Boxing Day!

At last. I have waited all year for Boxing Day.
Now I can finally teach these kids a lesson.

Christa and I noticed that Christmas came and went without much in the way of an annual newsletter from us. To remedy this oversight, we have composed the following summary of our lives as 2009 left them:

Biggest news:
We were on a roll to break a Flannery record for the year: No new children. Then a baby dropped into our laps on Thanksgiving day and it's a boy! We have dubbed him Jude.

Everyone was surprised at the idea of importing yet another human baby child. Zella was especially unceremoniously deposed, no longer the smallest and most fragile. Babies usually come after six to nine months warning. We had two days to decide. In fact, Christa's parents are still his official foster parents while we renew our foster care license.

Ada and Tirza seem thrilled to have their biological brother around. Now we just have to teach them what "gentle" means. All the girls (except Zella) received baby dolls for Christmas because they are newly obsessed with mothering. They would hide Care Bears in their shirts and amble slowly around the house, begging us to notice their baby. (We have good friends who had their first baby eleven days before Jude so the girls watched the whole process from belly to baby.)

When we finalized Ada's and Tirza's adoption in July, we expected to be done for a long time. We had barely agreed to consider conceiving another child when we got the call. We're not crazy but we do believe that people are the most important things in the world.


The work:
Lana started preschool this year and keeps embarrassing us by exploring her vocabulary. Brian left the big corporation to work for a small business and explore different endeavors.

Christa has met success with her new weekend photography business. She is also active in her MOPS group and composes the newsletter. Read it here: http://mopsinfo.blogspot.com/ Brian contributes the male perspective, POPS! (Unlike MOPS, POPS is not an acronym; it's an explosion.) Sample his back pages here: My Wife Left Me Today and Boys Are the Best.


If you browse some of the older posts here on this web-log ("blog" sounds so "blah" + "soggy" to me) you may notice that the last time I wrote anything for the greater internet's benefit was when Lana was born. Whew. Please forgive the gap. Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans.

We love you all and wish you a beneficent 2010.
-Brian and Christa Flannery

PS. Truth-by-Consensus (Wikipedia) describes Boxing Day differently than I imagined it. Alas.