We will especially remember this year as one in which we invested a great deal of ourselves in home improvements. In October, an indoor pool was put in our house. Unfortunately, this was done without any prior design–the "pool" was created as a result of a hot water heater pipe breaking loose from its fitting. This happened during the night so water gushed for an unknown amount of time, as many as six hours. The damage done was extensive as half the house was affected (the water heater is in the attic). The total bill for drying out the house and making repairs has exceeded $20,000 and is still growing. By the time the work is done--final cleaning will occur in January–we will have lived in a house in significant disarray for more than three months. Normal, daily living was put on hold while most of our thoughts and energies were spent on our home. There were hundreds of small and not so small things to address. On the plus side, the value and attractiveness of our house has increased by thousands of dollars and the financial costs will be paid by our insurance company and a class action lawsuit settled by Shell Oil, the manufacturer of the disreputable piping.
Though the house took a big hit from which it successfully though slowly rebounded, its residents had a largely successful year. Eric has grown into an energetic six-year-old who is all boy. He's always loved anything that moves and maybe that's why he's in perpetual motion. The gymnastics and soccer classes he's been taking seem to whet his appetite for even more physical activity. He bikes, rollerblades, skates, swims, wrestles, and skateboards and also plays football, basketball, street hockey, and baseball. He enjoys and thrives on homeschooling and the varied and extended interactions with his parents and friends it allows him. He has been taking a big brother role to our one-year old neighbor Haley. She adores Eric.
Last year, Missy declined an invitation to assume a larger, organizational role in La Leche League (LLL) of North Carolina. She was offered it again and this year she accepted. As a District Advisor, Missy is meeting more LLL members and helping more mothers with breastnurturing. The new LLL group she cofounded in Apex is developing nicely with the member moms growing in confidence in their mothering abilities. For the third consecutive year, Missy organized and ran a very successful bookstore at the annual LLL of NC area conference in Greensboro. As a parent of a homeschooler, Missy is not sure who is learning more. She enjoys the time she and Eric spend with other homeschooling families and the friendships she has made with those families. There seems to be a significant commonality in parenting philosophy among these homeschoolers and LLL members--a philosophy we also embrace. When she is not spending time with Eric and/or Curt, Missy reads, exercises, and plays soccer. She has also been honing her house decorating skills.
Curt takes pride in his developing skill as a handyman around the house–a responsibility more or less "poured" on him. The creative energies he enjoys tapping are mostly expressed in writing, though he also gets a few opportunities in the visual arts. This year he crafted a couple of websites with our newest computer. Check out www.bcity.com/ahc for our business homepage and www.geocities.com/Heartland/Lane/7250 for our family homepage. The new job Curt took within IBM at the beginning of the year was, in hindsight, a career step backwards. The project was deservedly canceled in October (at a loss to IBM of about $6 million). Curt's repeated attempts to call attention to the sorry state of the project while recommending possible remedial actions to take got him in his management's doghouse and resulted in his getting his lowest appraisal in 14 years. After the project was canceled, his immediate manager was demoted and transferred and Curt left the problem plagued organization in December.
During the year, we didn't spend much time on our home business, Alternate Healthier Choices. We are looking to see how much interest our products generate as they become publicized on the Internet.
We took two extended vacations to enchanting places we hadn't visited before. In May we spent a week camping on the North Carolina Outer Banks. The water was a little cool for swimming but there were plenty of other interesting activities in which to indulge ourselves. We explored the beaches, museums, an aquarium, Fort Raleigh (the site of the first English settlements in America), lighthouses, the Wright Brothers memorial at Kitty Hawk, the sand dunes of Jockey's Ridge, and the old Ocracoke haunts of Blackbeard the pirate. We also did some biking, kiting, and hang gliding. It was a wonderful time along a coast steeped in beauty and history. In October we outdid that, spending 15 days on Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula; a place with even more beauty and history. We sandwiched ten days of water play (which included playing on the best sand beaches we've ever visited as well as swimming and snorkeling in an underground river, with fish bigger than Eric, with a gato shark, with giant sea turtles, and with brightly colored tropical fish in the clear turquoise waters of the Carribean) around five days of visiting ancient Maya ruins (including climbing pyramids, swimming in caves, and snorkeling in sacred sacrificial cenotes). Our vacation started and ended in Cancún and included visits to Playa del Carmen, Tulum, Chichén Itzá, Mérida, Uxmal, the water parks of Xel-Há and Xcaret, the islands of Mujeres and Cozumel, and other small towns and lesser known Maya ruins. Diaries of these vacations including pictures are being stored at our family website.
We took a long weekend vacation in July at Sunset Beach, NC with Missy's
brothers Jim and Dan and their families and another long weekend with niece
and cousin Rachel Leslie in Washington, DC in August. That gave us
the chance to spend a day with Chris and Carolyn Groobey on their racing
sailboat, and to meet Julia Holsten, Tami and Steve's newborn and Andy's
little sister. Other trips we took this year include Missy attending
her cousin Jason's wedding in Chicago in May and the three of us traveling
to Curt's family of origin in Allentown, Pennsylvania in July. We
traveled to both Pennsylvania and Michigan to visit family in December.
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