Curtis Family 2002
for the Year End/Christmas Card Photo
For the "details" types, we've expounded in great detail here on our web site about our journey from newlyweds to a family on a fairly classic Catholic timeline.
As a compromise for the in between types, we'll recap the year in a one page, less than 500 words, missive explaining why we have so much to be thankful for this year.
Without a doubt, the pregnancy and the birth of Jane Amélie has been the big news this year. A quick recap of the pregnancy:
The loss of additional month of pregnancy discomfort we're sure Jane will make up to us as a teenager but other than that, no real drawbacks to the early delivery.
In the subsequent 4 ˝ months she's done fine and is progressing very nicely reaching with the most joyful achievement of sleeping thru the night about early November.
Although everything else pales by comparison, we should mention a few more things about the people that brought Jane into the world. We certainly don't get to the movies as often, and after a decade Randy threw in the towel on doing mini reviews or even keeping track of what we've seen. We made 3 vacation trips this year: Chicago in January, St. Pete's Beach Florida in April and an October road trip with Janie for Bethany's 10 year college reunion at W&J, stopping off to see family in Indianapolis, IN, Pittsburgh, PA, and Dayton, OH.
We've started drawings on for an addition to the house, which hopefully will be underway this spring.
Postscript: The "reduced" year end letter at roughly 1/4 the length of previous efforts of recent years could be cited as a whitering of creativity, verbosity, growing humility and a lack of extra time now that we have a child. Perhaps, all are true to some extent. However, we believe the cumulative mass of all the linked pages created this year tends to discredit this theory.
For the "short and sweet" folks out there, the photo pretty well sums up the year without another overly long summation letter from us.
Finding out the happy news on Christmas day 2001
1 ˝ months of nausea & hyper sensitivity to ALL smells, resulting in a weight loss for Bethany (not a recipe for glee)
6 months of relative contentment and generally glowing by Mom to be
˝ month of growing discomfort and displeasure with the heat, swollen feet, etc.
1 ˝ days of labor before hospital admission and 10 hours in hospital labor, most with our friend the epidural
1 healthy 7 pound 2 ounce, 20 inch baby, Jane Amélie, nearly a month early on August 5th
The cats and dog are mostly doing fine with their new "sibling" after an adjustment or two.
Bethany has elected to stay home full time, which certainly simplifies life when Randy has to travel (17 trips last year or about 1/3 of the time). Luckily we've got family close by who very enthusiastically have offered to watch Jane as often as possible. Hopefully we haven't taken too much advantage of their good will.
Happy Holidays and Wishing You and Yours the Best in the New Year,
Randy, Bethany and Jane