Wed 17 Dec 2008
Happy holidays everybody. I hope your year has been a good one, and if not, at least be thankful that it’s almost over. The biggest news for us this year is that our family has added both a new niece and nephew. Sheryl’s brother Brian and his wife Leah had their first baby in June, a girl named Marley Ellison Dunn. Then on December 3rd my brother Christer and his wife Katie had their first child - a boy name Tobias Leo Watson. Congratulations to both families. We look forward to spending time with Marley and Toby in the coming year.
There weren’t any notable changes for our family this year — same jobs, same house — which these days is probably notable itself, and something I feel very thankful for. Sheryl still works part time as a therapist at her private practice and spends her free time working on computer/craft projects for our kids’ schools. One new project this year was the creation of a cookbook of family recipes submitted by the parents of Davis’ preschool-mates. Everyone else in our house had a personal concoction to add (the Sheryl sandwich, Evan’s bagel, the Davis Bagel). I racked my brain for family recipes and recalled a fried doughy breakfast my Grandma Kaiser used to make that she pronounced “ush-tee-ahts”. I have no idea how it’s actually spelled — it has consistently defied googling — but I managed to recreate a passable recipe after some experimentation. It is now a favorite of Evan and Davis and their most common reply when the question of Sunday morning breakfast comes up. If there are any Kaisers out there who have the actual spelling or recipe, please let me know.
I’m still working in the IT department at Inspiration Software. Since both my job and main hobby is playing around with computers it means I spend most of my waking hours in front of a computer. I realize this would be torture for many people, but for whatever reason I still love it. Thankfully, for the part of my body below my brain, I dusted off my tennis racket this year and started playing regularly. One of my co-workers discovered public courts in a park just a block away from our office building and we’ve been playing a few times a week rain or shine. We’ll see if that continues since winter in the Northwest means a lot more of the rain and a lot less of the shine. One recent tennis highlight was playing a three-generation game with my dad and Evan when we visited my parents in Corvallis over Thanksgiving.
Our boys’ interests have stayed pretty consistent since last year. Evan is 8 now and his baseball fever has expanded to multiple sports — he played baseball and soccer again. This year his league had goalies for the first time and Evan excited us with some highlight-reel saves. We got a Wii last Christmas, so when it’s too rainy or cold for real sports he plays them on the Nintendo instead. He has also gotten interested in watching football and even helped me run a fantasy football team. They grow up so fast! Pretty soon he’ll be playing multi-player video games with me, building advanced Lego sets and … um, what are grown-ups supposed to do again?
Davis has always liked music and this year he has started rockin’ out along with his favorite show, Imagination Movers. The stars of the show are a kid-friendly rock band and when they start playing, Davis picks up a kid’s guitar and starts jamming along with the songs. He doesn’t actually play the guitar, but he knows the timing of all their moves and jumps and performs them in sync with the show. We’re going to try to encourage the actual playing part when he’s a little older, but this isn’t a bad start for a four-year old. Both boys have gotten into mix CD’s and rock music this year. For reasons I can’t explain their favorite band is Europe, a big-hair band that was semi-popular when I was in middle school. I must say it is endlessly amusing to watch them sing along to songs like “The Final Countdown” and “Rock the Night”. Especially so with Davis, who only gets about half the lyrics right and ends up singing a version of the song much more original than the real version.
We had several fun trips around the Northwest this year. One that I think we’ll remember for a long time was taking the train up to Seattle for the Fourth of July week. I had never taken a train before and watching the scenery roll passed was much nicer than starting at someone’s bumper for three hours. The kids liked being able to get up and wander through the different train cars. The first day we went to Pike’s Place Market and at dusk went to the top of the Space Needle. On the Fourth we watched an afternoon baseball game between the Mariners and Tigers. Later that night we saw the fireworks over Elliot Bay. On the last day of the trip we went geocaching in the Olympic Sculpture Park. Geocaching is something we learned about this year that involves using a GPS to find “treasure” hidden somewhere near a given latitude and longitude. For this geocache the kids had to find answers to a bunch of questions that ultimately gave us the coordinates of the “treasure” — an ammo box filled with random trinkets other geocachers have added. It was a lot of fun and had us exploring parts of Seattle we otherwise never would have seen including a hidden waterfall in the middle of downtown.
If you’re interested in getting updates throughout the year or in seeing pictures or movies, you can go to our website at www.thewatsons.info (congratulations, you found it). If I can find the time, I’m planning on posting a multimedia version of this letter (hurray for me, I did). Also Sheryl and I both finally signed up on Facebook, so feel free to “friend” us if you want to know things like what I had for breakfast. We’re all looking forward to a relaxing Christmas, hoping for an uneventful 2009 and wishing you all a happy and healthy new year.
With Love,
Greg, Sheryl, Evan and Davis
