As Did the Former Lions of Your Blood

After an autumn of almost disconcerting mildness a winter chill has descended on New Haven. It is officially cold. So cold that a couple hours ago we abandoned our plans of driving down to the church to watch the First Presidency Christmas Devotional on the big screen and instead curled up on the couch as a family with a capacious bowl of unadulterated (meaning modestly healthful) popcorn to take in the devotional on the diminutive screen of Justin’s computer.

It was wonderful. The girls were supremely cute today—by which we mean they graced the entire afternoon with a luxurious nap of three hours’ length—and especially so during the devotional. Each girl had a tiny personal bowl of popcorn, and Eli clutched hers to her chest with an impish mixture of tenderness and avarice. At one point, she needed the use of both hands and carefully lay her bowl on the surface of a flat-lying book—only promptly to kick the bowl’s contents to the four winds with her first succeeding step. Julia correctly identified each member of the First Presidency as he stood to speak, by name and without prompting.

Lia taught a masterful Sunday School lesson today that focused on the epistles of Peter. Justin loves having Lia teach, both because it provides occasion and authorization to look upon her glorious person for nearly an hour without interruption and because it somewhat mitigates the unseemliness of his ineradicable habit of proffering comments of disproportionate number and length comments in every class of which he is a member. He can now hide under the cloak of conjugal officiousness.

Yesterday (Saturday), we went to the Boston Temple and—Wonder of wonders, and Miracle of miracles—we made it there and back with no technical flaws (i.e. getting lost or taking undesirable detours). The trip was still a very long one and we came home exhausted. We fed the girls and promptly put them to bed, after which Lia sent Justin to a ward party of sorts while she stayed home and did Tae-Bo (in this family Justin eats sweets and Lia exercises, so things balance out in the end).

On Friday our dreams of date night were smashed by a softball size bubble that Lia found protruding from one of our tires. The Bull made it to Firestone without the feared explosion of the tire, and we idled away a happy hour as a family in such riotous redoubts as Once Upon a Child and Wal-Mart while the tire was replaced.

On Tuesday Lia orchestrated a baby shower for Virginia Rogers, another of the Wives of the Yale Law School, held in the home of Sander and Bianca Daniels. The shower was a long one (pushing 3 hours), and in the midst of the merriment Sander sent an email to Justin and Kirk Cheney that read something like, “You’re lovely wives are in my home and giggling up a storm.” Justin wrote back a note of sympathetic commiseration, indicating that overhearing a shower—baby or bridal—is in many ways a fate worse than coerced exposure to contemporary popular music.

Monday was the traditional Monday-after-Thanksgiving, which meant that Family Home Evening was devoted to decking our halls, or at least our living room, with emblems of folly—we mean, with our Christmas tree and an assorted omnigatherum of ornaments and lights. Most exciting, though, was the annual unveiling of our Little People nativity set, which roused to delighted approbation our own resident little people. Pushing down on the button above the stable where the star goes sets the thing off in a jazzed-up rendition of “Away in the Manger,” to the tune of which Justin has taught Julia a ridiculous dance. That dance, naturally enough, has become by now a daily ritual. “Daddy,” Julia cries, as she sets off the music and demonstrates the aforementioned jig. “Dance like this!” The rest we leave to the collective imagination of our intergalactic readership.