December 2009 Update

With the recent move, the kids were not able to get involved in any sports teams yet. Allison has taken up an interest in gymnastics. So she may be getting involved in that. Her sisters have expressed the same interest, no doubt due to Allison’s influence. They do get involved in plenty of recess sports at their elementary school. It is evident in the number of grass stains and holes in the knees of their pants. The older boys are very involved in boy scouts and cub scouts. Allison is involved in the Activity Days program at church. Jacob has earned his first class scout rank, with enough merit badges to qualify him for the star scout rank. He actually has almost enough for the life scout rank, but he must fulfill some service project and leadership requirements first. Kevin has earned his wolf rank in cub scouts and is working on the bear rank. The smaller children do a lot of playing.

The children are all doing well in school. From parent teacher conference, we learned that Allison, Kevin and Rachel are favorites of their school teachers. Rachel may be an elementary school teacher in the making. Jacob and Melissa also are doing very well. Melissa likes to stay a little late in her kindergarten class to help clean up, even though she is not assigned or asked to do so. Kyle is still full of energy. He still loves to wear baseball caps and likes trains, sticks, toy guns, toy cars, and whatever little boys can get into. Katelyn is beginning to talk. Some of what she says is understandable, most of it is not. No matter to her, she will go on telling you what she wants in her gibberish.

There were two major events this year in our family, beside the move. Jacob was ordained a deacon by his dad last month. So we now have two people with the priesthood in our family. He now passes the sacrament to the congregation and helps collect fast offerings to help the needed, which he did this past Sunday. The other is that we found that we are expecting our eighth child. The baby is due in March. There is more to this story. During one of the ultrasound visits, we found that the baby had a serious irregularity in her heart beat (we also found out that she is a girl). Anyhow, we had a somber conversation with the doctor about some fetal monitoring at the hospital, decisions that might need to be made about a C-section delivery as much as 3 ½ months early so surgery can be done on the heart, potentially losing the baby etc. We scheduled a follow up for two weeks later. In the mean time, we fasted and prayed as a family—Holly’s family joined us. Then Brett and Holly’s dad gave her a blessing to heal the baby. During the next appointment, the heart was found to be performing normally. This was also true during the last appointment a week or so ago. The Lord has healed our baby and we are grateful.