Rusek Writings: Christmas 2021

I wasn't anticipating the second year into the pandemic to be as busy as it was, but 2021 has been very full! It's been a year with some sad losses but many happy moments too. Abigail is the tiny human that keeps us on our toes and makes us smile everyday. 2021 was pretty much everything Abigail every day.

Our Abbie

Abigail has made an incredible transformation this year. At the beginning of the year she was still a newborn, just learning how to smile and sometimes giggle. She was a calm, content baby who just needed to be held all the time. Now she's a boisterous and demanding toddler. I don't know who coined the phrase, "soft, pitter patter of baby feet" but they obviously never knew Abigail, whose favorite thing in the whole world is to stomp, much to Kepler's dismay. She shows off her ten little chompers (soon to be 12!) not just by flashing a grin, but also by ripping her teeth into your leg. She not only walks-- she runs! And she can grab things off the table, she can climb on top of the couches and chairs, and if you turn around for a second she's vanished into another room and probably something is in her mouth that isn't supposed to be. We've found toys in the dishwasher, a sippy cup in the toilet, and the TV remote has been missing for a few weeks. We can only hope she didn't hide it in the garbage!

She absolutely adores the pets and especially Anyong. He is our fluffy rescue dog who still thinks he's a puppy and he tolerates her really well. If she sees him across a room she will race over to him with her arms extended, ready to tackle-hug him to the ground. If he licks her in the face she will giggle. She sometimes leaves with a fistful of his fur in her clutches and he never seems to mind. They have an agreement that serves their friendship very well. Abigail will give generous portions of human food to the dogs in exchange for handfuls of dogfood when mom and dad aren't looking. One time Anyong brought in a dead mole for Abigail-- I made Korben get rid of it after I nearly stepped on what I thought was a stuffed animal. Her favorite word is "dog" and recently has started saying, "Dog, woo woo!" It's just about the cutest thing in the world.

Abbie Lou Who, The Grinchy Daddy, and Anyong

One of the first ways Abigail attempted communication was by making a little piggy noise whenever she was hungry or thirsty. It was a lot of fun to walk past berry bushes this summer while Abigail made her little grunts! She also makes what Korben calls her "sonar" when she needs your attention. She can say "Daddy!" although sometimes it comes out "Daddin" or "DogDog." She has screamed, "MAMAMAMAMAMAMA!" in her carseat when she's angry, otherwise she just refers to me as "Daddy!" When she's excitable and laughing she practically hyperventilates. This causes everyone around her to make sure she's not choking, but a silly smile lets you know pretty quickly that she just has a ridiculous laugh.

She knows what "no" means. She will even walk over to the dog food bowls and wag her finger. Apparently I've wagged my finger at her a few times when I've said no and Abbie quickly picked up on that. Of course, it doesn't make her actually stay away from temptation. She's already giving us a taste of the toddler tantrums to come as she has figured out she can throw herself on the floor and scream! If that doesn't work she will also try to flash a smile at you as you sternly tell her no, hoping to charm her way out. She's got quite the mischievous smile, much like my sister Joni's smile when she was a baby. Time will tell what Abigail will bring us, but we may have a healthy heaping of trouble coming our way!

2021: The Year of Travel, Surprisingly

Last Christmas my family came up to stay at our place and visited little Abigail, only two months old. Abigail mostly napped and scared Grandma with every bowel movement. (You poop on Grandma one time and she never forgets it!) At the end of January we flew to Texas and visited Grandma and Grandpa at their place. It was Abigail's first airplane trip and she did a great job!

In February our home got about 5 inches of beautiful snow! We zipped Abigail up in a baby snowsuit and trekked out in the beautiful and cold wonderland. We had taken Abigail to see snow before, up in the mountains. She giggled whenever our snowshoes crunched. This time she was a little less impressed with the snow, but she enjoyed watching the dogs run around. In February we also took her to church for the first time where she captured the hearts of many church members who had been impatiently waiting to meet her.

Just a little light reading with Daddy

In March we drove down to meet up with my cousin, her husband, and two kids. They live in Vancouver, WA, but we decided to meet halfway. Her youngest, Isaiah, is only a month and a half older than Abigail. He squealed with delight to meet Abbie and she stuck her lip out and started crying! They've met a few times after this initial meet and have decided that they like each other, unless one of them grabs a toy from the other! My parents also came up to visit during my dad's Spring Break. For some reason they are enamored with their only grandchild. They tell me that she is a princess and deserves whatever she asks for. I sure don't remember them using that line when I was little! I'm still waiting for my pet raccoon...

She's got them wrapped around her finger!

