Molly Piper

On Sunday, our little Morrow turned TWO!

We celebrated with our family of SIX(!!!) and our friend Wendy Maybury, who just happens to be a professional photographer and just happened to bring her awesome camera and her love for our kids along.

Morrow is in love with all sports that involve a ball. His favorite at this juncture is basketball. So I attempted basketball cupcakes!

Feel free to submit these to Cake Wrecks if you feel you must. I don’t have the steadiest hand, if you couldn’t tell! I went back and forth between thinking that some of them looked cute and thinking that they looked like spiderwebs. You decide.

Regardless, this was how Morrow felt about them:

And this is how Morrow looked when he was eating one:

Pure enjoyment! I’m no Martha Stewart when it comes to how my cupcakes look, but I’ll take that smile over perfect cupcakes any day!

For the occasion, Cadence wore her first dress! Morrow is in love with the twins. He loves to hold them, give them kisses, throw their dirty diapers in the garbage, and get clean diapers out of the diaper basket.

Orison and Morrow shared some sparkling grape juice for the special day. I love how this picture turned out. It looks like stock photography or something (except for the fact that it looks like our 5-year-old is drinking wine).

I can’t believe it’s been two years since Morrow came into our lives! In some ways it feels like yesterday, and in some ways it feels like we’ve always had him in our family. He brings such laughter into our lives every day.

Happy birthday, Johnner. We love you so very much!

I know it’s kinda late in the week to be posting about Mother’s Day, but I just wanted to share about the weekend. I had a lot of FUN this Mother’s Day!

It started on Friday when Abraham told me he’d been given 2 tickets to the new Target Field (home of the Minnesota Twins) for the Saturday afternoon game. It was supposed to be rainy and cold but we decided to be true Minnesotans and go out to the game anyway! I took my 24-week picture, of course…the twins at the Twins!

By the way, those weren’t our seats. Ours were up in the top deck, but we decided to explore a bit after the game. It was fun to just get to sit together for a couple hours, even if we could see our breath and had to wear winter hats!

Then on Sunday, we had a lovely time at church, went out to lunch with Abraham’s parents and sister, and then went home to lay down!

After naps we went out to Dairy Queen, where I got my favorite Butterfinger Blizzard. Here’s an attempt at a good picture:

After DQ, we went to the cemetery. The kids just run and have fun there, which is kinda cool. I had to bribe them to sit for this one.

I was able to snap a quick one of Morrow while he was on the run:

The only sad part was when we were driving away, Morrow said, completely unprompted, “Bye-bye, dee-dee-dee.” Translation: Bye-bye, Felicity.

Here’s a couple more pictures from recent days, just because I’m crazy about these guys:

I’m so deeply thankful that I get to mother these two characters. And I’m happy to report that this Mother’s Day brought more smiles than tears. That’s a blessed change.

I know I’ve completely dropped off the map in 2010…

I know you’ve been wondering if:

• I ate so much holiday food that I’ve literally popped and vaporized?
• I got trampled when some post-holiday shopping madness went terribly wrong?
• There was some horrible glitch in the matrix and I’m frantically banging on the window of 2010, stuck on the other side, in 2009?

Truthfully, it feels like I’m stuck a few days behind, just waiting for the energy to officially enter into 2010.

Someone call Keanu.

You are warmly invited into my parents’ living room in Erie, Pennsylvania for…

Orison’s Christmas Concert 2009

It’s a little long, but trust me, this is the short version. The original was over 30 minutes long! The kid just wouldn’t stop singing!

So, hunker down with a mug of hot chocolate and enjoy! But drink at your own risk, because there are some laughs that might send it out your nose. Don’t say I didn’t warn you! I don’t want any Christmas lawsuits because of your burnt nasal passages….

Or, if you need to get dinner ready this evening, get your church clothes ironed, or get some last-minute gifts wrapped, plop your kids in front of the computer for ten minutes of family-friendly holiday entertainment! Just my little gift to you….

And for those of you who hang out until the end, Morrow makes an appearance as a Christmas dancer! He goes absolutely nuts anytime he hears Jingle Bells!

This is our joy-filled way of saying to all of you: Merry Christmas from The Pipers!

Our Christmas tree decorating process has morphed and evolved over the years. Now it includes shedding tears for our family member who’s not with us, prancing around the Christmas tree and getting into trouble.

Our daughter has been with Jesus for three Christmases now.

Most people who’ve ever lost someone they love will tell you that the holidays are particularly hard. So, for people to have the foresight to give these ornaments to us back in 2007… let’s just say, I’m deeply thankful.

