US Land Log 1, Year 2: Rockin’ in the New Year
Date: Friday, January 11, 2008
Weather: Temps in the 50’s-Much Warmer Than Normal
Location: East Falmouth, Massachusetts

Being a grandparent gives “rockin’ in the New Year” a whole new meaning. At 11:40 PM on New Year’s Eve Judy was rocking her one and only grandson to sleep while watching the Dick Clark “Rockin’ in the New Year” show. In fact, we spend a lot of time these days rocking Sam instead of rockin’ and rollin’ on the high seas, and we are loving it. We have been home for more than a month now – and what a month it has been. First we were off to North Carolina for Judy’s sister’s 50th wedding anniversary
celebration. The entire extended family was there, including our son and his wife (Justin and Jo) from New Mexico, and our daughter and her husband (Heather and Jed) with our grandson Sam. It was a terrific, but short three days with family. We then returned to East Falmouth on the Cape here in Massachusetts where we will be living with Heather, Jed, and Sam until we return to Australia in April.

Once back at Heather and Jed’s, we immediately set to work helping to fix up their new home (making drapes, rebuilding walls and painting a bedroom, laying flooring, etc.). Of course, all the work has been punctuated by long periods of time playing with, or just watching, grandson Sam. With Christmas coming we had shopping to do, decorations to put up, and preparations to make for travel to Maine where we would all spend Christmas with Jed’s family. This was baby Sam’s first Christmas and all
his grandparents and uncles and aunts on both sides of the family were there. It was a memorable Christmas and it took us all day just to open presents!

After Christmas Justin and Jo accompanied us to our storage unit in Concord where we have all of our “stuff” stored. We spent a couple days going through everything to find what we could sell, what we could give to the Salvation Army, and what we needed to throw away. Having pared down a bit we then went to Justin’s storage units (he had two) in western Massachusetts to empty them out. Some things he packed to take back to New Mexico, some he left for the Salvation Army to pick up, and the remainder
we moved to our now less-full storage unit in Concord. Exhausted by all that, we bid Justin and Jo goodbye and headed back to the Cape to lay the bamboo flooring in Heather and Jed’s bedroom. And Judy, liking this grandmother role so much, has taken over the day-care duties and has become the full-time cook and house cleaner for all of us. Mark is still optimistic about working while home this year. He has two possibilities and hopefully something will come through any day now . . .

We have also managed to do a little research and reading about Indonesia in preparation for our next season of cruising, but right now our attention is on doing all we can to help Heather and Jed survive Sam’s first year. Sam is an incredibly happy baby, but he doesn’t seem to require the same amount of sleep as the rest of us. So we all spend lots of time dreaming up ways to get this baby to sleep, but he is just not interested in our schemes. So we just keep on rockin’.