Happy Holidays to our Friends and Family,

For at least as long as I've been writing these letters, Alyson and I have had a plan – every other year we put up our artificial tree and go to Massachusetts for the holidays, but on the opposite years we stay in Maryland and get ourselves a real tree. As I write this letter, I am fretting over our tree as it isn't drinking enough water. What are we going to do if it doesn't start? I am, however, looking forward to a nice quiet Christmas at home this year.

Originally this post was going to be "How I spent my summer vacation" but things change.

Let me start by spoiling the ending of this story for you: Alyson broke her leg so badly that it required surgery.

Now back to the beginning. The plan was a long weekend at the beach. Thursday evening we left work to go to the luau they were holding at Caleb's daycare to celebrate the end of the season. The daycare was closed Friday for cleaning/preparing for next semester so we thought it was the perfect time to head out.

Earlier this month, Caleb turned 2 years old. Being the new-ish dad that I am it has taken some time to really wrap my head around what this event means to him, to me, to us as a family. People said to me that getting married would 'change everything'. It didn't. Becoming a father did.

One thing I've heard about raising children is that you need to provide them with structure in their lives. It keep them grounded and helps them to feel safe. It hasn't been until recently that it has been something that I needed to worry about. Here's the story of our child-care woes.

In which our author (that's me) talks about Mother's day, Multiple trips to Massachusettes, Daycare, and other children's stuff..

We had never intended to get Caleb a pacifier.

We had seen too many parents use them as a way to shut the child up and we just weren't prepared to go there. And then we discovered bruises on his arms. At first we thought he'd gotten his arm stuck in the baby bjorn. But then it kept happening. Caleb was self-soothing by sucking on his forearms and giving himself hickies. There was also some evidence that the pacifier helped prevent SIDS.

Not wanting him all bruised up, we got ourselves a couple of orthodnically approved pacifiers. It worked well and as he moved out of infancy we transitioned the binky (as we were calling it) to an only when he's sleeping thing. We even emphasized that part of his getting up routine was for him to put the binky back in his crib himself and wave goodbye. The original plan had been that we were going to toss it out when he turned one but given that he was only using it for sleeping, there wasn't that shame to spur us on so we decided to let him keep it.

In the past couple of months, particularly as he's been speaking better, the binky became part of his bedtime routine. We would first give it to him during story time to help him calm down and soon we would say "Ready for a story?" and he would run into his room yelling "Bee-Tee! Bee-Tee!". All well and good. But then we caught him moving one of his play chairs over against the crib in an effort to climb into the crib and get it. The time was right for it to be gone.

Friday night, the Binky went missing. We don't know where it went but it got "lost". The backups were nowhere to be found. We spent some time looking for it, mostly under the dresser and the crib but in the end we had to give up the search. He has since asked about it a couple of times but only in passing. Last night he didn't ask at all. The substitute of a sippy-cup of water seems to have been accepted as an even trade. That may come back to haunt us in the form of overfull morning diapers but so far things are working out.

By and large, Caleb has a low awareness of fear. There really aren't a lot of things that he is afraid of. He has his 'shy' moods where he just clams up and won't talk at all but actual fear seems pretty foreign to him. Because of that I think that the things that do scare him become that much more obvious. The first thing to make him panic was the vacuum cleaner. Lately, he's been having some difficulties with the concept of 'shower'.

I've always been something of a fan of Consensus reality... the idea that certain things exist because we agree that they do. It fascinates me because there are some things that exist even without our belief in them.. a good portion of math, physics, and biology for instance. But then there are some portions of Quantum Physics that seem to exist because there are holes in our attempt to model them, yet we treat those gaps as if they were reality.

Closer to home and every day life, things like Language, Color, and Emotion all have meaning because we give it to them and agree to that shared definition.

Well, lets put it this way, I have a general tendency to want to keep 'things'. There is that part of my brain that knows that the moment I get rid of something, I'm going to want/need it for some reason. So I keep/hold on to it.

Having shared living space with Alyson over the past 6 or so years now has slowly been breaking me of the habit. She gives me one of those 'Do you really need to keep that?' looks and I think about it. On top of that, cleaning out the old house for the baby and then moving has helped remove a lot of things as well. Last night I went searching for a piece for a Hero-clix I'm planning to mod (couldn't find it) and realized that perhaps its time for another purge.

To Our Friends & Family:

One of the best things about writing this letter each year is that it gives me the chance to pick my head up out of the trenches long enough to examine the past year. Sometimes it just seems to zoom by in a blur of shapes and colors. I do something similar at work and dread it as I never quite feel like I've accomplished enough. On the other hand, I only hope I have room for it all in this letter.

Being relatively new parents, the urge is strong to just go on and on about our son. The format for this year's letter (with a very nice family picture - I hope you enjoy it) does limit things a bit more so I'll do my best to strike something of a balance. Caleb has really grown up over the past year, moving from being our little baby to a little man in his own right. These days he has a handful of words and signs that he uses to communicate with us, but he has no desire to be a performing monkey and will often clam up shyly if he catches us trying to make him perform. His first word was 'Squirrel' (SKRL) but that was quickly supplanted by the much more useful (and masculine) words of 'Ball' (BAH!) and 'Car' (CAH!). No (or Nah) is also starting to make an appearance. Beside's that, he's eager and enthusiastic when it comes to helping out around the house - doing the laundry or insisting on dragging that heavy bag of trash down the hallway to the garbage shoot. He doesn't have to, but he knows that you're supposed to grunt when carrying heavy things so he does it just to keep up appearances.

Of course, Alyson and I do have lives outside of our son. I started out the year having surgery - my first (and hopefully last) kidney stone. Somewhere in the midst of everything we even found time for travel. There were two trips up to Massachusettes in the spring and summer when we were able to introduce Caleb to my side of the family and on the second trip we had the opportunity to say goodbye to Babci before she mercifully passed on. She will be well missed this holiday season. More happily, there was the trip to Florida for Alyson's cousin's wedding in July. Caleb wasted no time in charming the Papianni clan.

In September and October, Alyson participated in an event hosted the Smithsonian American Art Museum. The idea was to reach out to more and varied artists in the community. Alyson submitted a number of sewn pieces in response to 'prompts' (short fictional writings) that painted a Washington Irving-esque mood of American history. The results can be seen online (http://ghostsofachance.com/). I unfortunately missed the in person showing as I was off on my own adventure. In April, I applied for a short term assignment in Afghanistan. The timing and the assignment shifted a little but in the end (6 months later) I spent a week there in October learning about the project and creating a database to track the projects' accomplishments for reporting. Afghanistan itself was an interesting place. The people I met were quite friendly though at times I felt a little trapped in my hotel room.

Just the other day at work, I was informed that the plan for the coming year is to focus on making existing projects run more smoothly. In other words, stop for a moment and try to make sense of the shapes and colors as they whirl by. In a season where things seem to be going faster and faster, we wish you a moment to stop, take a breath, and catch up on some of the many beautiful things as they whirl past you.

Happy Holidays,
Alyson, Bill, and Caleb