Cousin Camp

The first time I heard about cousin camp was when my husband and I were newly married. We flew to Michigan to meet with his family at his grandparents’ cottage on the lake, all the cousins gathering together for a week of fishing, waterskiing and games of euchre just like what they had grown up doing in their childhoods.

We’ve kept the tradition going in our family with David’s siblings and the 10 (and counting!) grandkids. In the middle of every July, we meet up from our homes in SoCal, NV and TX for a long weekend for our own version of summer cousin camp.

We’ve done cousin camp in Tahoe, in Santa Barbara, at our homes in the OC. We’ve talked about going to Costa Rica and renting a big house with a private bus. We have big dreams of creating a family resort. But for the last two years, we’ve settled on glamping—low key, affordable, easy enough to do with a big group.

This year, we drove to the Palomar Mountains where we made s’mores, grilled burgers, and braved mosquitos. The kids decorated marshmallow shooters and had contests to see who could catch the most in their mouths. They wrote stories, painted rocks, and played Catan. We celebrated my mother-in-law’s birthday with a carrot cake from Martha Green’s, treebathed (at least one of us ;) ), and took family picture after family picture, all of the cousins in identical blue “Cousin Club” shirts, which they wore until three of the kids fell into the pond after a log walk.

It hasn’t always been easy, traveling with infants or making long drives with littles. The yurt was very, very hot and there was so. much. dirt. (And I did mention the mosquitos?) 

But was it worth it? One-hundred percent.

Favorite summer family tradition? “Worth it” moment? I’d love to know!

The practice of celebrating advent.

Today marks the liturgical beginning of Advent—the season of anticipating the celebration of Christ’s birth and waiting in hope for Jesus’ second coming.

We’ve picked out our Christmas trees (thanks @scoutforestladera!), bought matching pajamas, walked to the candy cane tree in our neighborhood, and we’ve written letters to Santa, but what I love about this season is that it’s so much more than even these special moments.

It is in Advent that we practice holding both—the pain and the promise, the not-yet and the soon-to-come, the comfort and the joy. Advent is the season where we both sit in the darkness and pay attention to the light. A season where we make space for grief while also holding space for the magic.

A few ways we’re celebrating this year:

1 // Starting the season with Every Moment Holy: A Liturgy to Mark the Start of the Christmas Season and A Liturgy for Setting Up a Christmas Tree

2 // Family devotions at dinner using Ann Voskamp’s Interactive Family Celebration of Advent Calendar. Each day, there’s a new devotion along with an ornament to hang on the pop-up tree. 

3 // Reading the Advent Storybook: 24 Stories to Share Before Christmas at bedtime with the  boys. 

4 // Incorporating into my morning quiet time: intentional journal time and Hannah Brencher’s Advent 2020 reflection emails.

5 // Creating an Advent video by taking a few seconds of video from every day of Advent and compiling it into a short video for us to watch on Christmas night.

In these days leading up to Christmas, may we practice—reflection, hopefulness, and peace. May we glimpse redemption and be reminded that joy is present, especially here, especially now.

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Start with Sabbath.

On January 1, per our annual family New Year’s tradition, we drove north to stay at a hotel by the beach for a night.

We’re on our fifth year of these mini family getaways. We used to stay at the Blue Lantern Inn, a cute bed & breakfast that looks out onto Baby Beach in Dana Point. One of the key selling points is that they  coffee to your room in the morning, but with three kids now, we’ve since outgrown it. Now we stay at a hotel in Huntington Beach that is both pet-friendly and kid-friendly. The room we book has a huge bathtub and a pull-out bed that all the kids, in theory, can sleep on, and the hotel offers a triple threat of treats –  wine hour, complimentary cold brew, and unlimited s’mores.

The intention in past years was to use this time to dream and pray over goals as a family, but that’s hard to do with three kids five and under. Now, Dave and I pre-game the dreaming and goal-planning with our own retreat sometime in the fall, and use the annual new year’s getaway to rest and play.

This year, after check-in, we went to happy hour on the pier. There were hundreds of people out, taking pictures and selfies, trying to capture the unreal sunset that night – all the shades of orange, purple, and blue – the first sunset of the new decade. We went back to the hotel for wine and s’mores and sitting around the firepit. The boys watched Home Alone on the pull-out bed. I brought a special bath bomb for their bath, and with the blessing of blackout curtains, my husband and boys slept in until past 9 a.m. I used the quiet time for something as life-giving for me as sleep: journaling, goal-setting, Bible-reading, and prayer. And when the baby woke up, the two of us headed downstairs to pick up hot chocolate so thick it was almost ganache, with homemade caramel and chocolate chip marshmallows, and nitro cold brew with cream. Breakfast was longanisa sausage and pancakes with butter-crisped edges topped with berries and vanilla butter and macadamia nuts. Then more beach time, us sprawled out on hotel towels, me with a book and the boys with sand toys, all blue skies and soft, sea breeze and grounding sand.

Now that we’re home, our boys say, out of the blue, “Remember the hotel? That was fun.” They say, “Remember the hot chocolate?” or “Remembering when we watched the movie and ate french fries?”

They remember. We remember. We remember what it feels like to celebrate and sleep in and savor all of our favorite foods. We remember how to be present and intentional and unrushed, how fun it is to be a family. We remember how to exercise contentment for where we are at this exact moment in this new year.

Our new year’s retreat was not officially Sabbath, but it captured the ethos of it: “a day to pamper your soul in God’s presence.” (John Mark Comer – Sabbath).

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I set 8 goals this year, and the first one is this: to practice Sabbath, every week for all 52 weeks of this year. 

For the last few weeks, we’ve been calibrating and experimenting with what it looks like for our family to set apart a day that is restful and worshipful, a day that shows gratitude for the week behind and celebration for the week ahead.

The questions that we keep coming back to are: What’s life-giving? What does self-care and soul-care look like in this season? What actually feels restorative? How do we model the rhythms of rest and work to our kids? How do we stay present? How do we follow the lifestyle of Jesus in 2020?

We’re learning new rhythms and building on family traditions. I don’t have all the answers to those questions, but we’re starting with Sabbath.