2008 Christmas Letter
Here we go again, the sixth Christmas letter. As usual, a lot has happened, and I’m sure I’m going to spend considerable time adjusting the margins of this letter to get everything to fit. Amy still works for the city of New Britain, I still work for Pratt & Whitney, and Emma attends kindergarten. This year, we’ve watched Emma make new friends, join the Girl Scouts, go on a number of trips, learn to read, and we’ve seen her imagination grow exponentially. Unfortunately, we also had to see her deal with the death of a friend and classmate. The year didn’t start out all that well, but I guess it turned out OK.
On January 1st, I slipped on some ice and tumbled all the way down the deck stairs, twisting my knee and putting myself in crutches for a week. Things turned around by the end of January, when we brought Emma for her second trip to Disney World. Our good friends have parents that work there, and they hooked us up with the royal treatment. Just to give a couple of examples, we were grand marshals of a parade, and Emma once wheeled into a private room to be greeted by all of the princesses together. Seeing Emma treated like such a queen is something Amy and I will never forget, and it was almost depressing to come back home. Even random Disney employees approached us to greet “Princess Emma” in the street. In March, things turned sour again, and Emma got sick. An X-ray showed pneumonia, and we ended up at Hartford Children’s Hospital. We only spent the night, but the whole ordeal lasted about a week, going back and forth between doctors. Emma was almost a hundred percent by Easter, which we spent with family, and that helped her recover even faster.
Emma continued her regular visits at the farm down the street, riding Tuffy the pony, playing with and feeding the newborn goats, and taking care of the animals when the owners were away. Later on in the year, a bigger horse mistook Amy’s thumb for a carrot. While the doctor was irrigating the wound in the ER that night and Amy was screaming, Emma said sternly “just take the pain.” Just like the nurses we could hear outside the room, the doctor had to stop what he was doing to laugh. Tuffy made a surprise visit to Emma’s birthday party, where he took some friends, and even Emma’s cousin Jordan from CA, for rides around the yard. Emma also got to show a goat in a junior class at the Goshen Fair, where she won a blue ribbon.
We held another FSMA walk-a-thon, where a ton of our friends showed up, all wearing matching “TEAM EMMA” t-shirts. We also made the trek to Hingham, MA, where we joined the New England chapter’s walk at Wompatuck State Park. Emma got to see the neighborhood I grew up in and spend some time with some of my dearest friends. We also attended a number of pageants this year, but Emma didn’t compete. Instead, we hung out with our good friends, partying and playing drinking games. Yeah, that’s right - your kids are in bed by 8:30, and my five-year-old is going strong at 11:00, playing cards. Putting only a slight damper on Emma’s Friday nights, she joined a bowling league where she bowls every Saturday morning. She started out by pushing the ball down the little kiddie-ramp, but now we put the ball in Emma’s lap, and she speeds toward the lane, stopping quickly at the line to let the ball go flying toward the pins. Hopefully.
In June, I had throat surgery. I was warned many times that getting one’s tonsils out as an adult was nothing like the surgery for a child. I believed the warnings, but I really wanted the surgery in order to improve my breathing and help eliminate the snoring. I was out of work for three weeks, and I could barely swallow at all for the first few days. It seems to be worth it though - the snoring is almost gone and I breathe much better. In July, we spent a relaxing holiday on the shore at a beach house that Amy’s family rented. Emma got to play in the sand, spend time with her cousins, and watch fireworks from the shore.
For a long time, we had been considering and planning a number of home improvements. This year, we finally got serious, had some plans drawn up, and picked a contractor. A week after I submitted a permit application for new siding and windows, we came home to find notices tacked to our door citing us for “blight.” I had peeled some siding off earlier, and that, coupled with the tarp over the garage and the second unregistered vehicle in the yard, had apparently upset at least one of our neighbors. A phone call to the town building department noting the permit application straightened that out. After that was settled, I started with my specialty, the demolition. I gutted the garage and ripped the flat roof off, then a contractor came in and put a new peaked roof on. Shortly after that, we got a new roof on the rest of the house. We’re now almost done installing all new windows and siding. For those of you that haven’t seen the house in a few months, you wouldn’t even recognize it.
Over the course of the year, we’ve become great friends with our new neighbors down the street. We first met them through school as they have a daughter that used to be in Emma’s class. Just to give an example as to the kind of people they are, when they were building their house, they built a ramp so that Emma could easily come inside in her wheels. Upon seeing how much fun Emma has on such play dates, and upon realizing that she was driving the two of us nuts with her high demand for attention, we decided that Emma should have a sister about her age. After reviewing our options, we decided to become foster parents. Amy and I completed ten weeks of classes, a myriad of paperwork, background checks, and interviews. As of right now, we’re just waiting for the home improvements to be finished, making us eligible to get a child early next year.
Thanksgiving morning, we flew to Orlando for our second trip to Disney for the year. We went with friends, and we spent Thanksgiving Day with them and their parents, the ones that took such good care of us during our previous trip. On Friday, we went to visit Emma’s great-grandma and my aunt in Clearwater. We relaxed for the weekend, then went to Disney for the week. This time, we rented a condo just a few minutes away from the parks. Emma found some courage to go on some more rides, and in addition to the Goofy’s Barnstormer roller coaster, she also rode Thunder Mountain. The high point for me was probably walking around Epcot and drinking a representative beer at each country. That’s right, eleven of them.
Emma is doing well at school. She has homework and reading assignments due every week that she seems to enjoy. She’s starting to sound words out and read on her own, but she has an amazing gift for memorizing entire books, forcing us to use a new book every time we want her to actually read something. Writing is a bit of a struggle, though - and we can’t tell if it’s the SMA or her diva-like attitude that’s causing the problem. Maybe she can write the next letter. Have a great holiday!
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