Christmas Letter - 2008

December 22, 2008

Well, another year has blown by us, and at this point I’m going to admit it, I’m just going to keep on typing up these Christmas letters.  At least until my push for everyone to switch to sending Midwinter cards to take some of the pressure off Christmas finally takes off.

We’re going to look back on 2008 as the Year of the House.  When I left off on last year’s letter, we thought we had found another lot to build on.  Well, I’m sitting in the middle of it now.  It actually turned out to be a nicer lot than we thought it was – we hadn’t understood where on the 24 acres of the parent lot it was supposed to be.  What we wound up with was four acres on a hilltop.  Not a very tall hill, mind you – we have mountain views but only off to one side if you stand on your toes and squint.  But being on the top of a hill actually makes it the flattest piece of property I’ve lived on.  We wound up with maybe an acre or so cleared; the rest is still in trees and deer.  We built the modular house that we had planned to build on the other lot before the architectural review board got silly with dormers and stuff.  It was delivered on June 10 and assembled on June 11; Bob and I both took the day off to watch them put it together.  It was so cool!  By the end of the day, we were able to walk through the house.  Our favorite features (besides of course the wheelchair accessibility) are probably the stone fireplace, screen porch, walk-in closet and whirlpool tub. J  We closed in August (just before leaving on vacation, the timing of which wasn’t our idea so much as the builder’s) and moved on September 20.  The one piece of bad news here is that we have not been able to sell our old house.  Anyone know somebody who’d like a nice ranch house on a wooded acre-and-a-half in Charlottesville?  We’re hanging in there so far, but will probably have to give up and rent it out if we don’t get an offer pretty soon.

This year’s vacation was to Minnesota, because Bob’s parents celebrated their 50^th wedding anniversary this August.  Bob’s brother and family also traveled up there for the occasion (Bob’s sister still lives in MN).  I actually started out the trip by doing something my cousin and I have talked about for ages – went up to North Dakota with her to look at where my dad’s/her mom’s family came from.  We saw the impossibly tiny house (shed, more like) where our great-grandma raised four children, visited the general store and the cemetery, and looked in vain for signs of the original family homestead.  Bob and Laurel stayed with Bob’s folks while we were doing this.  After we came back, Bob, Laurel and I left for the North Shore of Lake Superior for a few days before the big family get-together.  We took the train and boat tours and saw the aquarium in Duluth, stayed at a hotel right on the cliff overlooking the water in Lutsen, walked on all the wheelchair-accessible paths that we could find, shopped for agates, and made it all the way to the Canadian border before turning back for the Twin Cities.  As seems to usually be the case, Laurel had some periods where she didn’t feel too good, but we saw everything we meant to see.  For Bob’s parents’ anniversary, there was a nice dinner at the country club that his grandparents used to belong to, and a limo tour of sites that had figured in his parents’ lives.  The dinner was a really rough go with Laurel – actually, she and I spent a good bit of it outside.  But she enjoyed the limo ride, and her extended family – she cried when we left her grandparents’ house for the last time.  She kind of hit it off with her cousin Jacob, too – there’s a really cute video of the two of them at http://rochelle.rochelle.org/laurel_and_jake_highq.wmv.

Sadly, though, we did not need to hire a kitty sitter for this trip.  After all we went through with Jenny’s thyroid condition last year, we lost her to lung cancer in July.  It turned out that the mass on her lung x-ray that we’d seen prior to the treatment was, in fact, something.  She took a real nosedive; it was only about three weeks from having a reasonably normal-seeming, active cat to finding ourselves sneaking onto the new lot (which wasn’t of course actually ours yet) to bury her in the woods, because we didn’t want to leave her behind at the old house.  Because the timing was so awful – just before vacation and moving – we weren’t able to get another cat for a while and so I found myself without a cat for the first time since I was two.

