2018:  A Retrospective

 

Highs:

* Lauren and I managed to get away for a date together every month last year.

* Genevieve went from inarticulate grunting to speaking sentences.

* Will started pre-K and Daniel started Kindergarten.

* Daniel got a bicycle for his birthday and started learning to ride it.

* Daniel excels at reading, placing in the 97^th percentile (top 3%) in a nationwide reading test. He's approaching third-grade level, if he's not there already.

Mixed Blessings:

* We finally said good-bye to the church we've attended since before we were married. We looked around and realized that, after nearly a decade, we just didn't have any friends there.

* I stepped down as the Department Chair after four years so I could focus on my dissertation, which still isn't finished.

Lows:

* Numerous small repair jobs around the house turned out to be much bigger projects than anticipated.

* Medical bills were a heavy burden.

* My local BJJ school closed.

2017:  A Retrospective
 
Highs:
* Will got tubes put in his ears and his language ability skyrocketed immediately afterwards.  At the start of the year he was speaking in isolated words and a few two-word combinations.  Now, I can have whole conversations with him.
* Daniel’s reading ability took off at the end of the year.  He’s now reading unfamiliar books with little to no help.  I’d place him as approaching (or even on) a first-grade level, and he still hasn’t started kindergarten.  He’s past where I was at his age, and I wound up being an English professor!
* I completed my coursework, took care of my language requirement, and passed my comprehensive exams for my Ph.D.  All that’s left now is the dissertation.

Mixed blessings:
* This summer, we drove four hours to a beach.  Genevieve screamed the whole way.  We wound up only getting an hour on the beach, then Genevieve screamed the whole way back.
But that single hour on the beach was golden.

Lows:
* Daniel got his tonsils out.  Much unfun was had.
* Several of our friends moved away.
* I injured my knee and separated my collarbone from my shoulder and had to take several months off from playing sports.

As a four-year-old, I became enamored of a plastic sword I saw in the toy department of Harper's  Five-and-Dime, which looked almost exactly like the one shown below:

I begged my mother for it.  Sensing her misgivings about buying her son violent toys, I kept reassuring her, “It isn't sharp or anything.”  Eventually, she gave in and bought it for me, and I went on my merry way, slaying imaginary dragons and trolls.

Fast forward 35 years.  My eldest son, Daniel, will be four in two months.  Today, his friend came over to play, and brought a plastic sword (like the one above) he had just received as a birthday present.  They started playing, and my son became upset that he didn't have a sword of his own.  “I can't be a knight,” he said, on the verge of tears.

I stood up, squared my shoulders, and walked to the back room.  I opened a particular plastic storage tub, reached in, and laid my hands on what I needed.  I walked back into the room, knelt on one knee, and presented it to my son.  “Daniel, this is your father's sword he had when he was your age.”

Today was the day my eldest son took up his father's sword and embarked with his best friend on his first quest to slay a dragon.

(Later on, I was roped into playing the role of the dragon.  They say you either die a hero, or live long enough to become a villain.  Today I became a dragon, and I couldn't be happier.)

Postscript:  When I put my son to bed, he thanked me for sharing my sword with him.  Then he asked me, “Daddy, when you were my age, did you fight real dragons and trolls?”

“No,” I said.  “Even when I was a kid, real dragons and trolls were far away and difficult to find.”

“Daddy,” he asked, “Where are dragons and trolls?”

“That,”  I replied, “you'll have to discover for yourself.”  And I stepped out of his room and closed the door.

2016: A Retrospective

If 2015 was a pretty rough year, 2016 was a lot better.

This summer, we finally bought a house.  It has twice the square footage of the on-campus house we originally rented, and three times the square footage of the last house we were in.  Moreover, it was $20k less than the house we made an offer on in 2015.  Despite some minor repairs we had to do over the first few months, we've experienced no buyers' regret.  It has everything we need and most of what we wanted, for an affordable price.

Waiting until this year to buy a house was really a good decision.  We got a lower interest rate than we would have last summer, and we were able to finally pay off our student loans.

But the best part about 2016 came just about four weeks ago:  my daughter Genevieve was born.  She's the first full-term baby we've had (out of three), and the labor and delivery went like a dream.  My wife had a natural childbirth at the hospital, with no pain medication, and we were able to go home two days later.  Genevieve's two older brothers adore her.

There were some serious bad things that happened this year, but nothing as bad as the good things are good.

So 2015 was a pretty rough year.  On the whole, I'm glad to see it gone.

The continuing source of joy in my life are my two boys, who love each other and their mommy and daddy.  I love being a father.

There's no odometer listing this year.  I sold my car a couple of months ago.  I'm not really sad to get rid of it - it leaked water whenever it rained - but it's one more significant change in my life in a year that had more than its fair share of significant change.  I'd had that car for about 15 years.

Tonight we were reading the resurrection story to Daniel from his children's bible. We've gone through this children's bible several times before, but this time he started to get excited. He said, "Jesus died! Jesus came back! All happy!" He repeated this several times with great animation and arm waving.

Yes, son, you've got it. I'm not sure you understand what "dying" is, yet, but you've got it - and you're not even two and a half yet.

We had to move this summer. After five years in an on-campus house, the college kicked us out. (The rule was that professors could only stay in on-campus housing three years, so they'd been more than generous.) We found another house just off-campus and moved everything over.

It's been hard. While the rent is 25% higher than our on-campus house, the square footage is 33% less. We were already feeling like we needed more space, so, despite getting rid of some furniture, we feel even more squeezed, and that's not even considering that we recently added a new member to our family. To top it off, it's in the neighborhood of the house my parents just sold. Every morning I walk out the front door of my house to see the house I grew up in – but can no longer enter.

We've kept up our search for a house to buy (closing in on the two-year anniversary of starting our search). One house we had been keeping our eye on suddenly dropped $15k in asking price, so after looking it over, we made an offer, which was accepted. We were sky-high. Then, I did some careful number-crunching, and realized that our expenses had increased (with a new child and all) to the point where, although we could “afford” this house, we wouldn't be able to pay more than the minimum payment on our student loans each month.

Getting out of debt is a high priority for us, and if we didn't buy the house, we would be able to pay off all our loans within a year or so. With minimum payments, it'll take another 15-20 years. After many tears, we both decided to back out of the house purchase and commit to paying off our student loans before we buy a house.

This has made us all the more aware of the limitations of our current residence, and the let-down from not getting to buy the “house of our dreams” has given us especially low spirits.