2009 Christmas Letter (finally!!!)

It’s time for our yearly Christmas letter! This year’s won’t be as long as last year’s was though as all of our exploits have been detailed (with pictures!) on our blog (http://laneyandrob.blogspot.com).

The first few months of 2009 were very challenging for us. The good parts were that Beth turned 3 at the beginning of January and Papa, Laney’s dad, was able to visit us around that time. The bad parts started with the discovery that Laney had another cyst, so she ended up having one of her ovaries removed. Fidelity, as usual, was wonderfully supportive and Rob got to stay home for a couple weeks to keep the house running while Laney recovered. Everyone except Laney caught a stomach bug, then croup cycled through the kids.

In the midst of all this, we decided it was the perfect time for Laney to look into grad school. She found a program she liked through Capella University and started March 9th. She is majoring in Marriage and Family Therapy and will graduate around June 2013 if she sticks to her planned schedule. All of Capella’s classes are online, which really helps as homework can be scheduled around time with kids and other responsibilities. Laney will have to attend two one-week-long colloquia during her program and she’ll have to do 700 hours of internship before graduating (then complete an additional 3000 hours of internship before getting licensed, but we’ll worry about that later). We’ve timed it so that she will start her internships about a month after Jack starts kindergarten, which is full time in our school district. Laney is about 20% of the way done with her program and is maintaining a 4.0 GPA. She is finding most of the classes very interesting and Rob is learning more than he ever wanted to about methods of therapy as Laney’s enthusiasm translates to myriad conversations about the topic. Rob is doing an incredible job helping out by doing housework, watching the kids and proofing papers.

Following the kid’s croup episode, Megan seemed to take a long time to get better. She finally went back to school after about two weeks, then her fever spiked again. By the end of the first week of March, her fever had lasted for almost a month and the pediatrician pulled out all the stops. He ran every test he could – at this point they were mentioning things like leukemia – and sent us to Cook’s Children’s hospital. They ran more tests, then scheduled Meg for an echocardiogram, an abdominal ultrasound and x-rays. Everything came back negative. Her teacher and one of the ladies in the school’s office were wonderful and did everything they could to work with us. Laney would go once a week to drop off finished homework and pick up another week’s worth so Megan wouldn’t fall behind. Meg’s temperature continued to fluctuate. It was a really, really hard time for all of us. We had an incredible support system. Even when we got overwhelmed and stopped answering the phones and returning calls, the doorbell would ring and it would be friends dropping off dinner or cupcakes or coloring books for Megan. One of our friends who is a nurse in a pediatrician’s office spent literally hours on the phone with Laney explaining test results. Laney’s parents paid for the numerous co-pays and even sent money to help pay for all the extra gas we used driving back and forth to Fort Worth multiple times a week. So many people offered to babysit or do whatever we needed. It was amazing and we don’t know how we would have made it through without that support! Around the end of March, her fever disappeared. We really hadn’t gotten any answers, just eliminated possibilities. Megan ended up missing 43 days of school that school year. Laney’s parents took her to a doctor of Chinese medicine when we visited them in May and he said she had a virus in her liver. He was able to describe her symptoms without being given any information, so that’s as good a guess as any other.

In March we got hit by a severe hail storm that only lasted a few minutes, but necessitated the replacement of every roof for miles around. Rob’s car was parked in the driveway and got really dented (although fortunately none of the windows cracked!). After that storm, Rob cleaned out the other side of the garage and now we park both cars in there every night. It’s a tight fit, but it works!

In May, Kylie turned 5 and Jack demonstrated his all-boy-ness by splitting his chin/lip open and needing stitches. None of the girls have ever had stitches, but Jack managed to hit that milestone before his second birthday. He must take after Rob – Laney never needed stitches and never broke a bone (other than her toe). At the end of May, all of us headed up to Massachusetts for Aunt Molly and Uncle Brian’s wedding. The girls were flower girls and Jack was the “ring master” (as the girls put it). It was a beautiful wedding and we loved getting to spend time with Laney’s family and extended family members and friends we hadn’t seen in years (and ones we had seen more recently)! We stayed in New England for almost two weeks as the weekend following Molly and Brian’s wedding, Laney’s youngest sister, Susie, graduated from high school. We were so glad we had the opportunity to be there for both events!

