Here’s the thing about January. It’s more or less a holiday month in my opinion. In fact, in the Bendickson household, the holiday season starts the week of Christmas and doesn’t let up until after Sarah’s birthday on January 24th. In those four weeks we have Christmas, Second Christmas (usually with whichever set of parents we didn’t see on Christmas), my birthday, New Year’s, Macworld Expo (yes it’s an official holiday), MLK day, and Sarah’s birthday. That typically leaves us with just enough time to come out of our starch/sugar coma and catch our breath before Valentine’s Day.

In other non holiday related news, we’re in the final few weeks of single-kid-dom here. Joel’s baby brother is gestating right on schedule and should be joining the rest of us out here in “red-pill” land ’round about the end of March. Joel seems excited about the prospect of being a big brother. As you can see here he’s already scheming away with his unborn sibling, plotting against us.

“Dude, there’s only two of them! We can take ‘em!”

Joel, Mommy & Baby

If haven’t received one yet, you will soon. In the meantime here’s the “online” version. Happy New Year everyone!

Greetings and Merry Christmas!

2008 was quite a year for Joel, Sarah and me. We hit the ground running (so to speak) in January when we sold our house in University Place and moved up to Seattle. I’d been commuting to my job since May of 2007 and we were anxious to move north and shave a couple hours per day off of my drive. Luckily, we found a cute “brickie” complete with playroom and great backyard in the Crown Hill neighborhood of Ballard. My commute is now 3.3 miles, straight down 15th Ave. I still listen to the traffic reports my way into work, just to gloat to myself a little.

We spent the summer getting to know our new neighborhood and enjoying the local restaurants, parks, and beaches. We dove into a couple minor home improvement projects on our new home, specifically tiling the bathroom and repainting Joel’s playroom. We also hired our neighbor who was just finishing up a multi-year building project on his beautiful craftsman home to transform the decrepit old pile of shingles and sticks at the end of our driveway into an actual garage. It’s not quite big enough to be a two car garage, but it is a perfect “one car, one sound system” garage.

In July we found out that we’re pregnant again (well, specifically Sarah is pregnant… I just helped a little). It’s another boy and we’re expecting him to come along at the end of March. We’re still brainstorming names, but we have already started talking with Joel about his little brother. For the most part Joel seems to get it and is excited. We’ll see how it goes once the little one comes along and Joel is no longer the center of the proverbial universe.

Sarah’s sister Charissa is currently living with us. In addition to attending Mars Hill Graduate school in Seattle and working part time, she provides us with some (much needed) occasional babysitting. Most times its like having another parent around to help with Joel, but every now and then it’s like having an extra kid around too! (just kidding Charissa, we love you!)

I’m enjoying my job at The Omni Group as their Systems Administrator. It’s a fantastic place to work. Even though we’ve doubled in size over the last year it still feels very much like a small family business. And, now that my family lives so close, Sarah and Joel have been able to stop by for meals and the occasional coffee break. I appreciate the fact that Joel knows where I go during the day and is familiar with not only the office itself, but my co-workers as well. In fact he knows most of them by name!

Sarah is enjoying staying home full time with Joel (soon to be “the boys”). She attended a Birth Doula training course at Seattle Midwifery School this winter and will be pursuing certification sometime after baby number two. She’s enjoying MOPS in Ballard and is still part of a Tacoma based mom’s group that was started after Joel was born.

Joel continues to amaze us. Some fun tidbits: He does a spot-on (and hilarious) impression of Eeyore. He’s quite the baker; see his recipe for Pumpkin Muffins on our blog. He loves reading books, especially Thomas the Tank Engine & Bob the Builder. He loves helping daddy in the yard with raking, painting, and operating his backhoe. And he’s STILL pretty much inseparable from his Pooh Bear.

That’s it from us for this year. Hope this letter finds you well and (once again) Merry Christmas & Happy New Year. Blessings!

Aaron Sarah & Joel

Now you have to understand that the thing about the Mountlake Terrace Pool is it’s not just your typical boxy boring indoor pool. It’s a totally decked out, hexagonally hip “Pimp-My-Pool” kind of pool. They’ve got a kid friendly Leisure Pool area, a “Lazy River” area you can float along on inner-tubes, tons of colorful water playthings. It’s cool. So cool in fact, that the woman we talked to on the phone cautioned us that we’d better show up early because it reaches capacity pretty quickly and then they can’t allow any more people in.

