Christmas Greetings

Greetings to our friends and family and a blessed holiday season to you!

I wanted to write you all a short letter to catch you up on our family happenings, but didn’t want to bore you by creating an imaginary image of the perfect Midwestern family who loves each other, never gets bad grades, has clean language and reads their Bibles every day together at the dinner table. We do not compare at all with the Waltons, but we can, at times, make you think that Rosemary had a few more babies.

Dean is still teaching art to middle school students in MPS at a gifted and talented specialty school. He is grumpy because they took away his advanced art class and left him with hordes of ordinary, unruly children this year. Then he comes home to more of the same each night.

Ann is either at home, searching through the local Goodwill to find treasures to sell on eBay, volunteering at the kids’ schools, babysitting for a friend’s adorable baby boy, geocaching, or at physical therapy for her finally diagnosed piriformis syndrome with sciatic nerve involvement and both ischeal and greater trochanteric bursitis. The highlight of her week is usually the deep tissue butt massages she gets from her PT.

Laura is a freshman in high school and plotting her way to Germany for a year. Nothing is set in stone, but she hopes to go either sophomore or junior year and get away from her all too controlling parents so she can freely explore her not yet determined sexuality and her religion of choice, whatever that might currently be. We are torn between forbidding her the experience and packing her bags for her to give some other German family the joy of dealing with her teenage attitude, her hair dye, multiple piercings and rejection of anything I prepare with meat in it. She does play violin very nicely.

Sam is in 7th grade at Dean’s gifted and talented middle school. He is utterly disorganized, has an extremely selective attention deficit, has grown as tall as his mother with feet bigger than his father’s, is interested in video games and large snacks and somehow manages to pull in respectable grades. He drives most of us around the bend, but is loved by all those who don’t have to live with him. We do love him, of course, but have to restrain the sometimes twisted manifestations of this love on a daily basis. He plays the trumpet.

Sarah is in 5th grade and her last year at German Immersion. She takes piano lessons and reads voraciously. She is also absorbing Mom’s obsessive-compulsive tendencies and honing them to an art. Her school music teacher tells me that he sometimes enjoys turning one of the books on his music shelf upside-down before Sarah’s class arrives, just to watch her go over and fix it. The good thing is that she makes my bed and vacuums the living room every morning before school.

Gibby is in 2nd grade and doing very well in both languages. He has some of Mom’s OCD traits as well, specializing in the ornate tantrum when he gets not what he wants. He has gained quite a repertoire of cuss words, including, but not limited to idiot, butthead, stupid, I hate you and the ever popular shut up! Thankfully the school psychologist at Dean’s school is now also working two days a week at the elementary school. He knows our children well and is grateful to us for his job security. Gibby plays piano and enjoys it. We hope he learns to channel some of his angst into his music.

As a family, we tinkered with the idea of moving into more spacious digs this past summer, but as the real estate market quickly cooled, we decided instead to use our resources to do things around this little 1200 square foot box. We modified the kitchen a bit, relined our one bathtub, replaced all our windows and a couple guys are replacing our old siding as I type. It’s definitely crowded in here, and more so as the kids get bigger and bigger, but it’s home. It’s warm enough. It’s familiar. It’s cheap. It needs us.

So there’s a portrait of our family from someone who takes medication regularly for depression. Dean could have made it look more cheery, but I specialize in morbid sincerity and have hopefully made you feel very good about your own family at this beautiful time of the year. We love like good Germans, sometimes a bit combatively, but always as best we know how.

God’s peace to you, and when you pray, remember us.