Piper took Wes’s Devil’-Food-and-Oreo-Ice-Cream Cake, scraped off the inferior frosting and (Mine)crafted the cake as an exploding Creeper. She was also the one to make him an Among Us card. This inspired Reason #1.

Reasons His Family Loves 11-Year-Old Wes:

1. He plays video games with Piper and gives her interesting craft project inspiration.
2. He’s funny.
3. He’s Papa’s Halo buddy.
4. He plays foosball like a Tasmanian Devil.
5. He took Daddy’s snuggle genes and combined with Mama’s, and then doubled it.
6. It is so fun to watch Wes and Piper sled together.
7. Wes and Piper have a funny baby-voice interaction.  “It’s me!”
8. He thinks he wants his own almond mocha and can only drink 2 ounces of it.
9. I love him in spite of him eating—and enjoying!!—MY 100% dark chocolate.
10. He loves it when I read aloud.
11. He adorably loves tummy rubs.
12. He is wonderfully enthusiastic about board games and has a great attitude win or lose.  He always says “GG”, for good game.
13. We love his enthusiasm for being playful, like wrestling matches.
14. His enthusiasm for camping in the RV is contagious.
15. Mama loves Wes’s supernatural ability to balance on anything, especially Frederick and anything with wheels.
16. He was a wonderful hamster parent.
17. Wes was kind and interactive toward Ruby, and showed how he can be a really nice “big kid”.
18. I love that he is so likeable among his peers.  He can be with Abigail, Collin, Sumarth, Lily, etc.
19. He showed lots of maturity when he found out he probably had to get braces and on his own, he started practicing brushing his teeth 3 times a day.
20. I love his choice in friends!
21. He is a master fort builder.
22. He is a trooper about physical pain.
23. Even when he dislikes doing something, he will do it with minimal complaint, like going to tutoring. This compliment does not include Mama’s Forced Marches of Misery.
24. He embodies “it is better to give that receive”.  He is generous and thoughtful, getting gifts to his loved ones beyond expectation.

What is Wes looking forward to this year?

I want Covid to end. I want to get to round 200 in Bloon TD 6. Kill the enderdragon in no cheat survival.  Go back to CA in the RV. 

And Piper pipes: He will be sleeping by himself every night! (Kyla and Wes have to wean themselves off each other by September this year. They are sad just thinking of it.)

My outlook calendar is not just a metaphor for my brain; it IS my brain. When I add events for the kids, like an appt or a meeting, I “invite” them and have it added to their calendar, which auto-sends an email and a reminder. I just made an appt for a new orthodontist for Wes, and almost immediately got back his thoughtful reply and feedback:

I no

Sorry, kid. My brain has already spoken.

But sledding does it faster.

We went to Leavenworth for our January Snow fix, but really just got ice disguised as snow. I don’t have a good shot of Kyla sledding, as it doesn’t seem nice to take a picture of a girl lying on the ground who would be sobbing from pain if she were able to breathe. Yeah, conditions were brutal, but that didn’t stop the youngers who were having a great time together.

Fortunately, the Sunday afternoon snow was a little more on the slush side, making for decent XCountry skiing, at least for us beginners. Piper the Contrarian decided it was easier to move without poles. Sherpa Mama then ended up carrying two sets of poles. Good thing I have a theory that making the conditions tough make me better faster. Sunday evening, when we returned the skis, I kept mine and went again Monday morning (perfect ice, lousy snow–again, I think I got better by being so awful at it) and then Monday afternoon at Ski Hill (much more advanced course, better snow, still lapped by every other skier I saw). Like I told Dwayne, I skied for miles and miles on my feet…and only a little ways on my face.

After sledding, I took the kids either, depending upon your family role, 1) on a beautiful walk through one of my favorite run-on parks, or 2) out for their favorite gelato that they had to walk to.

We had really come to Leavenworth this holiday weekend because our Eastern Washington friends were going to be there, and so we got some lovely time with them in one of our favorite places, iced snow notwithstanding. Love our friends…and this town!

Since we finally have Yeti home, it was so much easier to decide to take her out for another spin. This adventure was a short 24-hour trip up to Birch Bay, bringing along one of the kids I didn’t give birth to, but wish I had. Birch Bay was one of those places I have never been….YETI!, as we now say in our family.

