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(If you don't have any small children you interact with, you may need to Google 'Paw Patrol' to understand this year's card.)
All of the linked photos, by the way, you can see on the Google Photos album if you'd like to view them.
2018 was an busy and exciting year here at Stumps and Rumps Homestead (it took a year or so, but we finally gave the new place a name)! The year kicked off with quite a bit of traveling, starting with a Caribbean Cruise with the Parisi cousins and grandparents. That kicked off a theme for the spring, with the boys getting grandparent time again when we attended Geoff's youngest brother, Spencer's, amazing Key West wedding to "Finally Aunt Gina". They got a week with each set of grandparents again when Geoff and Dianna got to be a part of Geoff's high school New Zealand!
Of course we weren't going to fly to the other side of the world just to pop back home after the wedding! After spending the first week celebrating up on the very tip of the north island in Paihia and Matapouri with a beautiful beach house a stone's throw away from secluded and picturesque beach where the ceremony was held. The first week was filled sailing, exploring, scuba diving, snorkling, night kayaking in bio-luminescent waters and making new friends from all over the world.
The second week explored the lower half of the north island including the Black Sand Beach of Piha, Hobbiton, Tongariro Alpine Pass (aka Mount Doom in Lord of the Rings!), Rotorua's geothermal features, and possibly the highlight of the second week - blackwater rafting the famous Waitomo glow worm caves by means of spelunking and tubing the rapids of a series of underground rivers. All this while coming home each night to a lovely farm bed and breakfast with a multitude of animals to hang out with. In fact, the lovely barn cat we befriended there is fairly responsible for us finally breaking down and getting a barn cat of our own, Tsarmina Greeneyes aka Mina, the first ever cat in the Marsh or Parisi housholds who you see on the front of this year's card. (That's right. That's how sweet and wonderful our little mouse terminator is; she let me put a costume on her. I don't know many other barn cats that would allow that.)
Speaking of animal additions, Mina was just one of the new members of Stumps and Rumps this year. We added 9 new chickens from 3 different hatches this year, plus two turkeys named Christmas and Thanksgiving! (Guess what their role was supposed to be). Ultimately we lost Thanksgiving to disease, but Christmas never picked up enough weight to be worth eating, so she's sticking around for a while longer. But the most highly anticipated addition was that Dianna, after 7ish years of waiting, finally got to get add another corgi to the family, and from the same wonderful breeder that we got Bean from 8 years ago! The new puppy, Sammich, has repeatedly surprised us as to how such a hyper pupper could simultaneously also be so sweet and well behaved. She adores her new furry siblings and our house is filled with non-stop puppy rumbles.
Perhaps the smooth transition for Sammich was aided by getting back into puppy-mode this year with 4 different foster puppies, one as young as 13 weeks! We had always fostered older dogs before and had never been the go-to foster for puppies before. It has been a lovely experience and if you've never fostered before we would, as always, recommend inquiring with a rescue organization near you. Guaranteed they will be ecstatic to have you!
This year also brought us our first real loss of a pet, as our mini-lop rabbit Elsie (more frequently referred to as Bun-bun in her later years) passed away in November at nearly 10 years old. She is buried up on a hill in the woods behind the house and is missed already.
We are still in love with the new house and surrounding property and are slowly but surely continuing to make it our own. We expanded the backyard this year by clearing a section of woods to join the two different areas of the back yard. We also cleared a large area between the quarter-acre vernal pond and the front of the house. It's not large enough to swim in (yet?) but it's lovely to finally be able to look out from our bedroom and watch the deer drinking in the evenings.
The other large house project this year was running electrical, HVAC, plumbing and venting to the 3 season porch to make it a 4 season laundry room hosting both her washers and both of her driers. We even put in a pellet stove to take the chill off during the chilly Michigan winters. The 180-degree windows overlooking the beautiful backyard and woods will let her watch the boys playing and wait for laundry while all the while time curling up next to a fire with a book!
Lastly, Geoff finally completed the new chicken coop and moved the chickens out of the attached shed where they were "temporarily" moved to a year and a half ago and he's begun converting the space into a proper workshop complete with reframing, rewiring, installing windows and lighting, adding a new entrance and creating a loft space that has become Mina's new home.
In addition to New Zealand, the Caribbean, and Key West we also had a number of smaller trips this year. We visited Uncle Joe and Auntie Manda in New York City, Dianna got to attend an invite-only week long conference in Philmont, NM for outdoor program scouting professionals (she was even asked to moderate one of the panels!), Geoff and the boys went down to Wilkes Barre, PA for the annual 4th of July family reunion, and we all (including the dogs) went to the new Marsh Thanksgiving get-together in the Finger Lakes. Geoff is not big on changing traditions, but after a week of laughing and cooking and playing pool and polar bear plunges and snuggling nieces and nephews, he'll be ok with the transition.
Another big change this year was moving the boys from the Montessori school in Flushing they had been attending for almost 3 years to a daycare closer to home. We will miss their school and teachers and friends a lot, but they had been commuting almost 2 hours a day with Geoff and the opportunity to spend more time playing at home and being involved more locally with another wonderful daycare was definitely the right call.
Winchester, now 4, has had a great year working on his reading, learning to ride a bike, pretending to be The Flash and Captain America, and adoring all things Rescue Bots.
Rutherford, now 2, has been getting more and more ridiculously adorable. He’s coming into his own as a complete ham and his goofy faces and booty dances constantly crack us all up.
So as a year of lots of excitement and transition winds down we feel very fortunate to have had the year we did and are also looking forward to the upcoming year and being able to spend time enjoying the things we've worked towards and the wonderful people we have the good fortune to call our family and friends.
Merry Christmas and/or Happy New Year! We hope your upcoming year will be full of joy and contentment.
