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This card represents the 10 year anniversary of this ridiculous Christmas tradition! There have been faces added and lost over the decade, but the family keeps growing and it’s a wonderful way to look back on the year past and the years that have led us here.
This year began still entirely virtual for our family but has slowly made its way back to more in-person normalcy. Winchester finished 1st grade as hybrid learning but is now halfway through a fully in-person 2nd grade. Rutherford was very excited because he finally got to take the bus to school with Winchester now that he's started in Young Fives (a Michigan-only pre-Kindergarten grade)!
While the pandemic/endemic changed some vacation plans, the boys now being old enough for vaccinations meant large family get-togethers were back on the agenda. We returned to a full 4th-of-July family reunion, a full-family Thanksgiving in Pennsylvania, a trip to New Hampshire with the Parisi side (including trips to StoryLand and Santa’s Village), and a full Marsh get-together for Uncle Nate’s wedding to our new sister-in-law Maria!
We also found lots of opportunities for smaller family trips like visiting Auntie Manda and family (affectionately referred to as Team JAAM) in Warwick NY, camping with Uncle Nate, visiting Taughannock Falls with Geoff’s parents and Team JAAM (their first camping trip as a family!), attending Rochester’s Lilac Festival, and Geoff took a week to drive out to Montana for a combination annual brother trip/Uncle Nate fly-fishing bachelor party/visiting old friends/road trip with Letzty adventure. Dianna also got a fly-fishing adventure in, getting nominated by the Boy Scouts for an invite-only 4-day guided fly-fishing trip in Cimarron, NM.
“Stumps and Rumps - North Campus”, the lake house we bought last year, has continued to be a year-round family escape. It has been the home base in winter for skiing, ice-skating, hockey, sledding, snow tubing, hiking, and curling up by the fire with a book. Summer at North Campus was once again filled with lots of swimming (Rutherford can now swim without a life vest!), canoeing, sailboarding, jet skiing, boating, campfires, and fishing.
Life at home was just as busy, with everyone picking up new extracurriculars as things began reopening. Most weeknights involve juggling taekwondo classes at Victory Martial Arts with Rutherford now a Tiny Tiger purple Belt, Winchester a Beginner orange belt, Dianna an Advanced purple belt, and Geoff just got his white belt in Krav Maga. Geoff has continued singing with the Carolyn Mawby Chorale in Flint, performing his first-ever live concert (the other performances since he joined were virtual). Cub Scouts has also picked up as a big family activity including hiking, STEM projects, indoor skydiving, a pinewood derby, and attending Camp Teetonkah as both campers and staff (Dianna was the Camp Director and the boys took very seriously their role as Official Taste Testers in the kitchen)!
With Dianna being posted at camps for weeks at a time and looking for a way to more easily bring the dogs along, she made an extensive leaving-Post-It-Notes-around-the-house campaign to make the case for a piece of home she could take with her. So in March, we pulled home a new 18’ camper we affectionately refer to as ‘Stumps and Rumps - Mobile Unit’. It also served as a nice excuse for Geoff to make upgrades to her Jeep to better serve as a long-trip tow vehicle. (Supercharger upgrade is still in negotiations.)
Projects needed around the houses have finally slowed a bit, but there were still several fun additions this year including a stock tank pool, continued kitchen refresh, an Arudino-controlled Free Little Library for Geoff’s mom, adding stairs to the front porch, Blue and Green Lantern Halloween costumes, ongoing homestead chores, and prepping both the Harley Sportster and Honda CB350F for sale (to allow the purchase of Geoff’s long-desired KTM 390 Duke!)
A big factor in the slower pace of projects was that, in August, Geoff’s VP of Technology at Kettering University left and he was tapped to step up and take on the responsibilities in the interim. It’s been a fabulous challenge and often a large time commitment, but he is really enjoying it and looking forward to the doors it will open in the future.
The biggest (and cutest) excitement this year, though, is the final installment of Dianna’s corgi trilogy she has been wanting for a decade. Three corgis, also known as a ‘Parade’, has been Dianna’s endgame since she got Bean in 2010 and was finally completed when she picked up Hammich (aka Ham aka HamHam aka Hambone aka Jean Claude Van Ham) in mid-November. He is as sweet and snuggly a pup as we’ve ever had and we can’t wait for him to grace the Christmas card for years to come!
From our ridiculous and ever-growing family to yours, Merry Christmas and wishes for a Happy New Year to come!
