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.

What a weird, weird day. It was the first day of our school break and the official beginning of winter. Wes had upped his “Is it going to snow soon?” whine, and I had spent much of this rainy, dreary, gray day explaining to him how it was simply too warm to snow and There. Would. Be. No. Snow. This. Week.

And then around 5, it began to snow.

About 5:30, it began to stick. Wes is back to being a theist.

I had three very happy, drenched children!

I needed a good day after spending our first day of Winter Break “helping” the youngers declutter, organize, and tidy their rooms–the least rewarding chore on the perpetual to-do list.

So my only goal for today was it be better than the day before, but the stars (and kids) aligned to make it one of my favorites. We started with the fourth Advent service, which is still a cozy online service for us. Then I started our mandatory Family Walk (usually known as Mama’s Forced March of Misery) by making our delivery of cookies and cards to all our neighbors first on our list. Kyla took one side of the street and the youngers the other as they ran between doorsteps and Dwayne and I with the packets for each neighbor, energized by their giving. Then we continued walking until we made it downtown, first to the Hawaiian BBQ food truck and then our local gift store for a yummy, yummy Kringle–an efficient way of regaining any calories we might have burned off.

We have a new downtown park with a fun lookout, where we ate our lunch and enough dessert to last until Christmas.

We all had been dismayed by the amount of garbage on our road down to town, so we gathered all the plastic bags we could find littered around, and as a family, picked up as much trash as we could hold….which only got us halfway back up the hill home. Just when we knew we’d have to give up the rest and just make it back home, a car pulled over just ahead of us. It was the man who was in charge neighborhood clean ups, but who hadn’t been able to arrange the usual litter pick ups with the county during COVID. But he was so happy to take all our garbage in his trunk and give us the three paper bags he had with him so we could continue the clean up! It felt amazing to have two good deeds do a head-on collision at the perfect time. We made it home, with our arms laden with more trash. The kids felt amazing about this Adventure, with a new pastry to crave and feeling great about making our town a better place. And I felt good about letting them have screen time the rest of the day.

The End

Dwayne’s comfort cookies are these Christmas tree cookies his mother made when he was a child growing up in Brazil. He still makes them and sends them, with no-bakes, to his family every year. This year, the kids were more involved. Dwayne makes the cookies, a slightly complicated procedure making an equal number of three sizes of round cookies. Kyla did the piping, Piper put them together, and all joined in for sprinkles and taste testing.

Neither the first or second batch lasted long!

Piper made these earlier this month. They did not have a long life, either.

As a family, we decided last month to not get together for the holidays. However, we had lots of household items and Christmas presents up north to deliver to my brother’s family down in Oregon. It’s a 3.5 hour drive from my house, so I packed my sleigh on a beautiful Saturday, downloaded the first book in the Renegades series Kyla implored me to read, and made my way south. It was a 4-mountain day, with Rainer, Hood, St. Helens, and Baker showing picture-perfect, an almost unheard of weather event around here! [Old joke: If you can see Mt. Rainier, it means it’s about to rain. If you can’t see Mt. Rainier, it’s already raining.]

One of the presents in my sleigh was Sandi’s new stocking, knitted by Mom, to match the other knitted stockings. Side note: Dwayne still has the BIGGEST knitted stocking in the family, making it not only difficult to fill, but a sign of who my mother loves best, including her firstborn–who has the smallest stocking.

Clearly, I enjoy taking pictures of the sun, my beautiful sister-in-law and two adorable nieces. Brian, sorry, I kind of left you out. Unloading and eating lunch took up my hour break, and eight hours after leaving my own home that morning, I returned, feeling great and loving that long drive by myself! A mom in quarantine will take any excuse, I guess. 🙂

2020 has changed a lot of the normal, but National Swearing Day will always fall the day after Thanksgiving for our family.

But that was weird, too. We got to one of our favorite farms and had to park across the street, as the farm and street parking were already crowded. It did not bode well, and everything that could be lined up for had long queues. But we were not deterred. We quickly found a too-big tree and wrestled it home in our sleigh.

Could this be the perfect tree? Could it? It could!

True to tradition, the tree grew two feet on the way home. It’s a grand fir, which has the most heavenly smell, drinks water for about three weeks, but then overnight dries out so that any touch makes the needles fall like stock prices last February. But it is our guest this year when we don’t get to host our regular Christmas feast. This guy will be at the head of our table!

As a family, we decided to play it safe this holiday season and just celebrate in our own homes. This worked out particularly well for me and mine because, as of 9am, all our hurdles had been cleared and we were free to build our last (last?) wall of the project.

Piper cooked up a 2pm breakfast for us as Kyla and Wes helped Dwayne and I build this entire 8′ wall in 4 hours. With the wall done, perhaps real progress can start next week.

After eating the yummiest pancakes and bacon, I organized another Forced March of Misery, aka a pleasant walk through a neighborhood trail. Candy canes and a read-aloud both ways barely made a dent in the woe-is-me whining spewing from the mouths of the youngers.

Somehow, St. Tom Turkey managed to overlook the infractions and still left holiday jammies and a game on the kitchen table when we returned from our healthful jaunt. With lamb shanks, roasted veggies, and sparkling cider, we were plenty ready for our feast in our newest jammies.

Cheers!

Our wall needed caps and after hearing that I was going to work on it on Friday, my mom volunteered to come over and help (Dad was also hoping to come, but had an appointment). Of the previous 5? 6? 7? wall projects we have constructed, it hasn’t really been my job to mix the mortar, cut, and attach the caps. So I went from unskilled laborer or foreman just like that. I torqued my wrists, again, from mixing mortar and Mom did the heavy labor of bringing and placing all the caps. It was exercise with the best outcome–a beautiful, completed project.

Here’s the before and after pictures!

Thanks, Mom! Really, you should know better, but it was fun working with you!

I’m not sure exactly what about 2020 cemented, and deeply entrenched, my role as sole family event planner, but to get us out of the house during what was supposed to be the Year of Adventure, I always have a half-baked plan moldering somewhere.

Tonight, it was to see the new WildLanterns at Woodland Park Zoo.

I loved it! Pretend it didn’t cost <$100 for the 5 of us (just focus on the needed financial support of a beloved zoo), and enjoy the magic world it creates around you.

Using reserved time slots and a one way path around the zoo, this quarantine-approved outing got five thumbs up, an almost unheard of rating from this family with two very contrary youngers. It was both novel and beautiful and I appreciate the kick-off to a much needed festive season.