Donating Her Hair

The little girl with the long hair made an important decision the other day.

She decided to follow in the footsteps of some pretty great people in our lives, Kristen and Jake, who donated their hair to make wigs for people who have lost their hair due to chemotherapy and other medical issues.  I'm so glad our family has such good friends for my children to look up to.

Gracie was sooo excited!!

I love that my 5 year old already has a heart for giving.  And you can bet I'm going to keep gently molding it in that direction.  

My first job as a parent is to make sure my children love God and accept the salvation that Jesus offers.  After that I want to make sure their hearts are full of compassion and generosity.  

Something happened while we were picking out our Christmas tree that I wanted to share.  Some nice ladies asked Grace if she was excited about Christmas presents and what did she ask Santa for?  

(We don't do Santa in our house.  Yes, I know, it's tragic.  My kids have no commercial compass with which to navigate  the holidays.  It's something we started about 2 years ago and it has been a good fit for our family.  I don't care what other families do--this just works for ours.  We keep the focus on Jesus and it generates a great deal of excitement.  It's still completely magical--but it's more of a sweet, lasting magic, full of awe.  Not a "what am I gonna get" magic.   We've kept our "no Santa" tradition mostly quiet for fear of a riot breaking out amongst onlookers.  But if you've seen my kids, you'll notice there is no shortage of joy.  They just go bananas over the baby Jesus.)  

So anyway, I wasn't sure how Grace was going to respond to these nice ladies, and there were several other people standing around. Grace said  "I just wanna be with my family on Christmas".   I could have died at that moment.  I have heard everything I ever need to hear in this life.  God, you can take me now.  Heh!  

Grace's short hair is so cute!  PS I love little legs in tights!

There was a collective "awwww" from the people.  Then of course everyone felt the need to warn me about how that would all change once she was a teenager and how I would have my hands full, that she would need every new gadget on the market plus some etc, etc.  Thank you everyone for the fair warning.  We  feel we may have a good plan in place for such a time as the one explained to me in the Christmas tree lot.  It's called Operation Go On A Mission Trip Sweet Teenager and See What Your "Needs" Really Are).

So that's the story of the short hair, with a tangent of a Santa-less house and other bah-humbuggery.

The End