After many years of resistance, Tinkleflick management has finally approved the issuance of a holiday letter. We did not send it out to everyone but, instead, opted to post it here on tinkleflick.com so anyone who is interested in the details of our lives in 2005 can read it at their leisure while those who are not can safely ignore it. After all, we do go to the trouble of maintaining our website which serves basically the same purpose of providing the public at large with a regular glimpse into the boring details of our lives as well as some cute pictures of the kids and more than a fair helping of Ralph’s quirky point-of-view. But we thought, what the heck, let’s boogie and do a holiday letter this year.
Obviously, this year was dominated by a very recent event. That is, the birth on December 19th of the newest member of our family, Natalie Marie. There’s plenty of content on the website about that event, as well as some pictures in the Photo Gallery. However, it’s fair to say that the pregnancy, preparing for Natalie’s arrival and all of the related logistics have kept us busy for much of the year. We are very excited to have her, she is very cute, Noah absolutely LOVES his little sister and, no, we will not be having a third as we are officially retired from child bearing.
We started the year with Noah’s second birthday, which we celebrated with an exhausting 2 hours at MyGym with all of his little friends (Noah co-hosted with his best buddy Jacob). It really has been amazing to see (and hear!!) his development over the last year. At Christmas 2004, Noah first started putting together two words into very basic sentences and now, for those of you who have experienced it recently, we have a little chatterbox on our hands. Noah also made a big leap forward into “big boy” status by starting pre-school in the summer. He attends early childhood education classes at the Alpert Jewish Community Center in Long Beach. No, we haven’t converted to Judaism. The programs at the JCC (also known as “the J” to those of us insiders) are very good and we wanted to get Noah started early because we thought that it would help ease him into life with a sibling as well as prepare him for the social structure of school. Preschool has been great for Noah. A few tears at drop off every so often are quickly wiped away as he runs off with his little friends. His teachers tell us what we already knew…that Noah is a “mini Me” of Ralph. He sorts crayons by color and demands that toys be located in their proper location! Noah continues to amaze us everday and we are really lucky to have a little boy who is as fun to have around (most of the time) as he is.
We decided to take a family vacation this summer because, last year, Ralph and Wendy went on three vacations by themselves and because we knew we wouldn’t have another good opportunity for a while until the baby is a bit older. We also wanted to cherish the remaining time we had as a three person family. We went back to Napili Bay on Maui and we just had a great time. Noah has very fond memories of our week there at the end of August which we know because every time he sees an airplane he tells us that it is flying to Hawaii, every time he sees mountains (which is rare here in smoggy Southern California) he thinks we are in Hawaii and the other night he told us that he wants to take his bathtub coloring tint to Hawaii next time to color the ocean water! We went there without him last year but we had such a great time with him this year that we are planning to go back again when Natalie is a little older, maybe in ‘07.
About the time we went to Hawaii, we broke ground on our latest home improvement project. For those of you keeping score at home, we have already remodeled both bathrooms and the kitchen, resurfaced the hardwood floors throughout the house, rebuilt our patio and added a patio cover, installed a sliding glass door in the living room and installed central air and heat. This year, we realized that we needed another room for Natalie and with housing prices as crazy as they are, we decided that it would be best to add one on and stay a while rather than spend $1 million to get a slightly bigger house. We decided to move Noah into what is now the office, give the nursery (which is now Noah’s room) to Natalie and build a home office attached to our garage and over what used to be our garden. We obtained the building permit in April and finally managed to secure a contractor, agree on a plan and green light the project in August. The idea was to have it completed by Halloween so we could move everything around before the baby arrived. Well, Halloween came and went…Thanksgiving came and went and now here we are entering the New Year with the project still not completed. Noah loves to play in the dirt pile but, other than that, we are really tired of the constant construction. The quality of work is good and we are passing all of our inspections but we are still a good 30-60 days from completion. It will be nice when it is done but it will be almost a year in the making for a 250 square foot accessory structure!!!!
We celebrated our 5th wedding anniversary this year and Wendy remains as the penultimate Super Mom. She is the room Mom at Noah’s preschool (she is actually co-room Mom), she has managed to remain sane while running after Noah and going to doctor appointments and stuff for the baby and she is becoming quite the knitter producing scarves and baby hats at a pace that would make any third-world sweat shop manager proud. Amazingly, in anticipation of Natalie’s arrival, in addition to all of that she managed to have all of the Christmas presents bought and wrapped by Thanksgiving!!! Wendy does not give herself nearly enough credit for the amazing job that she does everyday. Ralph, Noah, Natalie and especially the ungrateful animals are all very lucky to have her.
With the meningitis episode now two years behind him, Ralph limited his consumption of healthcare services to routine maintenance and elective laser eye surgery. After getting his MBA in 2004, Ralph was looking to have the chance to do things other than read legal documents and spend hours on conference calls. To the rescue was Ralph’s brother-in-law (technically, Wendy’s sister’s husband) who owns Apartment Lending Group. Located in Westminster, a mere 9 miles from home, the new company not only provides a much better commute but, because it is smaller and privately held, it provides new and different ways for Ralph to apply a wider variety of his geeky skill set (check out his handiwork at www.arates.com–he is, among other things, the webmaster). Ralph also retired from fantasy football this year after realizing that his favorite pastime of being a Dad left him with way too many hobbies of ever-lessening interest competing for way too little available spare time. However, Ralph continues to be very excited over the unexpectedly successful performance of his beloved Chicago Bears (11-4 with one to go, NFC North Division champs, second seed in the NFC and a first-round bye ain’t shabby) and can be found on most Sundays in front of NFL Sunday Ticket while playing Thomas the Tank Engine with Noah.
In the miscellaneous department, tinkleflick.com received a major makeover this year as we converted it to the current blog format. We haven’t heard any complaints about the new site, so we hope that it is satisfactory to you. It’s a little more minimalist than its predecessor but it is much easier to maintain and that has allowed us to update the content more frequently. The animals are as dirty and useless as ever and barely even deserve that much of a mention.
We are all very excited about Natalie’s arrival and we are looking forward to Noah’s third birthday here in a few weeks and to a happy, safe and successful year in 2006. We wish all of our friends and family the same. We will continue to post more pictures and information about life in the tinkelflick world so, if that interests you, please check back when you can.
Best wishes,
Ralph, Wendy, Noah and Natalie