In June, Rob and Laney got the amazing opportunity to see Andrea Bocelli perform live! The tickets were Rob’s birthday present from Laney. Laney’s sister, Christy, gave them a voucher for a free night in a fancy hotel in Dallas and even watched the kids overnight! Andrea Bocelli has been one of Rob’s favorite performers for years. It was wonderful to get a chance to hear him!

This summer we discovered how people actually enjoy the incredibly hot summers down here; they live at the pool. We went to the pool at least several times a week. Megan learned to swim without floaties at the hotel we stayed at in Massachusetts and within a week or two was swimming like a fish. The other three kids wore swimmies, but all of them LOVE the water. We usually brought Brittney, our friend and babysitter, to the pool with us and she would take care of Jack. That made it much easier. Meg and Kylie were fine with minimal supervision (i.e. – keeping them in sight) and Laney would stay with Beth. It worked out wonderfully and we had so much fun!

Laney’s sister, Susie, visited us in July and Laney and Susie stayed up until 1am (midnight mountain time) to help her register for her first semester at BYU! Also in July, Jack split the skin right above his eye open, although he fortunately didn’t need stitches for that one as it wasn’t deep. To anyone looking for investment ideas, we would recommend investing in urgent care centers in our general vicinity. Although neither of Jack’s major injuries had been on the trampoline, we sold it after that one. If Jack can do something that requires stitches in our very child-proofed playroom, we didn’t want to see what he could do on the trampoline!

In July a new member joined our family – Simon the dog. For years the kids have been asking for a dog. We’ve tried a few times to get a puppy, but it never worked out. Megan especially, backed solidly by Jack, really wanted one. We told her that dogs were a lot of work and we weren’t getting a dog until the kids started taking more responsibility for the stuff they already had. Megan translated this to mean that if she started helping out more, we would get her a dog. She worked her tail off for months, asking at the completion of each chore “Have I worked hard enough to get a dog yet?” From this Rob and Laney learned to never make conditional promises they don’t want to keep. Megan’s birthday is in July (she turned 7 this year), so Rob and Laney searched for the perfect dog to get as her present. This time we tried to learn from our past mistakes. We decided the dog: 1)had to be house trained, 2) had to be crate trained, 3) could not be a dog that sheds a lot, 4) had to be good with kids and cats, 5) had to be big enough that if the kids played with him he wouldn’t get hurt, but small enough that if he got excited and jumpy, they wouldn’t get hurt (and Laney was not seven months pregnant, as she had been the other two times we tried). We found the perfect dog through a private rescuer off Craigslist. Simon is half Catahoula Leopard dog (a hunting dog from Louisiana) and half something else (unknown, although probably German Shepard judging by his looks). We got him at 5 months old, about 25 lbs, guaranteed healthy (he was boarded at a vet), microchipped, neutered, with all his first year shots, house trained and crate trained. The transition went much more smoothly than previous attempts to incorporate a dog into our family. Simon came with his name, but Rob expanded it to match the rest of the pets. He is now known as Simon Templar the Hoover. We highly recommend getting a dog if you have small children who routinely make messes with their food. Simon has cut our vacuuming in the dining room down by about 75% and he loves to clean Jack off (Jack loves it too!).

In August, we went to the Ringling Bros circus in lieu of a birthday party for Megan (she got to bring a friend), Jack turned 2, Rob and Laney celebrated their 12th wedding anniversary, and Kylie started kindergarten! Kylie loves school and is doing incredibly well there! She has lots of friends and is having fun learning to read. We’ve promised her she can get her own email account, just like Megan, when she learns to read and she’s really looking forward to it. Nona, Laney’s mom, came out for a visit in September and we loved spending time with her! The timing of her visit was perfect as Laney ended up spending a week sleeping at the hospital with a friend who went into preterm labor at 25 weeks. Also in September Rob got to check an experience off his bucket list when Laney bought him a ticket to watch a UFC (Ultimate Fighting Championship – a mixed martial arts competition) live in Dallas as a very early Christmas present. He loved it!

