Wow, I have a minutes to write until the year is officially over. I didn’t really make plans to stay up for New Year’s… it just sort of happened. We went to Rachel’s parents tonight. I was going to back up and reformat Ken’s computer, but I had some problems with the back-ups and so I’ll have to finish tomorrow. Rachel and I spent about an hour going over the budget and paying some bills. I’ve been...

Nolan has learned to kiss. It’s pretty funny. As we are watching TV, he’ll run up to us and give us a smacker, then run away. Sometimes (mostly with Rachel) they are a big open mouth kiss. It’s pretty cute. It’s also funny that it has to be on the lips. He will hold your head in his hands until he can get you right on the mouth.

We had a fun family night tonight. After dinner we had a brief lesson about what to do when we get paid, now that the kids are getting paid for doing certain chores. We taught them to give 10% for tithing, put 10% in savings (for mission or college), and the other 80% is theirs to spend. I don’t think they really get the math, but hopefully they get the principle and they will catch on as we continue to do this week after week.

After our church today I drove to our old ward to hear Sam Fallows speak. He was a young man we taught in Sunday school. He had just returned from his mission in Brazil. It was a very good talk. I enjoyed being there. It still feels more like home than our new ward. I miss the old ward already. I hope I come to love our new ward as much as I love the old ward. Those that I talked with were very friendly. One man that I home taught came and said...

We had a party with Rachel’s friends tonight. We were having a good time playing rock bank. Rachel was singing (don’t ask me how they convinced her) and I was playing guitar, when the game was paused because our friends child was hurt and Gehrig was getting hysterical because he got in trouble. I couldn’t calm him down to even talk to him, so we just had to leave and I just put in him the car. When we all got in the car Gracie...

Even though it is not a holiday in the USA, we celebrated boxing day today. That is, we took down and boxed up all our Christmas decorations. It seems we also spent a good deal of the day shoveling snow. I’m afraid I might have a sore back in the morning! Later in the afternoon we went outside and went sledding. We are pretty luck to have a pretty good sledding hill in our front yard. Chris, Emily and Brielle came over. Chris and Brielle...