2007 Christmas Letter
As I explained in the 2006 letter (yes - you should have read that one first,) Emma was really sick before Christmas and we went to Disney World over the holidays, so I never got the chance to finish the letter until well after the first of the year. I was then confronted with the question of when to send it. It seemed strange sending it at the end of January, so I waited for the next holiday. It seemed strange sending out an “Easter Letter” so I waited some more... By the time I thought about it again, it was July - and an “Independence Day Letter” just didn’t work for me, so I just decided to wait until December and send two together. This way, everyone can spend twice as much time this year learning about us.
Compared to previous years, 2007 was a very good year for us. Nothing really bad happened. Emma is now in her second year of pre-K, and Amy still works for the city of New Britain. Amazingly enough, I’ve been working at Pratt & Whitney for well over a year-and-a-half, so it looks like every one of our friends has lost the betting pool. Of course, I did manage to switch departments already, and in mid-August I moved out of airfoil repair and into military customer support. Today, I actually help the USAF and the Pratt field reps troubleshoot issues with the engines in the F-22 Raptor. Yes, I’m actually happy working for The Man.
As I mentioned briefly in the 2006 letter, the trip to Disney World was a huge success. Since it was the holidays, the parks were open late and Emma closed a park almost every night. Even after 11:00pm, she was still full of energy and wanted to see more. Amy and Emma enjoyed it so much, they still talk about moving to Orlando, and we’ve already got another trip booked for the end of January, just a few weeks away. After that trip, the next major event in ’07 was another Caribbean cruise at the end of March. We took the Norwegian Dawn out of NYC again, but this time we did the eastern cruise instead of the western. Emma was in her power wheels this time, and with over a week on the ship, she wiped out only one other passenger. In Emma’s defense, it wasn’t her fault - she was stopped, and a woman carrying a tray of food turned around without looking first. Yes, it was pretty funny. And of course, just like on the last cruise, Emma managed to throw up all over her Backyardigan pajamas, warranting another trip to the ship’s doctor. Again, she just had a low-grade fever, and she recovered quickly.
In April, Emma got to meet her cousin Jordan for the first time, and will hopefully get to see him again in 2008. That month also brought exciting news at the farm where she goes for regular pony rides. Three goats gave birth within a week or so, and Emma got to see all of the babies just hours after they were born. We became regular visitors, and Emma got to feed them all with bottles. Family Weekend at Camp Hemlocks was our highlight for mid-June. Like the previous year, Emma enjoyed fishing, rowing on the lake, bowling, campfires, tons of games, and being spoiled by the staff. Unlike last year, this time each counselor paired up with a camper, and Emma was fortunate enough to get a lovely young woman from England named Laura. The two of them became such good friends that we took Laura out for dinner a number of times in subsequent weeks, and we’re making plans to see her again next year.
One of Emma’s favorite shows on TV was the story about Tai Shan, the newest panda at the National Zoo in DC. We had been planning the trip for months, and we finally got to go at the end of June. Combine Tai Shan’s elusiveness with the fact that as many people as humanly possible were perpetually pressed up against the glass trying to watch him, and our chances of actually seeing him were pretty slim. Good luck was on our side, and Emma got to watch him frolic for a few seconds before he ducked out of sight. As much as she liked going to the zoo, Emma actually seemed to enjoy other parts of DC even more. She remembered every monument that we visited, and - to her parents’ delight - the highlight of her trip may very well have been the museums of Natural History and Air & Space.
Emma continued her beauty pageant career in 2007, but she didn’t compete that many times. For the most part, we attended the pageants just to be with the good friends that we’ve made and because Emma has been made a “lifetime queen” at one of the organizations. In September, we went to NYC with a group of pageant queens to see Gloria Estefan perform on Good Morning America. Emma went in her wheels, and at one point, Gloria herself cleared the crowd so that Emma could see. We all had a great time, but ask Emma what she did that weekend, and she’ll tell you that she visited the big M&M store in the city.
A few weeks ago, Emma had a play-date with another little girl in wheels, and as difficult as it was, she did a wonderful job as hostess by actually sharing her toys. Other than that, the rest of the year has been comparatively uneventful. Like the rest of us, Emma certainly has her days when she just wants to stay home, but other than that - she really seems to enjoy both school and daycare. She’s made lots of friends, and she always comes home with a story to tell us. Her intelligence is progressing nicely, and even though she sometimes refuses to cooperate when we’re doing “schoolwork,” she’s at the point where she guesses many of the words that Amy and I spell when we don’t want her to know what we’re talking about. Her sense of humor is also progressing, but unfortunately for us, she’s at that age where she finds so many bad things to be funny. Bad words, body parts and their descriptions, spitting, other bodily functions, and showing us her partially chewed food are all examples of perfect, vastly underused comic material in Emma’s mind. Dinnertime can be a constant struggle of laugh-out-loud with her vs. punish her. We just hope that she eventually chooses to use her powers for good and not evil.