knitabit

Season's Greetings...

...from our family to yours. (The annual "brag rag" sent out to friends and family.)

2004 leaves us wondering if the hectic pace of our lives this past year was an aberration or a hint of what’s to come. We think we know the answer, and it makes us very afraid.

We started out 2004 with a fun and warm trip to the sunny Bahamas. During the 12-hour trip from our house to a condo on Grand Bahama Island, we traveled by car (from the house to the airport), by train (from the main terminal to an outlying terminal at Denver International Airport), by airplane (to Ft. Lauderdale), by taxi (to the port), by high-speed catamaran boat (to Grand Bahama Island), and by bus (from the port to the condo.) We all thought that was pretty cool.

Other vacation highlights included a week-long camping trip to Devil’s Tower, WY and the Black Hills, SD, plus other smaller camping expeditions in and around Colorado. We tried kayaking on the Colorado River in August and we all thought it was quite excellent.

Kyle started his freshman year at Skyline High School, and continues to enjoy as many athletic endeavors as he possibly can. Football is his favorite, and he was a starter at tight end and defensive end on the freshman team this fall. He seems to be enjoying the challenges that high school brings, even keeping up his grades in a couple of honors classes in spite of all the distractions of sports and girls.

Jeff is in his last year of middle school, and enjoys two seasons of soccer every year and doubles up in the spring by also running the 800m and 1600m on the track team. His soccer team had a breakout year in 2004, advancing up two divisions within their league. Jeff continues to do well in school. He is starting to see some light at the end of the orthodontic tunnel.

Greg can’t wait to start football next year, but is happy to stick with his soccer team for one last season this spring. We have been very lucky to have our kids on such nice teams with nice coaches. Greg is in his last year of elementary school and enjoys school and all his friends. When the phone rings at our house, it’s usually a call for Greg!

Katie is our bubbly little second-grader and seems to enjoy everything in life. She is really excited about playing the violin and is making lots of progress in the Suzuki violin method. She also takes piano lessons. We finally talked her into soccer this year, and she decided it was pretty fun after all! Like her mother, she is a voracious reader and we have a hard time keeping her supplied with interesting reading material.

Dale is still at the City of Longmont, busier than ever. He also volunteers on the board of directors for the Longmont Safe Shelter. Of course, he still keeps up our garden which overflowed with produce this year, and he’s maintaining his title as the World’s Best Short Order Breakfast Cook (Saturday mornings only) and will soon be adding titles in bread baking and canning (jams and salsas.)

Karen has two part-time jobs – still the Executive Director of DARCA, and also a part-time consultant through Aqua Engineering, Inc. of Fort Collins. Both jobs are flexible enough so that she can knock off every afternoon at about 3:00 to be the Taxi Mom. Her calendar of kid activities and sporting events is a sight to behold. Knitting is what she calls her “fiber therapy.”

Best wishes to all of you for a wondrous holiday season and a Happy New Year!

Dale, Karen, Kyle, Jeff, Greg and Katie

Photo disclaimer: OK, that photo of us in the Bahamas is totally FAKE! We had one picture of Dale with the kids, and another one with Karen and the kids, but we didn’t have one with all of us together. So we used Photoshop to cut Dale and Greg’s arm out of one picture and paste it into the other! Bet you couldn’t tell! Isn’t technology cool?

Comments

Gotta love PhotoShop, the technology that lets us make the pictures that SHOULD have been taken ;-)

Posted by: Patricia Tryon at December 20, 2004 10:50 PM