Happy New Year and a little bit....

January 28, 2009

Dear all,

I’ve been wanting to write a letter updating everyone for a while, but time is just not my friend. As it is, it’s almost February, some of my decorations are still sitting out, even if they’re not “displayed”. But since Dad’s letter writing of Christmas just came, ok, several days ago, I felt inspired again to write. My inspiration this morning comes from a book I’m reading called “The Hour I first believed” in which there are extremely detailed letters of a young girls’ visit to Mark Twain’s house. I realize that I’m reading fiction, but the amount of detail that went into that letter was impressing and amazing. It had its own chapter and contained so many elaborate details of venue, environment, food and dress, and it embarrasses me to think I will try and include enough info to be informative and yet, small enough not to clog up everyone’s email….


We had an extremely busy Christmas Eve. As usual, I played a great deal at church. I had told Mark (our director) that I would play every single mass on Christmas Eve if it meant I didn’t have to show up Christmas morning. He had already asked me and the kids to come to the 4:00 Children’s Liturgy, since he is new to this job and doesn’t have the Catholic School connection that Jaime had, he was short on kids for that service. We normally have this one outside, but for once, Phoenix weather didn’t comply and we had to plan to put our masses back inside. This meant splitting them in half since our sanctuary is not prepared to handle everyone who only comes to mass twice a year. I was glad to help, but I was disappointed that Charlie and Lucy’s first year in the children’s choir would be without me there to witness it. As it turned out, they delayed the start of the second mass so that people had to time to wander in to church, not find a seat there and cross back to the hall. That meant I got to accompany Charlie as he played “O Come Little Children” on the violin as prelude music. I was so proud I thought I was going to burst – he, of course, was really laid back about it, no big deal. Lucy was also feeling vulnerable because of her arm, so she accompanied me to the other service and sat next to me at the piano and sang. By the time I got home at 2:00 after midnight mass, Christmas was laid out, Santa had come and gone and everyone was asleep in bed.


But Christmas day was great – nowhere to be, no specific time to finish, no work – all in all, a great day. I joke that Tony and I did our part to keep the economy afloat. With all our talk of cutting back, including our substitution of ornament making and cookie baking with our friends and neighbors in lieu of exchanging gifts, the kids still had tons of gifts under the tree. I desperately tried to stay away from video games as the gift of choice, but Tony did find a creative way to give the gift of electronics: two sets of bongo drums and the video game that accompanies them. In this game, Charlie and Alex (or sometimes my neighbor Tricia,) compete to properly accompany a song on the video game by tapping the correct drum at the correct time according to a series of colored circles flashing on the screen. It’s fun, if not a little tiring, and certainly noisy. Even Florence likes to get in there and dance if there’s not a drum available for her. The boys also got some outside toys – a pogo stick for Charlie, and a “big boy” scooter for Alex. I have to say the pogo stick hasn’t gotten that much use, but a lot of that is my fear from more broken bones after Lucy’s accident. Lucy’s primary gifts were extremely girly – a Barbie head for her to fix hair, a kit for braiding, crimping, and beading extensions that you would then clip into hair, and her favorite, a pretend espresso machine so that she can serve coffee/hot chocolate to all her friends and family. The hair toys are sitting quietly waiting for her to get her cast off so that she can have both hands available, but she and Alex play “Starbucks” nearly every day. Florence didn’t care much about opening presents, but she did get a few things she likes to play with – her own cell phone and this magnet play set for the fridge that talks to her and makes animal sounds. I envisioned her playing happily with this while I prepared dinner in the evening, but mostly I just keep retrieving the parts out from under my feet and shutting down the stupid Old MacDonald song. My big gift was an I-Pod Touch. Tony had bought me, several years ago, a really nice 2G MP3 player that did music, photos, videos, etc. I enjoyed it and got great use out of it as Alex watched movies on it during my many OB visits when pregnant with Florence. Well, I helped my neighbor research ipods for her daughter’s birthday and was surprised by how they’d come down in price, so I asked for one for Christmas (8G, please). Well, I had given up since he told me he spent my ipod money on my driving school course I had to take to keep a ticket off our car insurance (you can’t pass even a street sweeper in a school zone!). He told me I couldn’t just go hot-rodding around town (16 mph in a minivan) without consequences. But he surprised me with the Ipod Touch (16G, yay!) and it can do everything – even check my email and get on the internet as long as I’m near a wi-fi. It’s so cool. In fact, it’s so cool, he bought himself one for his birthday…32G of course, because his has to be bigger and better. That, and he got a good deal on Craigslist.


Charlie has gotten to join the orchestra at his school this semester. It’s not exactly what I imagined for him – a place to make music with his peers and make new friends who had something in common besides wall ball and video games – pretty much, we get there at 7:30 in the a.m., I help the teacher tune everyone up and by the time he finished roll call, it’s 7:45 and they have 15 minutes before he dismisses them to class. Knowing this, it’s not surprising that he figured after only 6 months of private lessons, Charlie would belong at least in the intermediate class if not the advanced. He also continues with his karate twice a week. In school he is doing very well, except for handwriting. I waver back and forth about how important this is to me. On the one hand, every genius has notoriously bad handwriting; on the other, sometimes I don’t even grade his homework because I can’t tell what it says!


