Happy, Happy Birthday Megan Dear!

So it has been a fun month or two around here. Justin has been busy with school trying to make headway on some big projects and it has been a difficult semester in a lot of ways, but it is almost over. Hopefully next semester will be a better and more productive semester.  Lately, he has been pretty crazed with trying to find time to keep up with the #1 ranked IU Hoosiers Mens Basketball team, and also the IU Men's Soccer Team just won their 8th National Championship yesterday so that is pretty awesome.  We hope the Basketball team can do the same, but it is sure fun watching them play.  They are a hard working and extremely talented, but seem to all be pretty decent guys too, which is nice.  One of their star players, Christian Watford, a 6 foot 9 forward came up to us a couple of years ago when Eva was just a baby.  We were walking around Assembly Hall on a saturday and the team had just finished practice and I had Eva in our backpack carrier and he came up and made some googly faces and stuff to Eva for a minute.  It was pretty funny and ever since then, he has been on my list of cool dudes.

But our big event/news from November was that Megan turned 30!  As many of you know, I started collecting stories from family and friends of Megan a month ago or so and I put together a little memory book that really turned out quite nice.  Everyone agrees that Megan is amazing/wonderful/etc and it was fun to hear so many good memories. The following is a Wordle (graphic representation of words Wordle.com) that I put together.  I had everyone list three words to describe Meg and when you copy and paste the text into Wordle.com it makes a cool picture.   The larger the word, the more times it was said, so you can see what some of the common words were to descrive her.  I also successfully pulled off a really nice surprise party for her.  She had no idea and it was a fun party with several of our friends where I showed a little slide show, and just had a great time. It was fun putting together this and I really fell in love with her all over again looking at old photos and gathering memories from so many people that love her.  WE LOVE YOU MEG!!  You are the best!

Maggie has been crafting up a storm.  One of the things that we really like about the Project school that she is attending is that 4 days a week for the last 45 minutes of the day, they have "Passions" projects that they work on.  The children have these "passions" classes in 3 week rotations and they can be things from playing board games, music/dance classes, art, computers, robotics (for the older kids), or all sorts of things.  The current one for Maggie has been crocheting and she loves it.  The idea is to help kids find things that they can get really passionate about in school and I love it.  So she has been making belts, ropes and all sorts of little things.  She even started learning to knit a bit too, so she has started working on a scarf.  She has always loved making things and we constantly find scissors, yarn, tape, markers, duct tape, and boxes of stuff in her bed.  Crazy kid!

Eva is also growing so quickly.  She has really changed a lot the last couple of months and is talking almost as much as her big sister did and is really getting tall and is a cute little girl, not a toddler anymore for sure!  She also LOVES to tease.  She is really a funny little kid and you can almost watch her brain move as the thinks of funny things to say and try to tease.  She also ususally wears about 10 - 15 pairs of clothes a day.  Usually it just rotates between princess dresses and jammies, but she is almost always wearing her princess shoes and I am confident that she will have no problems wearing high heels when she gets older.  But she also loves watching sports with her daddy and will sit and watch a basketball game for quite a bit and she is very sporty!  Both girls are going to be so pretty and will be quite a handful to keep up with as they get older.

Beau is in full on walking/get into everything stage.  His sisters still ADORE him (sometimes too much), but he started walking at about 8 months and now cruises all over the place.  He is a big kid, but loves to snuggle his mommy.  Neither of our girls really liked to snuggle much, but he is such a butterball that he is fun to hold and snuggle.  His sisters beat on him quite a bit too, so I think he will be able to hold his own as he gets older.  We love him so much and are thankful that our kids are healthy, strong and happy.  We have had lots or runny noses, sore throats and all of other sicknesses that go around, but overall things are great.

Finally, we are heading to Idaho Falls for Christmas on the 17th and will be there until the 29th.  We are excited to spend some time with the Christensens and hope to see some of the Whitings, but we won't be able to make it down to Utah this time. We found a good deal to fly directly to Idaho Falls so we will pretty much just be camping out there. We are sorry we may not get to see more of our family this trip, but hopefully we can make it out next summer to spend more time with the Whitings when our misioneros finish!  Please put in your orders for some snow for while we are there as Bloomington has been in the 70's this past week and we are sick of the warm weather.  WE WANT SNOW!!