Happy Birthday Carole!!!

Carole has been a blessing to us for so many years. She is always eager to help us whenever we need it. She has been a model of hard work and motherly love to and for me. She is fabulous with Nicholas. I admire how hard she worked to raise her family, the sacrifices she made, and how she endured many difficult challenges. I am particularly appreciative of our long talks about difficult subjects. Carole, you are an inspiration!

We love you,
Ward, Chris and Nick

Little League

So, Little League is right around the corner. Nick is trying out for Majors this year. Ward and I are both on the board. Ward is currently serving as "Manager Coordinator" and I am about to join the board in charge of "Concessions". Ward will coach Nick's team again this year. And, he is also coaching Nick's basketball team, which just started last night. Yes, we weren't quite busy enough! It's a great organization for kids and their parents, and we are excited to help. See below for a link to Auburn Little League website. We will have an extremely busy spring / summer, with sports activities nightly and on Saturdays.

PS - I also started teaching again on Tuesday evenings, which continues through February. My Tuesdays and most weekends are going to be booked with studying & grading papers, etc.

Pray for our survival!! :-)

Gringos

This is a Miranda story.

Miranda is my dear little four year old niece, who is her own force of nature. She is in pre-Kindergarten at Valley Christian School; the same school that Nick & Megan attend. Pre-K is half-days, so she spends time in the after-school care. One of the teachers is hispanic and thought it would be nice to teach the kids a few words in Spanish. She rattles off a few common words and darling Miranda, who has seen most every "Dora" episode and thus knows a fair amount of basic Spanish, runs away with "uno, dos, tres, cuatro, cinqo...." fluently all the way up to diez (ten). The teacher replies, "Very good! Children, let's all listen to Miranda..."

Miranda pipes up with "Yeah, you gringos!"

We are fairly certain she did not learn that one from Dora.

A Boy House

Nick and Ward build their forts

Nick's fort is complete and populated with army men

Nick and Ward's completed forts

Nick attacking the enemy (notice the grenades on his belt!)

I live in a boy house. It has boy sounds, boy smells, boy clothes, and boy toys. Even the dog is a boy. Not that every boy is dirty, but they could be surrounded in squalor and not notice or care. It's only because of me (and Yolanda) that our house ever gets clean! But, that is a different story. Nick is now "in" to army: camo gear, little plastic green men with guns, toy hand grenades and toy pistols. Not the cowboy kind, the army kind. This is something I struggle to relate to. I have no memories of endless childhood fun playing with these kinds of toys. But last night I spent quite a bit of time timing Nick with a stopwatch as he practiced running through a carefully orchestrated obstacle course that he built in the upstairs game room. At the end of the course, he would throw a toy hand-grenade into a guitar case, closing the case and then running back to the starting point, finishing up with a baseball style slide.

Today, I noticed it was unusually quiet. I found Nick and Ward upstairs constructing a Lincoln-Log fort, populated with these green army dudes. I am definitely the "third wheel" in this arena. I do love my boys!!


Chris

Happy New Year!!

We had a relatively quiet New Year's Eve at home. The Laufmans came over (George, Christy and Oliver), and so did mom and the girls (Megan and Miranda). We had a nice salmon dinner, and then played Apples to Apples with the kids. Mom and the girls left at about 10:00, and the rest of us stayed up until about 1:00ish. We lit off fireworks that were left over from the Fourth of July, and spent New Year's day watching football and napping. I've napped so much that I think I have turned nocturnal! Going back to work hours will be a shock!!

Happy 2008 everyone!!

Chris