Our Christmas was a little different this year. Things had to be moved around and done in a different order or way than we had planned. It wasn’t very merry. But we all love and care for each other and we are all working on things that will hopefully help us have a more Merry Christmas next year.
Matthew is going to have to go through these pictures and label them with names and places when he gets home. He tells me about them when we talk on the phone but by the time I get the picture downloaded and on here, it is hard to remember all the details. These are more pictures of his time in Escada. The Bishop and his wife are really good at taking care of them it sounds like. They make sure they are fed each day. On Christmas and New Year Eve day they went to the Bishops. For Christmas Eve they went to another members house for a celebration. It looks like a beautiful area. They have Cana (I believe that is what he calls it) here. It is pure sugar water squeezed from sugar cane. Matthew-our soda addicted child- loves it and likes to stress me out by telling me it is healthy because it is ‘natural’ and even better than soda while he drinks a 24 ounce glass of it for dinner. I told him it is like getting hit by a truck or a car, it doesn’t really matter, neither is good for you.
We got to video call with him a lot on Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and New Years Eve and Day. That was nice. I think he was a little lonely and home sick so I am glad he could spend a part of his day talking with us. Since he is three hours ahead of us we actually got to celebrate midnight with him on New Years. He watched a lot of fireworks from his apartment. They live on the third floor so they had a good view. Time zones are a weird thing. For three hours, he was not just three hours ahead of us he was in a different year than us. Isn’t that crazy?!
Matthew said there was a mini Zone Conference they went to in Recife this week. The current Mission President- President Martins and his wife will be done in July. The new President and a member of the seventy came to this meeting to introduce themselves and see some of the mission.
We are lucky to have a pretty good view of the sunrise and sunsets from our house. They are beautiful the whole year but this time of year seems to be extra vibrant and colorful. I came upstairs the other day and the whole upstairs floor of our house was a pretty pink color. I went outside and watched a gorgeous sunset. The pictures have a little more orange look to them, it was actually more pink, but they are still pretty.
This is a sunrise picture I took when I left for work. It gave everything a purple tinge. My camera doesn’t do it justice.
Allison had a meet for wrestling in Basehor. This wasn’t her best meet as far as winning her matches but I am impressed with her dedication to wrestling and how much time and effort she puts into it. It is fun to watch her and cheer her on.
I love Calvin and Hobbes comic strips. I have several books of them. Every few years I come across them and decide to read them again. I did that about a week ago. This one makes me laugh, and I remember reading it with Matthew when he was 6-7 and he thought it was hilarious too. I sent him a picture of it in his missionary photo album that our family has for him.
Emilee is still doing her riding lessons once a week. She is getting pretty good. She is still doing English riding style and does 1-1 1/2 foot jumps. I don’t know a lot about riding but I have been watching her enough to be able to tell who can ride a horse and who is sitting on a horse bouncing around. Emilee definitely looks like she is confident and knows how to work with the horse.
Since it is close to the end of the year my phone is putting collages together and showing me ‘a year in review’ or ‘people over the years’. It showed me this one of Allison and I thought it was pretty cute. She is a funny, sweet, fierce girl. I sure do love her.
Emilee has a Bluey (kids cartoon) shirt that she got this year and wears to school. It is a little bit of a thing for middle school and high school kids to wear/have items that are kids cartoon stuff. Allison has a Barbie lunch box, and Emilee likes Bluey. Matthew teases them both and gives them a hard time about it. We were Christmas shopping and Emilee found a big Bluey stuffed animal. She sent Matthew a picture and told him it would be on his bed for him when he got home.
This might be the last year I get a cute decorated Christmas list from Emilee, my other two already don’t do it anymore. So here is the list she gave me. My kids know they don’t get everything on their list but I like to have lots of ideas. They also know I don’t give living gifts but they still put them on their lists sometimes.
The second area Matthew went for his mission is Escada. We haven’t spoken to him since he got there but he posted a few pictures. It is about 3-4 hours from Recife, much closer than the 11 hours Salgueiro was. It will be more humid but in the 80’s most of the time, not 100+. I don’t know his new companion’s name yet, but I know he is Brazilian and doesn’t speak any English.
