[Note: I wrote this on several occasions over the course of the past month. I've tried to fix all the verb tenses and date references to make sense. Really, I've tried.
Also, please know that the timing of finally publishing this today is entirely coincidental. The following has nothing to do with our new President.]
Happy New Year to one and all, and Happy Anniversary to us! Let’s begin with a pop quiz, to make sure you’re all paying attention:
On January 2, 2009, we celebrated 11 years of marriage by
a) Having my parents over to take care of the kids so we could go out all day
b) Going to a fancy restaurant to use a coupon-thingy for a flight of wine
c) Seeing a couple of possible Oscar contenders at matinee prices
d) Cancelling all of the above
While you’re passing your papers up to the front of the class, I’m going to tell you everything we’re going to cover in today’s “2008 – The Year in Review” post. As I mentioned earlier, we haven’t done a “The Year in Review” newsletter in several years (and by “we” I mean all two/five/seven of us, but mostly “the writer in the family, who’s typically too much of a perfectionist to finish anything…at all…ever…such as this parenthetical remark…”). So the challenge before us (and by “us” I mean “me”) is to catch all of you up at once, no matter how long it’s been since you heard from us, while disguising the whole thing as a Year in Review for a SINGLE year.
Thus, we have two topics before us for today:
I. Things that did not change for the Andersons in 2008
and
II. Things that changed for the Andersons in 2008
Any questions? Good. On to Part I:
Things that did not change for the Andersons in 2008
Well, the first one I already gave away. We are still married. Our house still has no front or back door, but two side doors, and a bay window that faces north onto one of the awesomest blocks of Madison Street, where all different kinds of families live and walk and play and bike and skateboard and drive by and honk and wave and sometimes even stop by and say hello, and where we are neither the old-timers nor the new kids after NINE years in the same domicile. I am still five months older and one grade ahead, and also the sole breadwinner, although sometimes it seems less like winning anything and more like they’re just handing out bread. My bread comes mostly from Breakthrough Technologies, a software consulting firm that’s about two miles away, as the bike rides; the owners are still very cool people, and they still buy lunch on Fridays, even for the English/Spanish major in the corner who has no background whatsoever in software. Emily is still richly and abundantly blessed to spend most of her waking hours in the gloriously trouble-free and comforting enclosure of our palatial abode, in which the 60-year-old drains never clog, the bathroom and dining room are each big enough to hold ballet auditions, and nobody ever runs out of places to store toys and clothes. (Do I need to tell you I’m kidding?) She still cares faithfully for the children, dogs, husband, neighbors, and friends, through such unsung heroics as cooking, cleaning, picking up, dropping off, planning playdates, refereeing playdates, packing, unpacking, laundering, and shopping. In the few remaining minutes of her day, she still likes to TiVo PBS’s Mystery!.
We still have two dogs: Narnia, aka Girl Number One, is older than our bonds of holy matrimony and spends her time being regal, tolerant, and sleepy, often all at once; Moxie, aka Girl Number Four, is not yet two and is mostly beagle, which means she has about four primary interests: cuddling with people, escaping from the back yard, eating garbage (including used diapers), and climbing on Narnia’s head.
We still have two beautiful daughters: Dorothy/Dar, aka Girl Number Two, spends more time reading and writing than sleeping, is in charge of feeding the dogs every night, and likes to teach just about everything she learns each day in first grade to her younger sister. Margo, aka Girl Number Three, is already reading (thanks primarily to you-know-who), has an excruciating 19 months left until kindergarten, and spends more time changing her clothes and fixing her hair than she does playing with baby dolls or stuffed animals.
We still have an annual Oscar party and cram the house full of just about everyone we know. We see family out in Wheaton just about every month or so. We camp at least one night every fall and go ice skating downtown at least once every winter. We still go to church in a movie theater (mostly because real estate in Evanston still ain’t cheap), and our kids are still getting used to the idea.
We still look the same, mostly (see for yourself—we try to dump all our phamily fotos on flickr, but we still haven’t gone through and really cleaned ‘em all up).
Now, lots of you were probably up to speed on all that anyway, so you might’ve been skimming up to this point to get to the first item coming up here in Part II:
Things that changed for the Andersons in 2008
WE HAVE A SON!
There. That’s about it. It was a great year. Thanks for all your prayers, support, friendship, dogsitting, emails, generosity, love, and …
Wait, you’re still here?
You want me to ‘splain? There is too much; let me sum up. Here, in no particular order, are some other things that happened this year:
- Margo finally agreed to potty-train herself, cold turkey, per Dr. Shana’s orders at her 3-year checkup.
- Margo started pre-school two days a week, at the park district building next to Dar’s school. Emily had a few months of two mornings a week all to herself!!
- Moxie settled down and started sleeping through the night without whining to go into the back yard.
- Narnia got more tolerant of Moxie, to the point that they occasionally fall asleep together on the same cushion or blanket, sometimes even snuggled against each other!