We were close to the beach and wooded trails, and we even explored some of it by daylight while the lasagna cooked back in the trailer. (I won’t bring up how far we explored by moonlight, as certain kids think it is Not Alright to have to do Forced Marches of Misery in the dark.) Two movies and a few bowls of popcorn later, we reminded ourselves we were camping and went to bed. I really love this Yeti life!

The big part is done, though I’m sure it will take many more months to get ‘er complete. But it’s really nice to have the newly named Yeti (“We haven’t adventured there… YETI!”) home in the driveway.

Dwayne likes to call this the “reality check” look. That water was ice-knife cold, and we all tingled longer than we were in the water. We were very pleased with ourselves, but boy! I’m glad I’ve got another 364 days before we do it again.

What is this? We were told to stay in bed until Piper brought me tea. I got to up…

…a white Christmas! She had made far more snowflakes than this shows, and her bedroom floor was very much a white mess.

The kids snuggled up to read their Christmas morning books while we prepped breakfast.

My stocking had yummy breakfast scones and jams, and so Santa Dwayne made us a lovely breakfast. It was the only meal we made that day, sustaining ourselves with cookies, leftovers, and cookies, cookies, cookies.

This Christmas Eve is (hopefully) unlike any other.

The weather had not been cooperative this week, and the schedule dictated our driveway would be poured the morning of the 24th…at the same time as our neighbors were getting married. At home. If a homeowner pours a driveway every 40 years and a person gets married just once in a lifetime, what are the chances that those two things will happen within 300 yards of each other during the same 3 hours? A 1 in 2020 chance, I bet.

We took a break midday to meet up with family at a nearby park to exchange gifts and let the cousins run and play, and hopefully take the edge of their Christmas energy. Better than rain, it was still hard to be out for too long in the frigid temperatures.

But eventually, the driveway was poured, most of the crew and all their noisy trucks had left, and Dwayne and I made our fancy Christmas Eve prime rib dinner. The kids set the table extra fancy, Wes wore his nicest jammies while the rest of us dressed up to watch (!) our church’s Candlelight services, before sitting down together and enjoying our feast, feast, feast. Even when everything was a never-before-today experience, it was our prefect evening together.

Merry Christmas, all!

What’s the deal about Polar Bear dives?  Well, it’s January 1st and the year can only get better from here.  And in an election year, that’s not a small consideration…

~Denise, Jan 1, 2020 needopedia.org

December 6-14, 2020

Oh, Dear Family and Friends,

If you are reading this, then you have survived 96% of 2020. That’s enough to earn you an ‘A’.

If you ever want to make God giggle, tell her your plans, they say.  She must have laughed out loud reading last year’s Christmas letter.  We were three weeks away from our Round the World departure when, on March 4^th [1], Microsoft sent everyone home to work, and March 5^th, the school district did the same. No one has been back to the buildings since.  Our 16-week, 11-country, 4-continent Family Adventure has been postponed, though I am hesitant to say for how long, my sense of control being one of the first casualties of COVID.

Actually, I don’t regret the trip too much, as that reality seems to be from an alternate universe in which I no longer reside. In this universe, Dwayne (over)indulged me when we bought a brand-spanking used 31’ motorhome in June…and have spent the rest of the year building a place to store it. While we are not doing much of the work ourselves, we did construct about 170’ of retaining walls. This time, “we” included all 5 of us. Lesson: Work doesn’t have to be fun to be satisfying. The Great Yard Project has been an analogy of this quarantine for us–lasting into 2021 when we wished it would be done in a month! We should know better by now.

But the RV itself has been a highlight of our year.  All five of us–and some extra kids I wish their parents would let me adopt–love it!  When we’ve rented motorhomes before, I never took the key; I unconsciously assumed a penis was necessary to drive an unwieldy, 8-ton vehicle[2].  But really, all one needs is unwarranted confidence, and I have that in spades.  So we took family weekend trips, and when Dwayne had to go back to work, I loved filling the RV with kids and going out for a few days.  In August, we did a three-week road trip down the Oregon Coast, over to Lake Tahoe, and back up again, getting to see some family, but mostly just making great memories and tracking in enough sand to ensure the RV will never be clean again.

