Merry Christmas! In case you’re interested in keeping up with
our adventures before and after the Great Road Trip With A Chicken, here’s the highlight reel from 2013:
January: we pretty much stared at our navels all month long.
February: Lumpy lost his first
tooth and was visited by Norman the Tooth Gnome, and Anna started reading Calvin
and Hobbes books with a passion that did her mother’s heart proud. Gretchen continued to make art out of
everything she touched, including but not limited to toothpaste sculpture. We booted the old Prius and got a newer one,
Darth Prius.
March: we gave up on the navels and moved on to ears. ___________________________________________________________
The
kids’ father, Lou, passed away on April 24th, which continues to be
a challenge and a process to deal with.
Grief support at the WARM Place, the constancy and love of Danny, and
the resilience of young hearts all continue to help in the marathon of
grieving.
___________________________________________________________
April: Danny started working in an office infested with gnomes. Lucy the dog demonstrated her overwhelming
intelligence as she fiercely protected the yard from airplanes, leaves, and
grass. Alex, the eldest child of Danny,
continued with great positivity and only a little bit of duct tape to teach the
shorter kids how to roll around on the mats perform amazing feats of strength and dexterity in gymnastics.
May:
We celebrated our first anniversary by hanging out at a Renaissance Faire. One of our wedding vows was to maintain
regular attendance at Renaissance festivals, so we felt like we needed to get
crackin’.
June: We moved into our new house and immediately
started doing our best to make it look like a giant landlocked pirate ship,
because that’s what you do when you move into a new house, right?
July:
we got back to staring at our navels.
August: After a few days at the family reunion in West Texas, we all
drove up to WA. When I say “all,” I mean
that there were two adults, four kids, a dog, a chicken, and a string of gnome
lights in the minivan party car. We saw all of the crazy roadside attractions
that we could cram in (Fifi the chicken in four states at once! A multi-room house built in a cave!) and found
letterboxes in off-the-beaten-path places.
Kelly got to try waterskiing and putting up with three stepsiblings in a
confined space, Lucy got to run around like a maniac, and the little ones got
to soak up tons of grandparent-time. Most
importantly, Christine can die happy now because she has finally been to Mecca
the World’s Largest Ball of Twine.
Also in August: Anna and Gretchen started their season
playing in the Junior String Orchestra (part of the Fort Worth Youth
Orchestras) for the first time, and they love it.
Also in August: While on a post-prandial promenade back
home in TX with the dog and the chicken, we were stopped in the middle of the
sidewalk by a wobbly mewing thing that turned out to be an extremely young,
injured kitten. We took it home and Christine
relived the “joy” of groggily mothering an infant as she fed it every 2 hours, all
the while insisting that they would not keep the darned thing.
October: Danny tried to come to grips with the fact that our chicken
learned to belly dance at the Texarkana Renaissance Faire. The family (known at faires as the Green Man
Clan) sang and played many songs off in the background while Fifi got all of
the attention. Danny named the kitten, so it is his fault that we still have
it.
November: Fifi managed to steal the show again at the Middlefaire
Renaissance Festival, but Danny was a rock star on his ashiko and djembe
fancy drums while Christine managed
to have a great time following a minotaur around with coconuts, making
clip-clopping sounds. The minotaur was
not nearly as amused as Christine was.
Also in November: making good on the aforementioned vow, we
went to Texas Renaissance Festival and camped out among the (other) hippies in
the frigid (for Texas) weather. That
made for four renfairs in one year – not our record, but certainly a
serviceable number.
December: Christine’s parents and grandma came to visit for a few
days. They had to earn their dinner
through manual labor and endless mind-numbing board games with the kids (not at
the same time). After they left, they
sent a carpet cleaner as a subtle hint because they, um, noticed the dog, cat, and chicken in the house.
With that, we wish
you all the merriest and best! J
