This past year included a lot of travel, nurturing of friendships new and old, personal growth, career struggles, and increased awareness of health issues and practices. Some of the credit for the latter goes to an acupuncturist we started seeing this summer.
Eric loves homeschooling. We believe that the best way to learn something is to help someone else learn it. As Missy and Curt help Eric to learn, he helps them learn. Eric is developing his skills with the tools of learning: reading, writing, speaking, applying logical and mathematical reasoning, body kinesthetics, creating in art, poetry and music, and inter- and intra- personal relating. He helps his parents hone their skills as he and they explore new subjects and activities, meet new people, and travel to new places. A very active boy for all his seven years, during 1999 Eric had his first experiences with snow skiing, whitewater rafting, Tae Kwon Do, rock climbing, mountain biking, golf, tennis, and horseback riding--with Missy and/or Curt participating with him. He is involved in the Pokémon craze with support from his mom.
La Leche League continues to be a major part of Missy’s life. She both provides to and receives support from moms. During the year, she celebrated her first anniversary as a La Leche League District Advisor, fifth anniversary as a League Leader, she and Cindi Freeman mentored three moms to co-lead with them in the LLL group they started last year in Apex, and she organized for the fourth consecutive year (and last), the bookstore at the annual LLL of North Carolina area conference in Charlotte. As she homeschools Eric, Missy is continually challenged to find mutually fun ways to learn--Eric lets her know when he thinks she isn’t succeeding. Missy has developed new and supportive friendships with people in their homeschooling group, in La Leche League, and with our neighbor Cathy Bishop. Cathy’s youngest daughter, two year-old Haley, is like Missy’s daughter. Haley frequently calls for "Mimi." Missy has changed some of her dietary habits (she’s eating fewer carbohydrates) and she’s seen some health benefits. She’ll explore this further in the year 2000. One can’t be too healthy. Missy enjoys reading novels and books on health and parenting (her bookclub meets monthly). She plays soccer most weekends, keeps her hand in crafts, and is testing the waters with Tae Kwon Do.
Curt went through a bit of a midlife crisis this year, largely because of conditions at IBM. He started the year in a new organization and did--according to his teammates, management, and self--a great job. His work included a large investment in time and energy and an exposure to an active case of tuberculosis. As that project wound down, for a "reward" he was asked to move to a new organization and assume responsibilities he did not want. Around the same time, IBM changed its pension plan in a manner that would cost Curt and Missy hundreds of thousands of dollars in retirement money. Additionally, Curt had six different managers over the past twelve months (after averaging a manager change every 2.5 years his first fifteen years), raising concerns that he would not get an accurate appraisal which would affect raises, promotions, and bonuses. For a few months Curt struggled with thoughts of leaving IBM. Late in the year all that changed. Curt got a good appraisal, assumed job responsibilities he had been seeking for two years (Java programming with IBM subsidiary Tivoli), and IBM re-instated its old pension plan for longtime employees. Work has become play again. In other forms of play, Curt is proud of the family website he created and maintains (which now includes nearly 100 webpages and 500 photos), the paper he presented at the La Leche League state conference on "The Manly Art of Fathering" and some portrait paintings he recently completed.
We have been toying with ideas as to how to expand our home business, Alternate Healthier Choices, but we haven’t yet put any into practice. We have been selling some of our books and tapes over the Internet through Amazon.com. You can look for our products there.
It was another fun and fascinating year of travel. We took ten vacations (of between one and nine days) spending a total of nine weeks away from home in seven states and the District of Columbia. (The timing of some of our trips was such that we celebrated Eric’s birthweek in four different states.) Our longest vacation was the nine days we spent in Charlotte and the mountains of North Carolina during the fall foliage season. We spent even more time together in and near Austin, Texas over Thanksgiving, but that included workdays for Curt at Tivoli. We did visit sites in Austin, San Antonio, Houston, and Galveston on weekends and holidays. Additionally Curt visited Waco, Forth Worth, and Dallas with co-worker and friend Ramesh Somisetty during his extended Texas stay. Missy had a couple of summer trips to Michigan and Ohio to visit family and close friends--the Brauns, Fords, Kiralys, Barkels, and Ramages. She took Eric along on the second trip while Curt and Eric traveled to Charleston, SC during her first visit north. We vacationed with the Leslie clan on Ocean Isle Beach, NC and the Frantz family in Allentown, PA in early August and we’ll see both families again in December. We took a couple day trips to snow ski in Carolina and Virginia and a day to raft in Tennessee. In October we spent four days in Annapolis and DC staying at the incredible dreamhouse of Chris and Carolyn Groobey and visiting our wonderful friends the Holstens. During the year we spent many days with our new and treasured friend Phuong Nguyen. Our out-of-state visitors were Missy’s parents Joyce (twice) and Jack. We feel fortunate we were able to see so much of Missy’s parents this year.
Diaries and plenty of photos from all our vacations, the Groobey dreamhouse,
Curt’s fathering paper and thoughts on other topics, images of artwork we’ve done,
and monthly news diaries and pictures can be found at this wowsite.
Explore and enjoy!
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© 1999 frantzml@juno.com
