Christmas 2016

Highlights of our Christmas season include:

• Skyping Dad
• Skyping Elder Jonas Bush
• Listening to Leslie sing while cleaning up after dinner (the sweetest angelic voice!)
• Working on and presenting the choir Christmas program
• Taking the Sacrament on Christmas
• Joy in kids faces as they gave their gifts
• And received them too!
• Traditions
• mini-Smurfs -- one of Santa's silly and awesome presents to me :)
• Texting Merry Christmas to family and friends as they came into my mind and heart
• Listening to kids enjoying gifts 
• Kids' excitement about new scriptures and cases, Evelyn's songbook, Reuben's brick of Mormon book (a lego book of mormon!)
• Gideon's joy in his bike
• Technology
• Christmas photo 2015 as my phone background
• Christmas caroling with family and with elders
• making cookies with little kids
• Christmas movies
• Sharing Christmas memories on Christmas night around a candle and reading Poppa Keith's 3 levels of Christmas
• Oh ... the snowflake blizzards- our upstairs is filled with hanging snowflakes that fall down so often!
• Virtual Caroling 
• Recording a Christmas song each night and sending it to dad and Elder Jonas Bush

Lucy

This is really hard to type out.  Lucy has passed away.  

She ran out into the street after a dog this morning and was hit by a car.  She died instantly, so there was no suffering. She was not torn up at all, just gone. It all happened so quickly, so suddenly.  We brought her inside, and waited for the younger ones to come home from a playdate.  Dad was able to be on the phone with us.  Mark and Stephanie came over and we had a burial in our garden plot.  We each shared a memory or a moment about her and spent the rest of the afternoon comforting each other and sharing how much we love her.

 

Yellow Senior Belt TaeKwanDo Testing

Whooohoooo!  These guys are awesome!

Book Reports

After much pleading, the kids have been doing book reports for school.  Here is one of Micah's.

Wonder

Wonder is a book of a normal life and a boy of 11 who says he is normal.  But he really isn't.  August's face deformity happened at birth.  August had been homeschooled all his life but when he finally went to public school, everyone got hit.  Some were hit with disgust, others with hate, and some with wonder.  This book is about miracles and threats, friends and enemies, notes and punches, and hate and love.  This book is about wonder.

Happy Sweet Birthday David!