Merry, Merry

December 2013

 

Dear friends and family,

We hope you are all well and happy. We can’t believe another year has flown by so quickly – I think we’d better get used to it so I can stop saying that every December. Our family is busy like everybody else, with work and school and activities and all the good things we can fit in. We’re having a great time with two children now old enough to ride bikes, swim, help around the house, and entertain us all day with their antics, singing, dancing, and funny personalities.

Claire is a first grader. There are 18 boys and 9 girls in her class. We can’t figure out how it happened, but the three other first grade classes have the same ratio. Luckily, she’s no doormat and doesn’t have any complaints about the situation. Claire takes tennis lessons and art classes and is always producing pages and pages of drawings, embellished love letters to mom and dad, and sculptures and contraptions of all kinds made with whatever materials we give her. We love her generous nature, her hourly hugs and kisses, and constant crafting.

Audrey is in fourth grade. It’s a whole new era with more homework; more social activity; more concerns about hair, clothes and friends; and more desire for freedom. Audrey is a Girl Scout, loves to read, takes piano lessons, and horseback riding lessons. She is good at the piano and it’s lovely to hear her practicing and mastering many familiar songs. This month Audrey turned 10 and we see teenage-dom closing in. We enjoy her sassy sense of humor, her singing in the shower, and her checking out 30 books at a time at the library. 

Mark is very busy as a freelance industrial design consultant. He sometimes has more work than he can do, and we are grateful for the bounty. This summer he went to Korea twice for one of his clients. And he just finished a 3-month contract with Hewlett-Packard that had him living in San Diego during the week. It’s feast or famine for us – he’s home all the time or none of the time. When he is home we keep him running with a list of work and play that just can’t be done without him - he’s good to all of his girls.

I still do quite a bit of freelance and volunteer at the school every week. We rent a garden plot from the city, and I am busy picking, planting, weeding, and watering all year long. We are lucky our climate is so mild we can grow vegetables year round. That’s a lot of veggies, but we eat a little bit of everything, including junk food. I play tennis and do yoga regularly and love finally having the time to be active. Both kids in school is a bit crazy, but awesome - half the day I do whatever I want and need to do and the other half I do whatever they want and need to do. I’ll take it!

Mark and I both turned 41 this year and it was definitely easier than turning 40. I might even say we are finally starting to feel like adults (middle age has a way of forcing the issue), which is weird. It’s a good life we have, that’s for sure. Not to say we don’t face our fair share of stress and struggle – but none of that is fun to read in a Christmas letter. Fortunately, our difficulties are all the kind that lack longevity, and when we look at the big picture we think of ourselves as very lucky.

Our girls are our main focus, and now that we are not drowning in the slobbery stage, we have come up for air with a vengeance. Survival mode was the name of the game for so long – now it seems, the world is opening up for us. 

All our love, Mark, Melissa, Audrey and Claire