A funny thing happened on the way to the your mailbox...

Skip to the last paragraph of this post to read the short version!

Hans has been sending out some version of a holiday letter/card since 1994. I did it when my oldest kids (Katie and Carter) were young but stopped when their father and I divorced - a consequence of my changing self identity combined with my shame around marriage, divorce, and all that beautiful life messy stuff perhaps. Over the last 4 holiday seasons I have watched Hans get his holiday card out despite everything else going on his life. Granted - sometimes it didn't go out until early in the next year - Last year I think it might have been spring before it arrived in your mail boxes. But still, the guy did it every year! So this year, given the official union of our family I decided to jump back on the wagon and become a part of the holiday card adventure. I was optimistic that we could get the card out by the New Year. Since this new holiday card would also be going to my contacts it was going to need pictures of my kids - which would be confusing for Hans contacts. I didn't worry about my contacts getting confused because I figured, if they have followed my life at all they were already confused. Anyway...In order to address possible confusions we decided to include introductions to both our kids with brief updates about their lives. I logged into my Canva account and created a card which I was pretty proud of. My heart swelled seeing our family and thinking of others celebrating the expansion of personalities and future family adventure possibilities. Hans ordered the cards. I searched for addresses and sent them to Hans to merge into his data base. The cards arrived in the mail more than a week before Christmas. We put on the Christmas music and excitedly started stuffing and stamping. We were doing it! AND some people were going to get our cards not before the New Year, but before Christmas. WOW! We were so proud of ourselves. Until...

But first, you've got to know, we were pretty tired. That must explain what happened. In the last month we:

• Flew a dog for my sister back from Hawaii to Colorado.

• Picked up our new (to us) van (sight unseen) in New Hampshire

• Drove to New Paltz, NY where we visited Mari

• Drove to Maryland, where we visited Hans' family

• Drove to Red River Gorge, Kentucky where we inspected our RRG land and soon to exist cabins (one is Carters). Given what we discovered we rented an earth mover and Hans dug two new driveways

• Flew to AustinTexas where Hans led some classes, gave a slideshow at a local crag event and taught a clinic.

• Drove to San Antonio for another slide show presentation.

• Flew to Cincinnati

• Drove to Wellington, Colorado (survived a scary windy night during which a tornado destroyed structures in a town we visited the next morning.

• Took care of my mom for a day so my sister could have a night away.

• Flew home (after being gone for 2 months)

Yes we did ALL that between November 14 and December 19!

So we were a little tired and maybe disoriented - well I was at least.

So we stuffed our beautiful holiday cards, addressed them, stamped them, and even mailed some of them. At one point I noticed the same quote was at the bottom of the inset page as the cover page. Odd. I figured the printer had made a mistake and printed it on the bottom of each "side one". I didn't think further. I didn't question further. I didn't even look further. My only explanation is disorientation from the last month and excitement to get our cards out to you. At the end of the day yesterday as we stuffed a few more envelopes before going to bed I suddenly noticed what I was stuffing. The reason the quote was the same on the inside of the card as the outside was because the inside of the card was a duplicate of the outside. Half our card design was missing! Oops. We don't know if this was a printer error or an oversight on our end. It doesn't matter. It's done. Some of you reading this may have gotten one of those cards. Maybe you noticed. Maybe you didn't. Maybe you were confused by all these new people on Hans' card. Maybe you weren't. Now you know what happened I can give you the short version of this story...

The picture attached to this blog post is what was SUPPOSED to be on the inside of our holiday card. It introduces you to all 5 kids now in our combined HansBet family. We hope to share more about them and us with you in other posts. Thanks for visiting our new HansBet blog!