In April, Korben's mom came to visit and to shower her granddaughter with attention. We went to Leavenworth and enjoyed the scenery and sunshine and also went to the Tulip Festival in Skagit Valley. By this point Abigail was a pro at sitting up and loved to see what was going on around her. She was also eating solids in her high chair and GamGam enjoyed feeding her different colors of mushy baby food. We were in the middle of replacing the floors in our master bedroom and living room and had also tossed out our couches (Brewster, my Siamese, had been marking them). I repainted our master bedroom and Korben put up new baseboards and was finishing the master closet. It's pretty slow and complicated to do major home renovations with a baby in the house. I don't recommend it. But if you own a cat who doesn't adapt well to having a new baby in the house and you find everything saturated in cat pee, well, you might not have a better choice! Brewster, by the way, is behaving better now that he's on antidepressants. Yes, our cat is on antidepressants. But he still likes to remind us occasionally that he thinks (pees) outside the box. Luckily our new hard wood floor is a lot easier to clean than the old green carpet that came with the house.

Our good friends, Mitch and Leslie, came to visit us in May with their two cute kiddos: Camille, who tried to stay up late when we were playing games and thought if she put her daddy's coat over her head she would be invisible to us, and Liam, whose favorite word is every toddler's favorite word-- NO! We had a lot of fun showing them the sights of Washington (they are from Texas), and we took a road trip to Spokane to see one of Leslie's childhood friends who lives there.

Mitch and Leslie barely survived this hike- sorry guys!

The summer was packed with more trips. Abigail and I actually took a few trips on our own while Korben stayed home and worked. But we did all take a big trip to Florida so that Abigail could finally meet most of Korben's family in person! She enjoyed meeting her older cousins, Justyna and Sebastian, and we were there to celebrate Cousin Sebastian's 10th birthday which hardly seems possible since he was just a baby not too long ago!

Abigail was enamored with Cousin Justyna

We expected cooler weather when we returned home, but Washington was hit with an unprecedented heat wave. Western Washington is a place where few homes have air conditioning and generally speaking people are most comfortable in the 60-70 degree weather. Once it climbs up to 80 degrees people begin to complain. 90 degrees is miserable for the PNW. We had three days of weather around 110 degrees and nearly a full week of weather above 100 degrees! For the worst three days we stayed in a hotel. We were lucky to find a place, and we mainly did it so that Abigail could sleep at night. But the other nights we suffered at home, sweltering. Our master bathroom has a fairly large tub. We decided that since we have no swimming pool the tub might be the next best thing. We all felt instant relief on immersing ourselves in the cool water. That's when Abigail smiled and we heard some rumbling and bubbles-- she had decided to multitask and relieve herself in other ways! Pooping in the tub has become a sort of hobby of hers since then, and as a result cleaning the bathtub has become a rather unenjoyable hobby of my own.

Abigail tried out a kiddie pool at Grandma and Grandpa's

My family came up for a visit in the summer, missing the heat wave. We went over to the Olympic Peninsula. The highlight of the trip was going through a drive through animal safari type of park. Abigail was sitting on Korben's lap, intensely interested in all of the animals who came right up to the windows and would stick their heads right inside the van, eliciting screaming from my mom and sister who couldn't roll up their windows because somebody (me) had turned on the window locks. A buffalo came up to Korben's rolled down window and belched loudly right into Abigail's face- she immediately started crying and even Korben looked as though the smell would make him cry! Later this year we went to Northwest Trek for my birthday. Northwest Trek is also a drive through animal park. This time there were no buffalo that came to the windows with stinky burps. Abigail loved watching the animals! Every time she spotted one she would point at it and say, "Dog! Dog!"

My sister Joni went back to school to get her Master's in Education which she completed. She got hired at a school close to her home in Southern California and I decided to take Abigail with me to help her set up her classroom before the year began. I've been a stay-at-home mom and while I've not been aching to get back to the classroom, I did find it a lot of fun to help my sister out as she began her new year (and then leave!). There were odds and ends in her classroom that had been in there for 30 years. I made a huge mess as I began sorting through her cabinets and shelves and I think Joni was a bit nervous for a minute that I was actually going to leave her classroom an even bigger mess than I found it! We worked from sunrise to sunset most days and Abigail was a trooper. I brought her travel bassinet and she would take naps in the room next to Joni's, surprising staff who would exclaim, "There's a baby in here!" When she was awake she would "help" by pulling more things off the shelves. In a week's time we transformed the classroom from a complete mess into a cute, organized space for my sister to start her first year. She has been having a blast and I'm glad I was able to be there to help get her ready.

Okay, it wasn't ALL work... Abigail takes a pool day with Auntie Joni and Uncle Greg

In September Korben's family planned a big trip to Shenandoah National Park in Virginia. We flew to Pennsylvania to stay with Korben's sister, Ann, and her family before we would all head out to Virginia. Abigail met Ann's children and finally met all of her cousins (Addilyn and Aiden)! Aiden is about 5 months older than Abigail and he was walking all over the place which must have planted the seeds in Abigail's mind because immediately after we came back from the trip she decided she was going to start walking. Shenandoah was absolutely beautiful. We went on hikes, we went to the beautiful Luray Caverns, and everybody except me went to Monticello which I heard had some amazing history. Aiden had decided to share a cold with me so I took advantage of being baby-free and napped the day away!

