Pattinson Times, Christmas 2019

Greetings to all of our friends and family around the world.  We hope that 2019 brought you love and happiness and hope for 2020.

We've had the good bad and the ugly this year.  So lets start with the good in the hopes that we run out of battery life before the bad comes up.

Lily has grown up all of a sudden.  She's putting out honour roll grades - without her parents help - working at her favourite restaurant 3 nights a week.  She continues in athletics and has taken up triathlons - well just one so far but she took a bronze in the under 19 crowd in Guelph last summer - and had a blast.  This is somewhat encouraged by her friend-boy whose olympic cyclist mother trains the two of them.  She is currently swimming with her high school swim team and hopes again to make it to the provincial competitions.  Her schedule is as busy as ours, and it seems like we don't see her much but she assures us that she is never leaving home...ever.

Grace continues to be a fascination by being good at everything, including pushing all of her sisters buttons.  The little devil made it to nationals in diving last summer and was then plucked by Dive Canada to be on the Junior Canadian Development Team.  So besides training 12 hours a week, she is invited to Montreal a few times a year for training with her 15 peers and Olympic Diving Coaches.  Academics seem to come easy to her and she has a wild little creative streak and a naughty sense of humour as well.  She seems to be more interested in architecture these days having discovered the Home and Garden channel.  We're not sure which
direction she'll head in, but it will be fun to watch.
 

Tony and I relocated the practice this year and are really enjoying working with a partner and his staff.  The facility is beautiful, the people are great and the work is...hard.  But sometimes when you put the old dogs with the young pups, the whole pack is energized.  Retirement doesn't seem to be in the cards yet - after all if the queen isn't retired at 95, who are we to complain?

We had our usual wonderful Orlando trip with the kids this year but then Tony and I went to San Diego for a conference this summer.  California has always been on my bucket list and the conference took place on Coronado - a ferry ride away from San Diego.  Every expectation I ever had about California was fulfilled by Coronado - it is breathtaking and there is a beach for dogs - which is now a requirement for any travel destination that I consider!  Especially with my dogs - who are the best dogs ever!  Except when they murder squirrels.

We are taking 3 weeks off over Christmas this year so that Tony can have his long procrastinated surgery to repair his diverticulitis.  I will be his "nurse" and I have been practicing all of my skills including advanced cardiac life support.  He may decide to change his sick leave plans to "I'm going back to work as soon as my anesthesia wears off".  That's the ugly.  The silver lining is that Mandy and Robin are flying out from Vancouver to spend Christmas with us - something we are all really excited about because we are secretly plotting to convert them to Windsorites!



We've lost some people we really cared about this year -  a beloved neighbour Ken, a gym friend Diane, and a very special family friend, Barry.  They all passed despite having so much more to give and enjoy in life.  We move forward into 2020 feeling fortunate to have our time on this earth and pledging to bring our memories of them with us.

So have a little eggnog, find a little mistletoe, reminisce about 2019, plan for 2020....
Have a wonderful holiday.

Love Tony, Mary, Lily, Grace, Sophie and Ollie