More false labor

Another three hours of false labor and it's tapering off again. ::sigh:: Oh, well. 11 days until induction.

That means 9 days until Christmas!! Are you ready?

Today during the children's sharing time at church, the lady in charge was asking Christmas trivia questions and everyone was just giving her a huge hard time.

She asked us how many wise men there were. Someone said three, another kid said "actually, the Bible never said there were three... they just mentioned three kinds of gifts..."

Later she asked "what was Mary riding?" But the way she said it made it sound like "writing" and I, being a huge stinker and in the middle of my false labor, said "a novel?" (We just barely had NaNoWriMo, folks) Gosh, that's the most irreverent I've been in church since adolescence.

"Who turned them away at the inn?" Someone guessed "innkeeper?" and another kid said "but wait, don't you have to say his name?" I asked him if he knew the innkeeper's name. He said no but looked bothered that no one bothered to write down that innkeeper's name.

This same kid also struggled with the idea of immaculate conception and an older girl argued that Joseph shouldn't be called Jesus' father because he didn't contribute any genetic material -- he was just a father figure. Most of you know that my family has had some exposure to adoption, so I turned to her and kindly said "you know, an adoptive father is still a father, plain and simple." I'm no scholar, but Jesus may have been known for a time as Jesus bar Joseph, after his father. He took up his father's trade as carpenter until his ministry began. It's a very touching idea that he would have knowledge of his own destiny as Christ and yet he learned carpentry and respected his father and mother. Another interesting perspective is from the Forgotten Carols, a song wherein Joseph is said to have expressed his feelings thus: "I was not his father... he was mine."