Thanks to the Family -

Despite the cold weather (-15 going to racquetball in the morning this week) there are a lot of wonderful things that warm my heart this week. It all has to do with the family.

Mom is working three jobs, plus managing the home and me. So with all that spare time on her hands she may be heading off to Peru next month to do some humanitarian work with the native tribes in the Peruvian Amazon basin. Got to love her energy.

Celeste has pulled together a fantastic family picture for this year’s card. The whole thing looks great and Celeste and Brad have really worked hard to help us all look so good. Of course she had great material to work with.

Bryce has been captured by the spirit of Elijah and is going to town in ways I never thought of related to genealogy. He has uncovered about 400 ancestors and many will need their temple work done for them. He even found a Marcia Barrand (I had to gently tell him that Marcia was my grandmother and the all you kids have met her on our travels back and forth from Utah to New Jersey. Way to go Bryce, thanks for bringing the family together.

It is so nice to have Danica and Dave so close, they help us keep our sanity, while she battles three sick kids. She has us over for dinner and between them there is always some fun project they’re working on. Danica has spent hours copying the slides from years ago and is trying to put together each kid’s pictures. Thanks for saving our memories.

With Preston and Tiana, Preston has been helping mom with her web site development. I used to think it would be good to have a plumber or carpenter in the family but it is proving best to have computer savvy and web familiar kids to deal with the age of Twitter.

Don is upholding our family and country as he serves in Afghanistan. I haven’t heard much from him except he likes boot socks and mechanics gloves to protect against the cold weather. I hope no news is good news.

A lot of great things are happening in Austin’s life. His internship is turning into a wonderful experience. They have started giving him so real meaty projects and he has impressed the boss with his attitude and hard work. He has also signed up for a demanding schedule next semester including Biology, Calculus, and Programming. He has also landed a teaching position at BYU – a diving class. I’m sure he is hoping for a pool deck full of attractive coeds so he can help them land a reverse twist. He said he would offer the cutest ones extra attention. He was also invited to join an apartment of social return missionaries from Toronto West. I hear they aren’t gamers so that makes me ever so happy. With all that going on in Austin’s life I will forgive his not keeping up his blog. He isn’t even coming home for Christmas because he wants to stay in Provo and learn a new programming language. Life is good

Thanks to all of you for being such an incredible family.