Right before he transferred to his new area he went to a Christmas celebration in Recife. Lots of missionaries came to have a fun day together. They played basketball, soccer, socialized, and ate lots of good food. Matthew said they did a little shopping and even listened to ‘non churchy’ Christmas music. Matthew loves music-including church music- they are not supposed to listen to anything besides approved church music. Not listening to his music has been hard for him, he has mentioned several times that he misses it a lot. When I hear music that I know he liked it reminds me of him singing it when he was home and it makes me miss him a lot too. I appreciate his mission president and his wife making a big effort to make a special day for them. This is Matthew’s first Christmas away from home (a lot of the missionaries first Christmas away). I am glad that they have a chance to have fun and enjoy the Christmas season together.
The second day of his trip to Recife they all went to the Recife temple together. Matthew hadn’t been to that temple yet. He said it was really beautiful. Whenever they get all the missionaries together they hand out any packages that have come since the last time they were together. We mailed one to Matthew with a private courier for Christmas…it wasn’t there. We found out a week later that it got taken to Sao Paulo (a four hour plane ride south) and is there with two other peoples Christmas packages. So frustrating. It seems like things not working the way they are supposed to happens a lot lately. At least it has been found and hopefully will make its way to Matthew at some point. He loved getting together with all the missionaries and seeing friends he made at the MTC. He loves the organized sports, he misses that a lot too.
Allison’s wrestling season has started! Her first tournament was the Spring Hill Invitational. She did awesome! She took 2nd place for the varsity 135 weight. She was disappointed that she didn’t win but she looked really good. I could already see improvement from last year. Ryan and I enjoy watching her.
Her first dual was against Pittsburg. She did great at that one too. I don’t watch her wrestle through the camera because I want to see it in real life so sometimes my camera doesn’t follow her like I think I am . I was also sitting pretty close so I had to move the camera a lot more to keep her in frame.
Her second tournament was in Douglas Kansas which is a few hours away. It was during the week so Ryan and I weren’t able to go. She won her first match and then lost her second and third. Maybe her dad and I are better luck than she thinks we are. 😜 Hopefully we won’t miss any more meets this season. She is hoping to make it to State this year. She is putting in the work, hopefully it pays off!
Matthew stayed in Salgueiro for two transfers. That is 12 weeks. He seemed to like it a lot and enjoyed his time there. He got there in September and left about mid December. That is the hot season for Salguerio, it is a dry heat and was above 100 most of the days he was there. He didn’t have any air conditioning the first half, then they had a room unit installed and they had air conditioning in their bedroom the last half. He baptized a young man named Enzo and a few of his friends and were teaching his mom when he left. These are the last of the few pictures Matthew sent of Salgueiro before he left.
The week between Christmas and New Years day it very unique. I love it. Ryan and I usually take it off and of course the kids are out of school. There is no structure. You bounce back and forth between constructive activities, and wasting time. There is no time. You don’t know what day it is. It doesn’t matter because there is no schedule, no demands. If there is something scheduled it most likely will be forgotten. Sometimes you go to bed at 8pm. Sometimes it is 2am. Sometimes you shower and get dressed for the day, sometimes you don’t. I get to be my true introvert self and rarely leave the house. A lack of a plan is the plan. We love it.
We had lots of relaxing, family time activities. The Bourne’s were at Grandma’s all week so my girls spent most of their days playing with them. The weather wasn’t to bad so they even went to the park a few times and got to be outside. I took them to the church one afternoon to play in the gym and draw on the giant chalk boards.
Grandpa Terry, Emilee and Jovee all gave talks on Sunday. We had a family dinner with everyone at our house afterwards to celebrate getting to go to three sacraments. Lots of games were played and football was watched. I caught Ryan getting a little extra snuggle time in with Emilee while he explained something about football rules to her.
