Christmas Letter 2001

Warm Holiday Greetings from the Reyersons!

Well, let’s get right to it. The year 2001 “by the numbers”:

$7.50: Amount paid out to Collin and Adrienne (50 cents at a time) by the tooth fairy this calendar year. The pictures enclosed pretty much tell the story for the year: both kids were spitting out teeth faster than Bob Hope one-liners. I am told my many. however, that the tooth fairy has been mysteriously shorting our kids, as the neighbor girl across the street has been getting a whole dollar for one of her teeth. Therefore Connie and I plan to renegotiate a deal with the tooth fairy so our kids can get a dollar too...only fair, right?

850: Miles covered on the 2001 Reyerson Family Summer Vacation. We made several stops on our 8 day, 7 night odyssey criss-crossing Iowa, starting with Connie’s 15 year class reunion. We dropped the kids off with Connie’s folks in Webster and rented a hotel room in Williamsburg, up the road about 25 miles, for 3 nights. Then the 4 of us were off to Ida Grove in western Iowa, for a couple days to visit some friends who’d had their first baby a few months earlier. After successfully peeling Adrienne off the baby (a bit of a chore), it was off to Oelwein to spend a couple days with my folks in their new house. They moved into Oelwein after 32 years in the house I grew up in north of town. The new house is a bit smaller, but plenty big for all of us when we come to visit, and it’s as cozy as it can be, just perfect for Mom and Dad. Weather permitting, we plan to be in Oelwein for the first Christmas at 518 East Charles.

1,000,000: Approximate number of new blades of grass in our front yard. Much to the consternation of Collin, who argues that we have done an egregious disservice to the St. Louis Park squirrel and chipmunk community, we took a big soft maple tree out of our front yard this last winter. It had grown too big, too close to the house, and it just killed our grass year after year. After the snow melted, we put down some black dirt and reseeded the entire front yard. Sounds like a bigger job than it really is...our front yard measures 40’ X 50’, or roughly the same dimensions as Bill Gates’ master bedroom. Still, the yard has never looked better, and we really are proud of it.

3: Brand new dents in my car. A few months after we took the soft maple down, pieces of our hard maple, also in the front yard but closer to the street, mysteriously started falling to the ground. One fell right on my ‘91 Pontiac, smashing the windshield and totaling the car. The insurance guy said he’d either give me $2900 and take the car or give me $2500 and let me keep the car. Hmmm. I landed on option B like a sumo wrestler, pounded out the aforementioned dents, dropped in a new windshield, and put about $2000 in the bank. I mean when you drive to work in the dark and drive home in the dark, who cares what the car looks like?

35: Number of hours per week Connie has to herself when the kids are in school. Connie is still the classic “stay at home mom”. She really enjoys it and it’s what we both truly want for the kids. And while she’s not working outside the home, Connie’s been working to get a small “cookies, bars and brownies” business off the ground right out of the house here. She loves to bake, and is always looking for an excuse to do it (half of what she bakes goes to the office with me and is devoured by my co-workers), so she might as well make a few bucks doing it I guess. Business cards currently in design will read “Cookies by Connie”, a simple but snappy name coined by the kids’ preschool teacher a while back.

Well, that pretty much wraps it up. If you’re ever in town, be sure to stop by. Our house is just a few minutes from downtown Minneapolis and we love to have visitors. We hope this letter finds you in good health and good spirits, and we wish you all a happy and safe holiday.

Warren, Connie, Collin and Adrienne