Children
At the start of the year, we discovered that my wife was pregnant with our second child, but she unfortunately lost the pregnancy making this our second early-term miscarriage. Oddly enough, it didn’t affect us as badly this time and we were able to bounce back quite quickly. We put this down to the pregnancy being so unexpected and the fact we hadn’t had time to get used to the idea yet. As we did the last time, we bought a plant and a pot, and buried what there was – this way we have a living reminder.
A few months later, we got pregnant again (albeit a bit more planned). This time, we successfully passed the first trimester and relevant tests, and we’re now expecting a healthy baby boy around the end of March.
In other child news, 2008 was year number two for our little girl Isla and she took to it with a vengeance. She’s running around with nearly a full set of teeth and a good vocabulary (including some unfortunate additions overheard from parents). In a couple of weeks, she enters the “terrible twos”… we’re already getting advance previews and are expecting drama, action, and hopefully some comedy. It’ll certainly be interesting to see her reaction to a little brother.
House
With the increase in family, we needed to get a bigger house as we were already bursting at the seams in our 90 sq.m three-bedroom. The plan was to get our house on the market, get a sale with a reasonable settlement period, and then look for a new house. This way, we would know our exact budget.
However, dreams don’t always match reality. We sold relatively quickly and had a four-week settlement period, but were unable to find a place that fit our requirements. This meant we moved out of our house and shifted in with my in-laws. As they lived about 50km in another town, I ended up referring to this as my “homeless exile” – this ended up being seven weeks.
We did end up finding a new house, after some extensive searching, and we are very happy. We have 150sq.m to play with plus a large double garage and a basement workshop.
Family
It seems that, out of my family, my brother had the most full-on year (although that may just be by comparison).
He spent about seven months as part of the NZ Army reconstruction deployment in Afghanistan, fortunately in a relatively safe region. He sent us regular newsletter updates and painted a picture of a very different culture and a country which had suffered a lot under the Taliban. It was interesting to see how the reconstruction efforts were progressing and how lives were gradually improving over there (e.g. can you imagine the impact of the training of midwives on a village?). In the end, it was a mostly uneventful tour and we were glad to see his safe return.
Not long after his return, we were surprised and somewhat shocked to find that he had severely constricted arteries and required a quadruple bypass (bearing in mind that this is a 46 year old here). Thankfully, he was able to be processed quickly and he is now home recovering slowly. As a bonus, his return to fitness plan seems to somehow involve my participation (oh joy!).
Personally…
I had a bit of a technology boom during the year (which is likely not to be repeated until Haley’s Comet returns), which resulted in my becoming the oh-so-happy owner of a PS3, PSP, iPhone, and LCD HD iDTV. Of these, the iPhone has become a fairly permanent fixture and it is rare to see me without it in my hand.
2008 is also the year in which I discovered social networking, which I embraced wholeheartedly. I’ve participated in site betas, tested others to see if they met my requirements, and generally had a good play. As the year drew to a close, I think I established a solid toolset but will always keep an eye out to discover others. As a side, I’ve found Twitter to be highly addictive (you evil buggers!).
Over the last couple of years, I went from buying books to borrowing from the library (due to costs). In 2008, I felt that I’d exhausted my interests in the written fiction sections and started borrowing the comic trade paperbacks. I hadn’t read comics for a number of years, and my interest was quickly renewed. I have caught up on some old favourites and discovered some great new works. To this end, graphic fiction has now become my primary reading material and I eagerly await each release day to see how my stories will unfold.
With my iPhone purchase and the lengthy commutes I endured, my interest in music was also reawakened. I have not only dug through my iTunes archives to rediscover old classics, but have been introduced to new genres which have rapidly become solid favourites (post-rock for the win!). This has been helped by last.fm and the excellent ways to discover new music through it.
In closing, my family and I have certainly had some significant highs and lows, some of which do make your pause to take stock of one’s life. We look forward to this year and can only hope that the good continues to outweigh the bad.
