Dear Family and Friends:

Welcome once again to the annual Lacey-family-holiday-letter-on-a-website experience.  Based on the overwhelmingly positive feedback received subsequent to last year’s inaugural effort (thanks, Mom), we determined again this year to eschew the tradition, elegance, warmth, and personal touch communicated through a classic Christmas card, and instead, to once again perpetrate our holiday cheer solely through bit and browser.  To those of you still taking the time to purchase, personalize, and post traditional holiday cards, we tip our Santa hat.  There is little that warms the heart like a mantle crowded with the holiday greetings of kith and kin.  One day, when our children all have evolved from small, destructive, cookie-crazed monkeys with poor judgment into larger, slower, more expensive and emotionally-complex monkeys with poor judgment, we hope to rejoin you.   

As always, we would like to take a moment at the outset to give thanks for you, our remarkable friends, classmates, colleagues, and cohorts, who celebrate with us when we find success, support us when we struggle, and daily share with us your own achievements and challenges, as well as those of your family and friends.  We believe that it is this sharing and support that keeps our relationships strong, and that strong relationships are foundational to a happy, fulfilled life.

With regard to 2013, we are blessed to report that throughout the year, our family remained in good spirits and in good health.

As you may recall from last year’s letter, for Aaron, 2012 was a year dedicated to physical fitness, with hours upon hours spent in our playroom/home gym hopelessly mimicking extraordinarily fit television trainers.  Ultimately, it was generally agreed that a more productive approach to busting his sleeves would be to simply buy very small shirts.  Accordingly, this year, he turned his attention to expanding his mind.  Intellectual pursuits have included the reading of the Percy Jackson and the Olympians book series, the reading, re-reading, and re-re-reading of three books featuring Clifford the Big Red Dog, and of the viewing of various films based either on comic books or young adult novels and involving vampires, werewolves, dragons, costumed superheroes, or a dystopian society.  In contrast, television viewing has been restricted largely to programs based either on comic books or young adult novels and involving vampires, werewolves, dragons, costumed superheroes, or a dystopian society.

Andrea continues to dedicate the balance of her time to protecting, nourishing, and loving our three, beautiful backyard flower beds, her iPhone, and her iPad.  She also spends a fair amount of time with our children.  All kidding aside, she is constantly educating them and preparing them for each new stage of their development.  For example, earlier this year when she discovered that August had poured an entire glass of water into her Apple Powerbook, she helped him to rapidly and colorfully expand his vocabulary, and also to explore the upper limits of his foot speed and cardiovascular endurance.  With August now in Kindergarten and the twins in pre-school three days a week, Andrea is getting a much-deserved opportunity to shower, wear clothing that is free of crust and goo, and to hold adult conversations with someone other than Aaron, about something other than vampires, werewolves, dragons, costumed superheroes, or dystopian societies.         

August, as noted above, made the big transition to Kindergarten this year.  For the first couple of weeks, he would hold Dad’s hand all the way to the classroom, and stand at the door until Dad was out of sight.  Then, for a while, Dad would just walk him to the front door.  And eventually, he began asking to just be dropped at the curb.  At this point, Mom and Dad also made the big transition to Kindergarten.  He is a great kid.  Bright, sweet, curious, and obsessed with Angry Birds, Star Wars, Angry Birds Star Wars, and Legos Star Wars.  If Legos ever signs a deal with Angry Birds and Star Wars to create Legos Angry Birds Star Wars, his head might explode.  We are blessed.

Ella and Truman also have had a great year.  Truly, it is an incredible thing to watch children mature through the first two or three years of their life, where each year brings such radical transformations.  You begin with the smallest, little ball of helpless life, and end with a three year old sitting on the top shelf of your refrigerator dumping out anything in a jar.  Both kids are crazy cute, clever, and destructive, and we know we are blessed to have (and to survive) every minute we can get with them.  As an aside, for those of you who have never potty-trained two children simultaneously, it is a surreal experience.  And by that I mean there surreally is a lot of poop involved.

Last, but not least, we give a nod to our beloved Bix, who among us remains the most distinguished and, at least among the men in the house, the most handsome.  By all accounts, he is doing very, very well.

We thank you for taking the time to read our little letter, and hope this holiday season that you and yours are happy, healthy, and spending time with those you love.

Warmest regards,

The Laceys