Saturday, December 22, 2012

Our 2012 Christmas Letter


Dear friends, families and recycling facility employees,

The year 2012 was another fantastic one in the Villarreal household. The highlight was our conscription of yet another recruit into our growing army. Zachary, who was a born a bit larger than expected, made the birthing process interesting. He arrived as a full-grown man, with muttonchops, a full neckbeard, a set of tattoos and a genuine “party in the back” mullet. The pediatrician tells us he’s in the 90th percentile of his “age group.” With “age group” in this case referring not to humans but to archaeological estimations of 5-month-old brontosauruses.

It was also a big year for our other kids. Five-year-old Luke started kindergarten. In less than a semester, he’s truly grown as a gentleman and scholar. He is now able to hum several versions of the Transformers theme song and perform remarkably accurate impressions of Super Mario’s nemesis, Bowser. It’s only a matter of time before Harvard comes calling, offering Luke a scholarship to kidnap Yale’s princess and stand guard over her in its castle.

Emma, meanwhile, is performing with similar excellence in preschool. She has honed her skills of editing and revision to near perfection. Take, for example, her improvement on the nursery rhyme that starts “There was an old lady who swallowed a fly,” to which Emma astutely added the line “I hope she dies.” She has also demonstrated formidable dead language translation skills. In the Christmas carol “Angels We Have Held on High,” the chorus goes “in excelsis Deo,” which Emma explains is actually “And Jesus was his name-o.” Doctors have yet to rule out the possibility that she was actually sired by Weird Al Yankovic.

For us, Phil and Jessica, the year has passed too quickly. To them, it seems like it was July only yesterday. That’s partially because in their minds, that actually is the case, being that the energetic and alert Zachary has not let them sleep a single minute since his arrival, thus making the second half of the year into one long, neverending day.

With that, we wish you a happy 2013. We must go now, before we collapse from exhaustion and our faces hit the keyboard. Oh, wait…. Adjasjfk;ldfjafkjasfjsf’kkkie

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