our grants we received…wishing them a Merry Christmas, asking questions and not expecting a reply at all, but I left my in-laws house feeling a sense of accomplishment along with another giant stack of papers ready for the mail.

This morning after my workout I was driving home and caught the sky in my rearview mirror.  I turned around and headed to the Kroger parking lot and then just sat and watched the sky.  Things feel really messy right now on so many different levels.  My stress level can skyrocket with simple thoughts like realizing 2017 is just 5 days away which puts me and our little guy another full year apart…another full year I completely missed.  To put it simply, I feel like a mess.  A jacked up, messed up, wonky mess.

And as I sat there and watched the sky change minute-by-minute and thought about the past few days and the days ahead…when I thought about all those feelings and emotions and downfalls…When I thought about how undeserving I am of pretty much everything…I was reminded of how God sent Jesus for my wonkyness, my brokenness and just my messed-upness in general.  I’m so thankful He shared Jesus with us all, but first with a bunch of messy misfits.

“Now where would your send your splendid choir?  To a big cover hall maybe?  Or a palace perhaps?  God send his to a little hillside, outside a little town, in the middle of the night.  He sent all those angels to sing for a raggedy bunch of shepherds watching their sheep outside Bethlehem.”  -The Jesus Storybook Bible

And that feels like hope.  Big, lovely, messy, gracious hope.

Happy Monday!