Christmas Blog 2013

2013 Schwartz Family Christmas Letter

Best wishes for the Christmas season to you and yours!

Once again we welcome the opportunity to bring you up to date with the news in our family and we hope to hear from you too.

The big news in our family has been brewing since January. Laura and Brett presented us with twin granddaughters on September 14! They are doing great and growing like weeds. They recently started smiling and cooing, so our new favourite pastime is talking like idiots to get them to perform their tricks. Celeste goes over most mornings to help out. Caring for two small babies is pretty labour intensive.

That wasn’t the only excitement in our year though. We went to Vancouver to visit Darren’s family in January, March, June, August, and November. In June we took a seven day Alaskan cruise with short Vancouver visits on either end. The cruise was great with beautiful weather and scenery. 

The August visit came after niece Shaela’s wedding. Darren and Sue stopped in on their way home from the Ontario cottage and left the boys with us for several days before we flew home with them. Celeste’s sister Angie and her gang also stayed with us for the week after the wedding. The kids all had a lot of fun together. 

We made a short trip to Bismarck, North Dakota in July for a genealogical convention and enjoyed a Paul McCartney concert at Mosaic Stadium in August. We spent a few weeks at the end of summer finishing Laura and Brett’s basement. Although it has been substantially done for some time, it needed a few finishing touches and we had not yet done the bathroom and shower.

The last big highlight of the year for us ‘Rider fans was winning the Grey Cup at home. It was really special to be in the stands for this win. 

Capacity for the game was 44,710 and it was hard to spot more than a handful who weren't wearing green. There was such a feeling of community. At the end of the game everyone stayed for the presentations. I later heard Glen Suitor on the radio. He said that they had all the top crews from TSN and Bell Media that had done world juniors, Olympics, Stanley Cups, Olympic hockey gold medal games, you name it. They had never seen anything like the community during the previous week, during the game, and after the game. At the end, it was almost like a religious experience or a cult meeting. 

Then, thousands of people descended on the Green Mile on Albert St. It was bedlam. Even Carla was impressed. And No Riot!! It was a once in a lifetime experience, not to win the Grey Cup, but to do it at home with all the home fans worshiping at the altar of Mosaic Stadium.

Laura and Brett spent most of the year getting ready for their new arrivals. They helped finish the basement, moved their office downstairs, and set up the baby room. They also found time to travel to Phoenix for a week in February to holiday with his parents and to Vancouver for a week in late March and early April to visit Darren’s crew. Laura continued to work at Rexall until beginning her maternity leave. Annabelle and Charlotte now keep her pretty busy all day every day. She will be off work until at least late next summer. Brett is again enjoying teaching grades seven and eight at St. Matthew School. He retired from the Lumsden Monarchs this fall, but was invited to play with a high calibre rec hockey team.

 

Darren and Sue continue to make progress on their home renovations. The big jobs are all done. Now it is a matter of finishing all the little details. They tore down and rebuilt the deck during the summer. In late summer they put a new glass roof on the deck and had the house painted. Looks pretty good!   

The boys keep busy with their activities. They both go to playschool, music class, and swimming. They also took skating lessons and Justin went to "bike camp" where he learned to ride a bicycle. They also get out on the beginners' ski slopes.

Simona, their au pair, had to return to Italy in early summer 2012 because her visa was due to expire.  They all completed the pile of paperwork so she could return in February 2013 as an “official” nanny. She is happy to be back and they are glad to have her. She fits in like a member of the family. Darren and Sue have both done some travel for work. Darren spent a couple of weeks in Chile in the spring and will be at his company’s smelter at Trail, BC, for a few weeks before Christmas. Sue has made a few trips to Vancouver Island and the BC interior. For personal travel, the whole family went to the cottage in Ontario for a couple of weeks in July, stopping in at our place on their way home. For Christmas this year, they are driving to San Francisco to visit Sue’s sister and family, but we hope they can get back to Regina early in the New Year.

Carla and Tyler returned to Japan for four weeks beginning in mid-September. An Australian friend from their time teaching English married a Japanese girl and Tyler was the best man. They had a wonderful time renewing old friendships, making new ones, and visiting their old haunts. On the way home they stopped in Vancouver for a few days to visit Darren’s family. Carla still works for CGI Group, supporting their network customers. She is often on call or working overtime on weekends for scheduled outages because customers don’t want any downtime during the week. Tyler still picks up part time work in video production and works for TSN at ‘Rider games. He worked quite a bit setting up for Grey Cup and was on the field for the half time and post-game festivities.

Glenn’s Dad has had a rough year. It started with shingles in May. Of course, being old school, he tried to tough it out before going to see a doctor. By the time he went to a nearby clinic, the doctor diagnosed him with a “bad case” of shingles. For the next couple of months he was in so much pain that he was hardly aware of anything else. A series of large open sores erupted over his shoulder blade in a three inch wide band from his spine to near his armpit. He also developed less severe sores under his armpit and all over his right breast. After the sores healed up the pain gradually decreased from all-consuming to bearable with the help of a morphine-based drug. By October, it looked like he was over the worst of it. The doctor also prescribed another drug for nerve pain. Then he started to have hallucinations. One evening he began to also babble incomprehensibly. Mom called the ambulance and he spent eight days being weaned off the morphine medication and regaining his strength.

After a couple of weeks at home, he went back in the hospital with low blood pressure. He had been on high blood pressure medication before, but now it is so low that he often feels faint when sitting or standing. Mom could not even get it to register on their machine, so she called the ambulance. He was in hospital for another eight days, during which he had a blood pressure spike, causing the hospital doctor to quadruple his high blood pressure medication. When we got him home and saw what had been done we were concerned that we were heading in the wrong direction and monitored his BP very closely. A week later he was hallucinating again and fell getting out of bed at night scraping and bruising his back. Low blood pressure again or just confusion? Back to the hospital next morning (Grey Cup day). There they also took him off the nerve pain drug and his mind soon cleared. They took him completely off of high blood pressure meds and carefully monitored his BP. There doesn’t seem to be anything they can do to prevent his BP from falling when he changes posture, so we will just have to take great care to let it stabilize before he starts moving around. Every time we thought he was coming home they decided they needed another day or two to monitor his blood pressure or tinker with his insulin. He finally came home two weeks after his fall. He is still sore, but we are hopeful that we are on the road to recovery. Shingles pain is an issue again because the drugs that work on it are the ones that gave him the hallucinations.

Glenn’s Mom has been holding up pretty well, but this has all been hard on her too. Her own health is pretty good, although she had a small skin cancer removed.

Celeste’s Mom has also been doing pretty well. She recovered well from her own health scare two years ago. She lives at home with Celeste’s brother, Tom, and gets around pretty well with the aid of her trusty walker. 

Best wishes for the Christmas season and throughout the New Year!

Glenn, Celeste, & Family