We arrived at 11:50 (five minutes after the start of open-swim) after getting briefly sidetracked by Google Maps not-always-so-accurate directions. Sarah unloaded Joel from the car as I ran around to the front door to make sure we got in line. Behind me I could hear Joel’s excited little voice, “we are going swimming”! I rounded the corner and was of course greeted by a bright red sign stating that the “POOL IS FULL”.

Strike one.

I returned to the car to break the bad news. Joel was not exactly, um… thrilled with the idea that we NOT in fact going swimming and had to get back in the car. In an attempt to ward off his tantrum we decided to spend a few minutes in the outdoor play area next to the pool complex. I asked him, “Joel, would you like to play on the swings?” “YEAH!”, he exclaimed. Excitedly he climbed back down from the car and jump-skipped across the parking lot (holding my hand of course) towards the play area. “I’m going to play on the swings”, he kept repeating cheerfully. We hopped the little molded-cement curb onto the soggy cedar-wood chip covered ground and beheld the kid-sized plastic play fortress before us.

No swings. Strike two.

Now this is the point I start thinking to myself “well this certainly can’t get any WORSE” and wouldn’t you know it, I’d be wrong again. As we had sort of trudged our way over to the soggy, no-swing-bearing, play forte-de-lame I glanced backwards and noticed that the building just next to us is sporting a 15 foot floor-to-ceiling glass wall through which we have a perfect view of what… yeah, you guessed it, the FILLED TO FREAKIN’ CAPACITY POOL! Happy kids and their much-more-punctual-than-us parents are frolicking about in their Wonka-esque Happy Water Play Park Land and we’re standing outside in the dismal, soggy, Thanksgiving-weekend-in-the-northwest gray “play” area with NO SWINGS. Joel shuffled wide-eyed over to the huge glass wall and held his hand up to the transparent barrier (somewhat reminiscent of the way an inmate might look longingly at the free world outside his prison window that he’ll never again get to experience), he looked up at me and said pitifully, “I want to be swimming”.

Strike three.

Shortly we were joined by several other families who had also arrived too late to be allowed into the pool. We all tried to make the best of our consolation-prize play area and for what it’s worth Joel did seem to have a good time. He really enjoys watching and playing with other kids. Here’s a shot of him “smiling” from atop the play fortress.

Next time we’re getting there early!

As usual, Scott prepared a fantastic meal and afterwards we all lounged around and watched movies. We even let Joel watch one which is a bit of a treat for him. We watched WALL-E and he seemed to have no problem keeping up with the storyline. “WALL-E is coming! He’s a bulldozer! He has a plant! A ‘car-guy’ (Joel’s word for anythig that looks like a robot) is coming!” Good storytelling in my opinion.

We also had a brief and only semi-successful photo session in hopes of getting a Christmas card photo. I don’t think any of them had all three of us looking at the camera at the same time, but here’s our best effort:

Me: Joel, do you think there will be enough room for mommy & daddy AND Joel AND the baby in mommy & daddy’s bed?
Joel: Um… no…
Me: Should mommy and daddy get a bigger bed?
Joel: (shaking his head) No!
Me: Joel, when your baby brother comes will we be able to SHARE mommy and daddy with the baby?
Joel: (more emphatically) NO!

I don’t know how fair some of these questions are for him, since the reality of having a little brother is probably still slightly outside of his realm of comprehension, but it is telling. Having another one changes the game for everyone. I’ve really enjoyed these last couple years of learning what it’s like to be a parent and Joel has been a great teacher. It’s hard to know what life will be like with another one around… and yet like my Mom would always say, “You can’t imagine loving another one as much as you love the first… but then the second one comes and there’s just more love. You don’t love the first one any less, there’s just more.”

• We spent Christmas in Montana with Gpa & Gma B
  
• We moved from Tacoma to Seattle (Ballard to be precise)
  
• Joel learned his ABCs
  
• We rebuilt our garage
  
• Back to MT, where Gpa B took us for a boat ride
  
• Two words: “Oh shoot”
  
• Joel disgused himself as a giraffe
  
• Pumkin patch pillaging galore
  
  

Last, but certainly not least, we learned that Joel will soon have a little brother! That’s right, we’re expecting again, and another boy at that. While of course we would have been overjoyed either way I must admit I’m glad that we’re having another boy. I know what a blessing it was for me to grow up with brothers and am glad that Joel will have the same opportunity. As for child the third… well we’re just taking it one step at a time.