Halfway through our August road trip, Kyla posted a sign on her bunkbed curtain: Kyla’s World: Sorry I can’t hear you. Kyla’s world is certainly an improvement on the regular world. I know no one else who can get a full cardio workout simply by reading but she bounces through the house like a hyperactive ten-year old boy, which is not a theoretical comparison[3]. One of Kyla’s lifelong dreams was realized this summer when Uncle Dan—aka Dwayne’s Perfect Brother, as we fondly refer to him—and Cousin Esther met up with us in CA and took Kyla backpacking in the Sierras. Kyla spent quarantine doing every jigsaw we have, often multiple times, though we almost made her stumble with a 2,000-piecer.  She pretty much raises herself these days, though the other two have tried to compensate by over-occupying my mama brain this year. 

Piper has found her alliterative passion this year—pimple popping.  Perhaps you don’t know that there is an entire YouTube genre of satisfying pops, but I do like this annual letter to educational.  If she could do skin extractions and bake yummies in lieu of all academics, she would be the happiest preteen.  But she can’t…and she’s not.  The best thing about online school is not getting up for the bus.  The worst is everything else.  Piper doesn’t so much lie to me; instead, she prefers being willfully, woefully uniformed. (“No homework that I know of, Mama!”) However, she has become Wes’s go-to when he is struggling with school and has shown remarkable patience helping him.  Her big sister heart has grown a size bigger this year.  

In keeping with Kyla, Wes has two signs on his bedroom door: “Blah, blah, blah, blah NO!” and “I do not take orders from you I only tak [sic] orders from God.”[4]  We didn’t really need a pandemic to make this year difficult.  Wes and I limped into June finishing his last home-schooling year, and when he returned to [virtual] school, we had him assessed to confirm the learning difficulties we already suspected.  His accomplishments include avoiding reading at all costs, getting a dinglehopper in the n^th level of Minecrazies Among Us,[5] standing(!) on a large balance ball named Frederick, and getting sand semi-permanently ingrained in his unkept hair.  He loves games of all sorts and is the most gracious winner and cheerful loser in all our family games. Papa introduced him to coffee and Halo this year and I have no comment.

Dwayne had prepared for his sabbatical by reassigning all his reports and projects to others right before our trip was canceled and Microsoft instituted a hiring freeze. This man always lands on his feet, though, and now has another position that I don’t understand nor can explain to you. He has kept off the weight he lost over the last few years and added strength training, which is what we call it when Wes does pushups on Dwayne’s back while Dwayne himself is doing pushups. One thing I appreciate about Dwayne is that he visualizes what cannot be, and then makes it happen. If you don’t like your driveway, you’re not going to cut down a bunch of trees, dig out literal tons of dirt, and change the elevation by several feet…right?  Until you do.  After 18 years of marriage, I still underestimate the wonders he can imagine into existence.

I’ve upheld my annual vow to read promiscuously, tackling about 125 books across many genres, which almost catches me up to Kyla.  The cabin keeps me busy as the quarantine has made this the most rented year yet, which means I do more maintenance in less time. I am astoundingly – and I don’t think this can be emphasized enough – uselessly good at 2 suit spider solitaire, and I make the most undrinkable kombucha. As keeper of screen time, the homework calendar, and bedtime, I get to be the bad guy. All. Day. Long. I am also the monster who plans Forced Marches of Misery and other family outings. My happy place this year has been on my paddleboard, which not coincidently, holds just one person at time. 

Maybe this is the year we need the Gospel of the Grinch:  After our hearts are broken, we can grow them three sizes bigger. And from all of us, the tall and the small, we wish you Merry Christmas, with heaps of love and goodwill,

Denise, for Dwayne, Kyla, Piper, and Wes

---

[1] Also the date I finally quit bras cold turkey.  It was a tenuous relationship at best anyway.

[2] And if that is a mental image that you can’t erase, I apologize. 

[3] We have a very noisy household.  Did I mention I haven’t had to the house to myself in more than 18 months?

[4] This is a lie. He absolutely doesn’t listen to God either. 

[5] I may have the details wrong.  I listen to video game descriptions as well as Piper and Wes listen to chore lists.