Don (Daddy!): Yet another career change for Don in 2010. He left a wonderful job at SAS to join the ranks of the consultants at Accenture. There was nothing wrong with SAS, it’s just that Don had spent the last four years doing the same demos and telling the same tired jokes to customers. Make no mistake, Don loves to hear himself talk and loves telling the same joke over and over and over. The problem is that he ran out of customers who hadn’t heard his sales pitch. The proverbial writing was on the wall when Don started hearing with greater frequency … “hey, didn’t you tell us that joke the last six times you were here?” Choice was simple …. NEW JOKES or NEW JOB. The high point of Don’s professional career for 2010 occurred when he was asked to speak about cluster analysis in text mining in Las Vegas at the M2010 Data Mining Conference. He spent 5 days rubbing elbows and hob-knobbing with some of the biggest names in data mining and statistics. Yawn … Oh, I mean … WOW! Lucky for Don: “What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas!” Don is still playing tennis … badly. But he loves it. He was in two leagues this year and was able to improve his record by actually finishing with a mediocre record (but that includes two matches where the opponent forgot to show up and Don won by forfeit). Next year he hopes to play against men.

 

Kathryn (Mom): Kathryn is again a shoe in for the annual “Mother of the Year” award. I won’t go into all of the details of how well she does her job, but suffice it to say that she keeps the house running like a well oiled machine. Kathryn credits her accomplishment to a strong sense of love, an attention to detail, and an obsessive need to be a “control freak” and manage every last detail of everything. This allows her extra time to be a lunch mom at the kids’ school, go to Jazzercize several times a week, and even run Emily’s “Brownie” troop. Kathryn’s other hobby is saving money by keeping the heater set so low that you can see your breath. On especially cold nights, she allows us to go outside and warm up. This Christmas, we hope to set the thermostat into the double digits. When she isn’t being the best mom ever, she is the best wife ever. Her specialty is making Don laugh with her sense of humor. Some of her more humorous comments include:

• “You might as well confess … I’m going to blame you anyway”.

• “If love and tolerate are the same thing, then I love you very much.”

• “Hey … you are encroaching on my third of the bed.”

 

DONALD (Age 10): The typical news for Donald is that he is still doing great in school and still loves Karate where, after 5 years, he is a blue belt. He hopes to continue for several more years and maybe get a black belt. Donald continues taking piano and has progressed to playing tunes such as Beethoven’s “Fur Elise” and “Carroll of the Bells”. And it sounds amazing! Donald’s big adventure this year was spending several days in Toledo all by himself staying at his Aunt’s house and playing with his cousins. He spent four days learning to swear, not brushing his teeth, wearing the same underpants, and basically living a feral life style. We now have the answer to the age old question: “What would Donald have been like had he been raised by wolves?” One final note, Donald joined his grade school orchestra where he plays the xylophone. We couldn’t understand why he did that, but after some investigation we discovered he joined the orchestra to get out of his school’s music class which he hated. He chose the xylophone because it was a blow off instrument requiring no work. In short, our son has figured out how to cynically pervert the intent of his school rules for his own benefit. As a father, I have never been more proud.

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EMILY (Age 7): Emily is following in the footsteps of her older brother and is doing really well in school. She is also taking piano and progressing wonderfully. Emily has also taken to sewing and designed and sewed herself her own little apron which she uses when she helps her Mamma cook in the kitchen. It’s really sweet. Her new activity is that she and her little sister are taking ballet and dance lessons and were part of the travelling dance team for her school. She and Katelyn both performed at two nursing homes and at a major shopping mall. It was very sweet. Emily also adores her baby brother David and seems to be a great built in baby sitter. This might come in handy in a few years! On a lighter note, if you recall that last year Emily went horseback riding and got bitten on the arm by a horse (immediately after her Daddy assured her that “horses don’t bite”). It left a huge welt and broke the skin. Well, this year we went to the Lake County Fair and we saw some Shetland ponies and for the second time her Daddy was absolutely convinced that it was safe to pet the horse (I think we all see where this is heading). Suffice it to say that the cute little pony took a huge chunk out of Emily’s leg that took months to heal. We got concerned that people would wonder why our daughter is covered in bruises and would get the wrong impression. So whenever anybody asks Emily how she got those nasty bruises, we told her to say “my Mommy and Daddy beat me”.  We are afraid that people might think that Kathryn and I are bad parents and are raising an idiot. On a sad note, Emily no longer trusts her Daddy’s opinion … on anything! What’s up with that?

 

KATELYN (Age 5): Katelyn has just started kindergarten and piano lessons this year. Although it is difficult to gage progress at this early age, she hasn’t been eating the paste and doesn’t run with scissors. Actually Katelyn is very bright and is reading and can actually play the piano very well for only having lessons for a few weeks. Katelyn also loves to draw pictures and is quite a good little artist. She also enjoys helping her Mamma in the kitchen. Like her older sister, Emily, Katelyn loves horses. However, Katelyn has taken her love of horses to the next level. She plays with her toy horses all day, draws pictures of horses, and pretends to be a horse. Her favorite thing to do is to go up to Mentor and see a family friend, Janet, who takes care of horses. Katelyn has decided to be a “horse girl” like Janet except that Katelyn has decided that she will only be a horse girl that rides horses and pets horses and not somebody that has to clean up after the horses. Why didn’t anybody think of that before? Katelyn recently asked her Mom if “baby horses are born with horse shoes on their feet?” Kathryn said “no”, but Katelyn wanted to call Janet up and make sure about that. Katelyn has also recently begun praying every night so that God will “bless Unicorns and Pegasuses so that they won’t be extinct anymore”. I hope you all remember that in your prayers also. This is starting to sound like a really bad episode of Shirley Temple. I better move on to writing about David because if I write anymore on Katelyn, you will likely get a serious case of diabetes. 

 

DAVID (Age 22 months ): Pushing two, David still isn’t much of a talker but is frightening at his ability to figure things out. Basically he’s technically brilliant but won’t communicate … a born engineer. His favorite toys are the dish washer, the stove, the radio, the electric plugs, and anything with knobs and lights and dials. He is capable of deriving ways of getting to any of the fore mentioned gadgets that have been put out of his reach by mom and dad. He’s driving us crazy. His favorite foods are tooth paste, pop corn, and chocolate milk. He absolutely adores his daddy … mostly because Don will allow David to eat nothing but tooth paste, pop corn, and chocolate milk.