Happy Meximuse!

It has become an annual tradition, because it has now happened two years in a row, for Jack's godparents to get together over the new year and celebrate a holiday we call Meximuse. For more details on that, refer to last year's blog post. While our original envisioning of Meximuse involved snow and mountains, the proximity of this year's celebration to my due date (I know I'm still a good six weeks away, but my friend Carolyn had her son eight weeks early, so it happens, and how awful would it be to happen while stuck in a blizzard on highway 80?) kept us a little closer to home this year.  Actually we wound up being a lot closer to home; about 0.9 miles, in fact. We'd found a great ranch in Boonville we were going to escape to, but they canceled on us at the last minute because torrential rains had wiped out their road. Apparently there is nowhere safe to go in California in the winter. So we wound up at our friends Rebeccah and Justin's house instead, because they were out of town and we were out of beds. It seemed especially fitting as a hosting place for Jack's godparents, since Rebeccah is my godmother. One big happy god-family.

Our celebration actually began a day earlier, when we went to go visit Godmother Julia in the city. Jack actually calls his godparents "Godfather" and "Godmama". It's pretty adorable. Especially when used in sentences like "Godfather make dino poop!" Godfather and Godmama got their godparently duties out of the way early by taking Jack to see a big elaborate nativity scene at a nearby little chapel (not much bigger than the nativity itself).



Jack was very excited to see the baby Jesus. But then, he was possibly even more excited to see the baby sheep, so I'm not sure what liturgical lessons he took away from the experience. Baby Jesus got to hang out with farm animals -- what a lucky baby! I think that was the lesson.

Maybe that counted as our hike. One of our meximuse traditions is to go for a hike. This was a pilgrimage of sorts, right? Close enough. This is how Jack travels now:

Can't say the cast on his foot bums him out too much, as long as there's a daddy to ride on. He only has 23 days of cast left now, so he should be back to tearing around the neighborhood in no time, but for now he's more careful than is usually characteristic of him, and has reverted back to crawling around the house. He should be able to walk on the cast eventually, but his legs are two different lengths with it on, so that adds its own challenges. The biggest challenge from my perspective is bathing him. The cast can't get wet and Jack has let us know in no uncertain terms that he does NOT care for sponge baths. So in 23 days, he should only need like two or three more baths, right? January is going to be a dirty month for Jack. :)

Back to Meximuse! Another tradition is a feast, and on this one we took no shortcuts. Danny made barbacoa, mexican barbeque wrapped in banana leaves and slow roasted for many hours with various chile peppers... it was as delicious as it sounds. The best part of a nice long roast is there's plenty of time to play games and tell stories and take silly photos.

And here's the godparents teaching Jack to see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil...

Jack loves his godparents. He reveled in all the attention this weekend, and is already looking forward to their next visit. We rang in the New Year thinking about the things we were thankful for in 2010, and one of them is definitely having wonderful people in our lives like Scott and Julia, such incredible role models for our son and such inspiring friends to us that have become our family. God bless the godfamily!