We’ve done it differently every year, but this year, the Felicity ornaments were the last to go on the tree. And since there were three, Abraham, Orison, and I all chose the one we’d like to hang.

I don’t want to make our tree a Felicity tree, I just want her there. These three little ornaments are very special to us.

If you’ve ever wondered what to get for someone who has lost a child, I would highly recommend an ornament. That way, it’s not another item they have to find a place for year-round, but when Christmas comes, there’s a ready-made place for remembering.

Our tree isn’t fancy. It’s not pristine. But it’s ours. It’s our family tree.

And an angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were filled with fear.

-Luke 2:9

This, my friends is our angel.

I know… she’s filling you with fear right now.

I know… it’s weird. But to us, it’s hilarious. And now… it’s just tradition.

You can’t see too well against the pink bow backdrop, but the angel has some pink netting for wings. And of course, her cotton candy hair.

“What is the deal?” you might be asking. Well, this is an art project my husband did when he was little. And for our first married Christmas, my mother-in-law bequeathed us the box of ornaments she’d been collecting for each of her kids. (Which was a very good thing, because we had neither Christmas decorations nor money to go buy them.)

Abraham’s family grew up not doing Christmas trees (they did a Bethlehem Tree instead). I grew up going out into the field and chopping one down as a family. So the first Christmas we were married, Abraham just didn’t understand why I would want a Christmas tree so much.

But one night, he dropped me off to do some grocery shopping, and said he needed to go run some errands of his own (we shared a car then, and still do). At our set meeting time, he picked me up, but when I looked around for evidence of his so-called errands, I couldn’t find any.

As we got home, we came up the back stairs to our second-floor duplex apartment and started unloading groceries. A few minutes into it, the doorbell rang, and he told me, “Why don’t you go get that?” I remember being kind of annoyed, thinking, “Well, why don’t you?”

But somehow he convinced me and I walked toward the front of our apartment. As I walked into the dining room, there it was…

A Christmas tree, standing tall and proud.

I screamed and hugged him and screamed some more and hugged him. (Oh, and then I got the door.)

It was one of the best Christmas gifts I’ve ever received. So surprising, so unexpected, so thoughtful.

Thanks to Abraham’s mother we actually had some things to put on the tree. But what would we do about the topper? We didn’t have a star (which is what my family always did), and we didn’t have a proper angel.

At some point during my lament about the sad state of our tree and it’s lack of crowning glory, Abraham jokingly placed the little drag queen angel from his childhood at the top. We had a good laugh about it, and decided she should stay.

And she’s assumed the same post for all our Christmases since.

What’s the weirdest thing on your Christmas tree?

Most of you have already put up your Christmas trees. You’ve strung the lights and hung the ornaments. You might even be sitting and enjoying it right now.

There’s nothing like a Christmas tree at Christmas to make it feel like home. Like family.

We chose, for a number of reasons, to put up a very small tree this year. But in actuality, it’s the third year in a row we’ve used this little thing as our family Christmas tree.

You see, I bought it in the Fall of 2007, just after we lost Felicity and I was going through a major money-spending binge (shock does insane things to you). And then when Christmas came, I was too tired to think about putting up a real tree. Plus, we decided to go on an extensive 4-week road trip at Christmas. (Again, shock does crazy things to you.) We spent Christmas #1 without Felicity in Pennsylvania (in our stupor of shock) among our family and friends there.

Then for Christmas 2008, we had just moved into our current house a couple weeks before and the only thing I had time for (and room for among the boxes) was this little tree. Combine that with having a 4-month old baby, and it wasn’t exactly the right time for me to move forward with any elaborate Christmas decorating.

Now it’s Christmas 2009. Christmas #3. (For those of you living without loved ones, help me out here: do you mark your holidays like this? I don’t feel like I have the same inclination to mark other holidays like Thanksgiving or Easter this way. But at Christmas I miss her a lot, and I feel the passage of time more poignantly.)

Anyway… Christmas #3. Another Pennsylvania Christmas. So I figured, “Why go to the trouble of doing a tree when we’re not even going to be here?”

But Orison had other plans.

In his Christmas excitement, one night after dinner, he’d had enough of this waiting around thing (I’m pretty sure it was December 1) and decided to light a fire under Abraham and I. He came into the kitchen and announced that we were all going to the basement right now and, “Dad, you’ll carry the Christmas tree. Mommy, you’ll carry the Advent calendar. And I’ll carry the boxes.”

“Ready… set… go!” And all of a sudden we were putting up a tree after all.

(And no, we didn’t make him carry the boxes.)

I’m planning a couple more posts about what makes our tree, our family tree, special for me. What makes your Christmas tree special for your family?