Thomas turned 9 last week. He is a great kid, always willing to help, even-tempered (mostly), and a lot of fun. We had a fun birthday party with him last week.
Thomas and his best friend, Payton.
Payton gave Thomas a matching monster sweatshirt.
Thomas scoring some cash from Grandma!
Thomas asked for pumpkin pie instead of cake.
I took Thomas skiing for his birthday. It was his first real skiing and he did great. He caught on quickly and was soon cruising down the hill making some good turns.
I got a Kindle for Christmas last year and my reading has increased significantly. I read 45 books in 2009 compared to 30 in 2008. Of those, 27 were Kindle books. I’m also still a big audio book fan, listening to 17 audio books this year. I’d like to shoot for a goal of 52 books in 2010, but realistically I think I’ll be more around 40. Last year was unique and I had an unusual amount of free-time and travel time to get a lot of reading in. But I still hope to take advantage of my time and enjoy some more great books in 2010. Any recommendations or must reads? Always looking for a good book.
I enjoyed most of the books I read in 2009, with just a few duds in there. Here’s my list with the highest rated first.
Grace and Thomas performed in a Christmas Piano recital last Friday night. The six weeks of listening to Feliz Navidad and Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer five times a day finally paid off:
Try to ignore Henry’s begging to watch a movie on the camera.
Amanda and team put on a great birthday party for Grace’s 11th birthday a few weeks ago. They did a spa theme with facials, hair-dos, makeup, yoga and a movie…and lots of junk food.
It’s been a long but fantastic weekend. We closed and moved in to our home. So many boxes. So much clutter. But we’re getting there little by little. The kids are happy and we’re loving the extra room. We’ve had many nice neighbors drop by to welcome us to the neighborhood. We went to church on Sunday and everyone was very welcoming. Very similar to our last ward, lots of young families but with a good mix of older folks as well.
Internet, TV, phones, utilities: all set up.
It feels so good to be getting settled again, and very nice to be sleeping in my own bed again. Life is great.
So much for that last post from over a year ago. So much has changed since then. We are staying in Utah. I got a job working for the LDS Church, working at the same building where I worked for Intel for the past 9 years. We are buying a home back in Herriman. We are very happy things have worked out. It’s been a long and crazy summer, one that we’ll never forget, but we’ve been very blessed and feel that we are where we’re supposed to be.
It’s been almost nine years since Amanda & I (and baby Grace) moved away from Portland, OR, and now we’re headed back. Following an invitation from my manager and much prayer and contemplation we feel that it is a great opportunity for us and will be a fun adventure. The hardest part now is knowing that we will be leaving a wonderful neighborhood and our best friends.
We haven’t set a move date yet, but it will likely be in June or July.
The kids are also sad but we’ve been trying to focus on the positive and they are starting to get excited about the move. I’ve tried to find fun things to tell the kids to help them get excited about the move.
Knowing that Thomas loves zoos and animals I told him that the Washington Park Zoo in Portland has the largest population of elephants in the United States. He got very excited about that and we looked more online together; after further research Thomas told us “Yeah, but they’re Asian elephants, my favorites are African elephants.”
Oh, and check out new photos going back to Christmas and our cruise and Thomas’s birthday. I’m still getting caught up.