We went on our annual family vacation in October. Laney found a farm with several cabins that could be rented out about an hour south of Fort Worth in Glen Rose, TX. One of the cabins was a railroad car that had been converted, so of course we rented that one! It was an interesting vacation as the animals on the farm were very aggressive. After Jack almost got trampled by the horse (no, it was not due to anything he did or a lapse of parenting) and two of the kids got attacked by sand fleas, we decided to spend as much time as we could away from the farm. The weather decided not to co-operate and was rainy and unseasonably cold (40’s and 50’s – virtually unheard of in TX). We spent one day in the one room cabin, playing checkers, watching tv and making corn husk contraptions (Megan made a croquet set), then braved the cold and wet the next day to go to a park with over 50 life-sized dinosaur statues. At the end, the kids got to dig for fossils in a sand trough and keep three. The next day we visited Dinosaur State Park to see the fossils there. Unfortunately they were covered with water due to the weather, but they had casts of them at the visitor’s center. We finished the afternoon playing at a town park covered with huge rocks that the kids had a blast climbing on. The kids had a lot of fun, Simon LOVED it (for the first time in his life, he could run and run and run – our backyard is not huge) and Rob and Laney were glad the kids and dog enjoyed it, but were glad when it was over. Kylie developed a fever the morning we left and by Monday all four kids were sick with what was eventually determined to be swine flu. Laney got a tiny spot of poison ivy on her neck, probably from Simon running through the woods, which over the next few days mutated into a staph infection. We were very blessed though – the horse only nicked Jack’s ankle, the kids’ cases of swine flu were relatively mild, and we caught the staph infection early enough that it wasn’t a major problem.

October was also the beginning of Laney’s fall quarter and for the first time she took two classes at once. That was challenging, to say the least. One class, Ethics, required about twice as much homework as any of her other classes had, and between the two classes, all Laney had time for was homework and a little bit of time with the kids and Rob. Rob was amazingly supportive and the kids helped out too. Christy was given tickets to “Boo at the Zoo” and shared some with us. The kids loved it! This year our costume theme was “decades” – Beth was the 50’s in a blue poodle skirt, Megan was the 60’s and wore a hippie costume, Jack was the 70’s and Laney made him a white suit with black sleeves, and Kylie was the 80’s complete with a side ponytail and two different sets of neon socks. We had friends over for Halloween, the Livingstons – a friend of Laney’s from high school and his wife and four children. We hadn’t met his family before, but we loved spending time with them and the kids were instant friends.

November was a bit less eventful. Laney spent most of her time working on homework (we’ve decided she certainly is not going to take two classes each quarter – she is going to alternate taking one class and then two). The most noteworthy event was Kylie’s receiving a Hughes High Flier award. These are awarded every 6 weeks when report cards come out. We were notified ahead of time so we would know to show up at the award ceremony. We were concerned about how Megan would respond as she has been trying to earn one of these awards since she started kindergarten. When Kylie’s name was read out, Megan jumped up and clapped as hard as she could, saying “that’s MY sister!!!” without a thought of jealousy. What incredible children we have! We had Thanksgiving at home with two other families, one couple that we are friends with, Janette and Lee, and the Livingstons. Christy and her boyfriend, Ron, came by for dessert with another friend of ours, Jersey, who was visiting.

We started off December with snow – very odd for around here. It’s only snowed enough to show up on the ground a few times in the almost half a decade we’ve lived here. The kids were thrilled. Rob and Laney were hoping it was just a fluke and did not mean that the rest of the winter would follow suit. That month was insanely busy. We made it through the last two weeks of Laney’s classes. She turned in two papers, both about 18 pages. She got A’s in both classes though! The week after Laney’s classes were over was a whirlwind of preparation for Christmas and visitors. Laney’s family started arriving that Friday. Once again we were able to have Laney’s whole family down here for Christmas. The kids were over the moon! We also had a roommate of Travis’ here, Jeff, who amazingly, despite spending several days with all of us, still wants to come back and see us again! Our plans for Christmas Eve changed a bit when it started snowing early that afternoon. It kept snowing on and off and got pretty cold, so the roads were very slick. All of Laney’s family made it to our house (some had been at Christy’s ) and we had a big sleepover. Christmas day was cold and the first white Christmas this area had seen in about 85 years! We had a full house for dinner with Laney’s whole family, Jeff and the Lopes, friends of ours. It was a wonderful holiday and we loved getting to spend time with everyone!

Now all the visitors have gone home and the kids are back in school. Laney’s next quarter starts on Monday. It’s still absolutely FREEZING here (the low for tonight, without wind chill, is 11 degrees). We hope all of you have a wonderful year! If you’re ever in TX, give us a call!