- Dar got glasses. Luke & Emily learned that kid glasses have gotten a LOT cooler since the early ‘80s.
- Dar started piano lessons in October…and learned to play “Joy to the World” by Christmas!
- Emily joined Facebook, reconnected with old friends, and had a lot of fun with status updates.
- Emily spent much of the ridiculously long political cycle (especially on nights when I was working late on one thing or another) by laughing at it all with Stewart/Colbert and learning from American Experience.
- Luke gave up on trying to do freelance editing work on the side, switched to a 40-hour schedule at work, and started to treat his day job more like a day job. For the first time since we got married, Luke is officially not doing any work in Spanish.
- For the first time ever, Luke snowshoed to work.
And speaking of firsts, and of Spanish, and of joy, and of the world, and of snuggling, and of sleeping through the night, and of checkups with Dr. Shana…
On June 10, 2008, a little boy entered a hotel room in Guatemala City. He was being carried by a very quiet and gentle caregiver and a young law-school student, her boss’s son. And when he went to sleep that night in that hotel room, he had a Mamá and a Papá.
The little boy had just started walking and just finished drinking formula. We said, “Hola”, and he said it right back. A few days later, we brought him home.
If you’d like to read more but don’t have (or don’t remember) the password to get to the content on our other site, let us know. If you’d like to start back at the beginning, go ahead.
As for Rique in 2008, here are some things that were different for him, in his own words:
- At my new home, there’s only two other kids. Sometimes they’re not even around. That’s a little weird. At least we all still sleep in the same room.
- These other two spend a lot of their time hugging me, talking to me, squeezing me, trying to pick me up, trying to teach me things, and holding me.
- I learned about a type of four-legged kid called a “Narnia”. They don’t touch me quite as much, but they let me touch them, and they’re fuzzy. There are two of them here!
- Reluctantly, I learned to chew, but it turns out to be really useful! Also, you wouldn’t believe how many different kinds of food there are! I learned that I like almost everything there is to eat. Whatever I don’t like, I try to share with the Narnias.
- People here wear more clothes at one time than anyone I’ve ever seen, especially in the last couple of months. I think it has something to do with the way the air outside gets really prickly and sharp. Sometimes they even put clothes on their hands! I’m not a big fan of those, but I also hate it when the prickly air makes my fingers feel all funny. I must admit, I can get pretty unhappy about the whole thing sometimes.
- Speaking of being unhappy, after being in my new home for a while I came up with a new strategy: when you get unhappy about something —anything at all, really— high-pitched screaming at full volume is the only response that makes any sense. This is true for serious bodily injuries, most diaper changes, not being picked up by the nearest adult, and everything in between.
- I learned that running and jumping are almost as fun as dancing. Sometimes I combine all three.
- I learned about strollers. Like everything with wheels, they’re awesome. The best thing about strollers is that you can usually lean over to see —and sometimes even touch— the wheels while they’re turning. The worst thing about strollers is that they have straps that keep you from getting out to play with the wheels.
- Sitting still is a big thing around here, especially at meal time. I usually go along with it for a while, because it makes their feeding routine a lot smoother.
- Speaking of sitting, the two grown-ups here want me to sit on a little bowl, half-naked, for what seems like hours. Eventually I decide to pee, because that makes them clap. They seem to enjoy clapping. I usually clap also, to encourage them.
- I have grown quite used to riding in cars, getting buckled and unbuckled, and so on. Nothing to it. Those little metal toy cars, on the other hand, will never get old. You can pretend they make noise, and you can roll them along the floor or on your head, and there’s even this one toy that makes them go around in circles all by itself! You might also think that throwing them is a great way to express frustration, but it usually just makes the little metal cars disappear up onto the top of some tall piece of furniture. (See high-pitched screaming, above.)
- Also, “car” is relatively easy to say, although sometimes I think one of the other two kids thinks that’s her name.
- I don’t even remember what it used to be like when I took a bath, but the way they do it here is awesome: you get to sit in the water and play, which is about as much fun as anything can be. Usually you do it at home, naked, with soap and toys. Sometimes you do it in someone’s backyard, only there’s a lot more water, and the grown-ups don’t let go of you. And there’s this one kind of bath that you have to go through sand to get to. It’s so big that you can do it with a whole bunch of strangers, all at once, and the water moves all by itself, without anybody splashing in it!
OK…you get the idea: we really like having a son, and we are also really outnumbered. There’s always more to say, but I need to just publish this and be done; I’m having entirely too much fun instead of doing other things I should be doing, and this newsy-update-thing is already really late AGAIN.
First, I need to check with my first mate (ha ha) and make sure I’m not veering too far off course on any of this. And then I’ll send out this link to all kinds of people we haven’t seen in years, and that’ll kind of be like the nationwide release of our little corner of the interwebs…so when you get to this point, if you want to forward this around, go ahead.
Thanks for reading. Happy New Year, give or take a couple of weeks!
[The answer to the quiz was D.]