At the end of September, Korben's grandmother took a turn for the worse and we flew out to Florida to visit her in hospice care. We had seen her in the summer and she had seemed peppy and energetic. She had fallen and broken her hip. She was a fighter to the end, but on September 30th, just 2 months shy of her 95th birthday, she passed away. She was a feisty lady and she always spoke her mind. I remember she snapped at Korben once for turning off the television because she was watching her program (she had been sleeping). She often slept through movies and would wake up at the end and say, "That was the stupidest movie I ever saw!" She also thought my food allergies were ridiculous and there was one Christmas I spent sick from eating gluten at her home-- I'll never know if she poisoned me on purpose or not! She had been a teacher briefly in her younger years and she would often share teaching stories with me. She enjoyed traveling, hosting parties, playing bridge, and visits from her family and friends. She lived on the beach and was extremely independent. She was such a lively force of nature that it's hard to believe that she really is gone. We are glad we got to see her in hospice, but especially glad we got to see her earlier. She told Abigail that she was the most beautiful baby in the world. On that we can all agree!

Ann McKinley Abercrombie (Harman)

Shortly after Grandma Ann's passing, Korben's family gathered together to celebrate a milestone birthday for Korben's mom. Sometimes it is nice to have reasons to be grateful and happy even amid very sad times. We had a cowboy themed birthday celebration (Aneta, Korben's sister-in-law, really outdid herself with the costumes and the cake!) and stayed all together in an Airbnb near Orlando. Abigail looks adorable as a little cowgirl. The neighborhood had a community waterpark which was really fun. Abigail decided she really enjoyed the lazy river so we spent a lot of time doing that. GamGam seemed to be thoroughly enjoying having all 5 of her grandchildren in one place and it was a really nice time.

We flew directly from Florida to Texas to celebrate Abigail's first birthday at my parent's house. We had a pumpkin theme for her and she didn't seem to understand what all the fuss was about, but she's not one to mind being the center of attention. My parents' dogs were terrified of the birthday balloons at first, but eventually had a change of heart and began chasing and bopping them with their noses to keep them in the air. In addition to the new toys Abigail received, my parents dug out a few of my old toys in the attic and it was fun watching Abigail play with them.

For Thanksgiving, Korben's mom and stepdad came to visit and we had a very nice time. Korben's mom stayed a little longer and we were able to drive up to the mountains and play in the beautiful snow. We'll be spending Christmas in the Florida Keys with my family and then driving up to spend New Year's with Korben's family in Northern Florida.

And Other News

Abigail's first Washington beach experience!

This year we were pretty active in our church despite waiting until Abigail was four months old to go back in person. We had Abigail's dedication when she was 9 months old and my family and Korben's mom were able to be here to see it. The pastor preached an entire sermon about the name Abigail! I also preached this year-- I'm not sure how it happened but I preached a total of 3 times! In 2019 I had preached one sermon and gave birth to Abigail exactly a year later. It's a little worrisome to think of the precedent now that I've preached 3 sermons this year!*

We upgraded our ride from the cramped Ford Focus I got right before we moved out to Washington to a sweet Toyota Sienna minivan! Yep, now everyone who sees us on the road knows: we are parents. Honestly, we love it: the extra space, the fact that it's AWD and drives great in the snow, the ability to haul Korben's Lowe's purchases for whatever house project he's working on. It's been an awesome vehicle for us.

Korben's first Father's Day

Korben's work at Google has been going really well. He's been working at home for all of this year and may be going back into the office soon next year. I've personally enjoyed having him home. Abigail climbs upstairs to his office to say hello and pushes buttons on his adjustable desk to change the height while he's working. Working from home means that Korben has been here to see all of Abigail's milestones and has no commute time. If he had been working in the office this year he would have only had about an hour in the evening (oftentimes Abigail's fussiest time) to spend with her. He's definitely enjoyed having time at home, but there is a part of him that would like to get back to the office, especially as Abigail gets more skilled at becoming a distraction (a cute one, though!).

Abbie and I on a girl's trip to see my friend Katrina, my roommate from Honduras

I've been enjoying staying at home with Abigail, but we'll see how that changes when Korben does finally start going back into the office. Abigail is currently transitioning to one nap, but teething has been complicating the adjustment. The house will always be a complete disaster with Abigail in it-- she can make three messes for every one mess I clean up-- but it's a happy home. While we have had a few sad losses this year, including a very recent miscarriage, overall we have been counting our blessings, and Abigail has been the biggest blessing of all. She's quite the handful and keeps me busy, but she's the sweetest and cutest and silliest little girl around and I wouldn't have it any other way.