Late December 2017

Well girlies,

You are in the basement playing with your new (to you) Disney Infinity toys.  We bought them from  a mom who couldn't sell them to the video exchange store we love.  At $2.50 a figurine it was a great deal.

You had a good Christmas, and it has snowed, so you were able to sled for the first time since 2015 winter.  We spent a good part of the day going up an down a giant hill in an innertube we bought on clearance a few springs ago, and some borrowed sleds.  You were bundled in your thermies, clothes, snowpants, snowboots, winter coat, extra hats, and gloves.

Today was the first time we tried the self-heating hand warmers made by HotHands.  They were surprisingly effective with the ~10°F and wind.

Afterward we went to McBurger (what I call McDonalds) and you had happy meals.  There was a brother and little sister with an age gap like yours, and they were struggling to get along.  I told you that I was proud of how kind you are to each other.  I tell you that when you both are grown up, you are going to want a team.  You want a capable grown-up to be a friend and strong ally, like the force only different.  The cheapest it is ever going to be is to earn the trust and friendship of your sibling today.  They can be a great friend and great ally.

One of my deepest regrets is how badly I botched that with my siblings.  Even if we started today, there is never going to be a bridge starting from when they were young.  My sibs and I competed, instead of cooperating.  Someone had to win and someone else had to lose.  It looks like a zero sum game, but its really a negative sum game over time.  When I moved away, my family imploded.  Some parts are still there, the bomb doesn't make the brick and metal not exist, but the life-trajectories of J. or B. are not something we can go back in time and amend; the damage is extensive.  They never get a healthy childhood. Their personality and character breaks, strongly driven by crushing trauma, but then having layers and layers of choices and habits of thought and emotion layered upon them are a symphony of sorrow that only infinite hate could rejoice in.  This is one of the many reasons that I need Jesus.  He is truly the only one that can take something devastated, and do any good with it.  He did that with me.  He continues, for some amazing and unfathomable reason, to continue to do that.  Maybe someday he will do that for them.

Girlies, I want you to live with kindness.  It means something big in heaven.  It is one of the "fruit of the spirit", but really is one of the currencies of heaven.  In heaven, what we call gold they call pavement.  What they call gold is the only thing worth having.  The agrarian meaning of "fruit" is lost in translation to a technical civilization.  If you have the hand of God on you, doing to you and through you the things of heaven, that is a good thing.  It is a super-human thing.  Kindness can be a super-human thing. Patience can be more powerful than the whole world.

Wind-chills are going to get bad tonight.  Scary for a mathdad who lived 16 years in Phoenix before moving to where water falls from the sky, sometimes in feet per day, frozen.

I love you.  I delight in you.  You read so well.  You think so well.  You love well.  I delight in that.
Math-big-girl, you are competitive but need to get better at sportsmanship.  Sometimes you are a sore looser, and a poor-sport.  We will see what can be done there.  Soccer?  Martial arts?  I don't know. 

God keep you girlies.