Lucy’s broken arm has hardly slowed her down. I have to keep reminding her that even though she feels better, running and monkey bars are out of the question. We took a hike on New Year’s Day and she had no trouble making it to the top of Hayden’s Butte despite the fact that I kept fussing at her to slow down and be careful. And despite the fact that I threatened her about the playground after we found sand in her first cast, she still comes home covered in it. She looks cute running around in her hot pink glittery cast, and it’s going to seem weird to see her without it after we get it off next week. Gosh, time has flown. We’ll still have to see how long it will be before she can return to normal activities, but I know gymnastics is off the table at least until the fall. Her birthday is coming up and despite the fact that she made out like a bandit at Christmas, it hasn’t stopped the begging for birthday plans. She lost one of her front teeth. It has really changed her face.


Alexander thinks that because Joe Leo has turned 4, that he must now be 4. After all, they were always the same age, right? He wonders why he hasn’t had a birthday party. But if we try and explain it’s later, he still asks, “you mean, right now?” – he just isn’t getting the whole calendar thing. He loves his scooter he got for Christmas and he is also getting good at driving the jeep (even with Florence buckled in) and he is also learning to ride Charlie’s old bike. It does have training wheels, but they are so off-kilter that half the time they don’t touch the ground because he doesn’t like how the leaning feels when they are. I figure if I get him outside everyday, I could definitely take them off by this summer. I think Lucy was only 4 ½ when she did it. He and I are still going to Kindermusik classes. It’s a lot of motion and dancing and rhythm repetition and playing on instruments. The only part I don’t like is the CDs that were part of our kit. Two CDs full of songs, some of which are ok, but most of which are sung by “trained” children who sound so unnatural, it’s creepy. There’s also all the synthesized music they attempted to make sound like real instruments, down to how they record several string instruments, making them just slightly out of tune with each other. And the sound effects…well, don’t get me started.


Florence finally started walking on Christmas day. We had seen the signs it was coming. She would let go of things here and there and take a few steps. Then that day, she just quit crawling. And when she’d fall, she’d get right back up. We were so happy. Of course, the few bonks she got were right on her forehead where her surgery was. But now she is pretty steady, learning to navigate stairs here and there where she meets them – even treating the step off the patio and the seams from grass to driveway as a step, getting down on all fours and putting one foot at a time on the new level. She loves to do what the other kids are doing, which drives them crazy. I’m constantly being asked to remove Florence from whatever blocks, legos, or games they are playing. Her favorite toy, besides Charlie, of course, is a pretend cell phone. And from the moment she learned to walk, she has paced the kitchen with the phone to her ear chattering away. She babbles all the time now. Other than Uh-oh, she still doesn’t really have discernible words, but her babble is extremely conversational with ups and downs, pointing and pauses so you can respond. It’s really amazing. She’s also really stubborn and totally understands the word no. She can throw a big time fit, but she’s still easily distractible, thank goodness. She also is currently healthy for the first time since Thanksgiving – it has really improved her nighttime sleeping – she goes from about 7 until about 4:30, when she’ll wake up to eat and then go back to bed. I finally put away the little crib in my room. She enjoys going to the nursery during church time and pretty much eats anything we give her. Tony and I are beginning to see the light at the end of the baby tunnel.


By now, you all know about Tony’s new car. The accident in early January totaled the Sentra, which wasn’t difficult given it had 160,000 miles and was 11 years old. The thing that put its value where it was were the new tires and the nice stereo I installed for his birthday last year. So USAA is “buying” it from us and we bought a really nice, almost new, Civic Hybrid. Tony’s first choice was something cool and fun, but after doing a little research, the MVD convinced him that if he bought a used car that already had an alternative fuel tag, they would transfer it to him so he could use the HOV lane to get to work. Well, in true government fashion, after being reassured by no less than 5 people that it would work out, when he went to do it, they wouldn’t let him. I expected him to turn around and trade it in for a VW Bug convertible he had his eye on, but he’s keeping it. We’re hoping that perhaps our new governor (because, as you know, Napolitano defected to DC) will find a way to expand the program or make it work for us. I even wrote her a letter. It’ll no doubt get lost in the shuffle with all the letters she is receiving on planned cuts to education funding, but I had to try. Maybe she’ll be happy to take on something she can actually solve to someone’s satisfaction. But in the meantime, we’ll have to be happy with our financial savings in gas mileage, as we watch gas prices climb back up. That and the fact that Tony is no longer commuting in a car destined to break down.


My projects lately included putting together a photo album for Tony’s birthday. I collected all the “professional” pictures in one album from our history as a family. It was so much fun to see how the kids have grown and to see how much they favor – those Horn genes run deep, I tell you. Alex kept looking at pictures of Charlie and wondering if that was him. I also dug up all our Christmas letters, so it was neat to read the highlights of each year too. My other projects include getting the house ready to host two gatherings this week. Tony and I will host our bi-monthly Marriage Encounter meeting on Tuesday and I will host a Mardi Gras theme party for my MOMS group on Friday. I’ve put pressure on myself to do extra dusting and cleaning, hanging curtains over the kids toy clutter “closet”, organize pictures that didn’t make it into the album into frames, put batteries in the clocks that are dead…you know, the stuff that doesn’t really matter if you have good food and plenty of wine. I’ve also been working in the yard. We planted winter grass in the front and now I’m trying to keep it from dying. I always love getting the yard together, but I have the worst time “maintaining” it. I planted flowers in the beds out back, but they died during the one freeze we had in January. There’s the back lawn which I deliberately allowed to go dormant for the winter; however, the weeds don’t know the meaning of the word dormant. They creep underneath the alley wall and are thriving. Even the weed killer I put down doesn’t seem to be helping. I should just put down Astroturf and plant fake flowers and be done with it.