The weekend before we moved, though, I thought it would be safe to go to the SPCA, figuring surely they would hold a cat for a few days if we found one.  Well, we did – we knew she was the right cat when we put her on Laurel’s lap and instead of getting freaked out, she reached up and licked Laurel’s face – but they wouldn’t.  Our first reaction was to turn around and leave, but driving home, we felt like we’d lost another cat.  By the time we got home, we’d decided that I was going back for the cat, and we’d make it work somehow.  And so Peabody (her shelter name, about which Bob said, “Works for me, I hate naming cats,”) became a member of our family.  It turns out that fearlessness is the norm for this cat, along with 110% enthusiasm for whatever she decides to do and an accompanying complete lack of awareness of what her body is doing while she’s doing it.  She’s probably the most graceless cat I’ve ever seen, but I have to admire her go-for-the-gusto attitude.  Hopefully she will settle down some as she gets older (she’s now about nine months old).  And unlike Jenny, she and Laurel have gotten to be friends (not that Jenny was ever nasty to Laurel, or anybody ever – she just ignored her).

We also added a tank full of fish to our family this year!  This was my offer to Laurel to give her something to look forward to about moving, because she was not too excited about the idea.  She chose the fish and bought them with her allowance.  We bought everything else, which of course was a lot more expensive than the fish. We have a 36-gallon tank with three platys, four guppies, six head-and-taillight tetras, two dwarf gouramis and (yikes) 14 baby fish!  Thirteen of them are guppies and are the result of my separating one of the momma guppies because Laurel wanted to have baby fish.  The fourteenth we found hiding behind the floating box where the baby fish are living, and I think it might be a platy because it looks different than the others.  We are going to need to give away some fish when they get a bit bigger.  Guppy, anyone?

Laurel is continuing to do well with the content of school.  Her IEP (individualized education program) this year has her doing the same curriculum as the other kids, and when tested via eye-gaze, she gets 100% a lot of the time.  However, she is still struggling with using her switches, much to the intense frustration of all, as learning to use the switches is what will enable her to use the computer and open up the world to her.  I think a lot of it has to do with her muscle tone being kind of tight lately. 

  After a rough first year of Brownies (a lot of it having to do with the meeting place and the unwillingness of last year’s leader to let anyone talk to the group about how to interact with Laurel), a new leader brought new changes and Laurel is enjoying it more this year.  She has earned nine badges so far! The one we had the most fun with was the Art-to-Wear badge.  Among other things, she directed the decoration of a pair of jeans (how to decorate it, which appliqués to use and where to put them) and the color and pattern of a tie-dye shirt (for that one, she was also able to help squeeze the bottles of dye).

Laurel also had her first out-of-school birthday party this year.  We found ourselves taking nine girls to Build-a-Bear (that was Laurel’s choice – we let her pick the invitation list), and then down to the food court for pizza and cake.  The Build-a-Bear part went well; Laurel found the pizza place a bit overwhelming.  As I reminded her afterwards, “You were the one who wanted all those girls there!”  (I got this look from her like, “Oh.  Yeah.”)  But for the most part, a good time seems to have been had by all.

We have some adoption news, sort of – not that we got a referral, but we have made a decision that should bring us closer to one.  We decided to put ourselves on the list to adopt a child from China with special needs, with a limited list of needs that are correctable or cosmetic.  We think that this will probably get us a referral in 2009; otherwise, we were looking at 2012.  Should the non-special needs list speed up, we are still on that one until we accept a referral from the other list.  We decided that we would rather deal with a surgery for, example, cleft palate than to wait another three years.  We did look at our other options, but this seemed to be the most viable one.

Not much news on the job front – we’re both still doing what we’ve been doing.  Bob went to a supercomputing conference in Austin this year; me, I was about conferenced out after going to several last year (all in VA, I don’t generally get to go anywhere exotic) and didn’t go to any.  My biggest worry is that funding for Disability Services Boards, which is what I’ve been spending 1/3 of my time staffing for the past three years, is eliminated in the budget that our governor proposed.  We’ll just have to see how it all pans out.

That’s the news from here.  If I had three wishes for us for 2009, it would be (not necessarily in order) for our finances to stabilize (the house to sell, my salary to not get cut), Laurel to finally “get” the switches and the computer, and our adoption referral to come through.  Wishing good things for you and yours as well!