Becky invited me to go to a paint class with her so we filled one of our afternoons painting a winter sunset scene. I really like painting. I never know what to do with it when I’m done, it is not good enough to hang up anywhere. It is a fun thing to do and I like learning the techniques and creating things.
Ryan and I worked on some projects together. He made some awesome shelves for my holiday decoration boxes. I can now take one at a time out without having to restack or take other boxes out of the way. I LOVE IT. I went through all my decorations and storage stuff and organized it and cleaned it out. So satisfying. We got a new security system that Ryan installed too. We live far enough away from people that there aren’t that many people but not far enough that I don’t think a weirdo wouldn’t wander by. Ryan got a dart board for Christmas so we hung that up and put a frame around it to help protect the wall a little from wayward darts.
We celebrated New Years Eve at our house with all the Terry Family. We had lots of food and yummy treats. We watched movies, played games, ate and visited while we passed the time away until midnight. I made a balloon drop with confetti for the kids to pull down when we got to midnight.
https://youtu.be/v5mnrlAsQ8E?list=PLBwkO01uWtw9DJu2WA-l0-1CZ6EuoK5Kl
It was a fun night to celebrate the last day of the year and the starting of a new one. It is pretty crazy to look back over a year and see and the things that happened and how things changed. It is weird how things change and don’t change at the same time. I think 2024 was good to us. We had some good times and made new memories together. No broken bones. I waited until 2025 had started before I typed that. We are not perfect but we are blessed and grateful for our good health and the comfortable lives we all have. There is a lot of crazy stuff going on in the world right now and we are mostly untouched by it. 2025 will bring a new chapter into our families lives. The foremost in my mind is Matthew will graduate and is planning on going on a mission and the dynamics of our family will shift from how we have known them for the last 18 years. For the last picture of this edition of my blog I thought I would put this picture. I wish I had one of our whole family doing this but this one will work. Ciao 2024
It was Ryan’s families year for Christmas. The Bourne’s came from Idaho and the Ross and Ryan families are already here. The Lee’s couldn’t make it.
Christmas Eve we spent most of the morning cooking a preparing the meal. We had ham and cheesy potatoes, green bean casserole, rolls, jello salad, and Ryan smoked a brisket. It was all very delicious. We ate dinner around 4pm. After dinner and pie and cookies for dessert, the cousins continued to play and have fun together. Some of us watched a movie and played games or took a nap. When everyone was rested and not stuffed from dinner anymore we had a little family gathering. Emilee, Jovee and Tyler started us off by sharing a little thought they each wrote about what Christmas means to them and what some of their favorite parts about Christmas are. Then most of the grandkids shared some kind of talent. We had several piano numbers, a flute, a trumpet, dancing, and even a little acrobatics. Grandpa then gave us a Christmas message and we all had a family prayer together.
Later that night when we got back to our house we opened our Christmas Eve PJ’s and did any last minute wrapping and headed to bed.
Christmas morning we plan for 6:30am at the earliest to wake up for presents. The kids have the option to sleep in longer if they want but so far they have not taken us up on the offer. This year Allison woke us all up at 6:30 sharp with excited cheering that it was Christmas morning. The kids wait at the bottom of the stairs until we get into the living room and then they come up and we start opening presents.
Matthew got some golf clubs and a guitar. He pretty recently decided that he wants to learn the guitar. It isn’t the piano but I’ll take it. Allison wanted lots of clothes and some fancy head phones. Emilee wanted some lego sets to put together and she is currently collecting palm pals and had a list of those she wanted. I didn’t do a very good job of taking pictures this year. Here are the few I did remember to take. Last year we did a scavenger hunt for the kids for the family gifts. They seemed to like it so we did it again this year. The family gift was tickets for one of the Chiefs play off games in January. It will be a fun family event! I’ll post more about it after they go to the game.
After we opened presents and ate breakfast and chilled for a little bit, we went back over to Grandma and Grandpa’s house. We opened more presents there with them and then the Chiefs played at noon so everyone came over to our house to watch the game. We ate snacks and leftovers, played games and hung out together.
