Our last newsy update was back in the fall/early winter. Since then so much has occurred that it would take a long time to write it all out. I’ll just blitz through a few of the highlights instead.

Christmas was a wonderful season of spending time with family and friends and striving to bring joy to others. A very last minute decision was made to redo our chalk art presentation from last year at one of the homes. Thankfully, Erica was there to keep the chalk artists on track during the preparations!

We did our traditional Christmas concerts at three nursing homes. Elizabeth and Caleb joined us on the jingle bells!

We also kept our gingerbread house decorating tradition. The young ones always love this. And the not-so-young ones too! I’m not sure who had more fun – Elizabeth or Grandma!

In the midst of all the Christmas activity, we also butchered our 20-month-old steer. Weighing over 1,000 lbs, he was by far the largest animal we have done to date. It was a big job, but we enjoyed working together with family and friends. And we tried our hands at sausage making afterwards! It was certainly a learning process.

More recently, we found ourselves once again making trips back and forth to the hospital. After months of trying to cure Amy’s health problems through a medicinal route, the surgeons acknowledged that surgery was the only option left. We really saw God’s hand in it all. The timing of the surgery couldn’t have been better: we had no other outside commitments that week and Amy was doing well in the sense of having regained the weight and energy she lost last summer. We were told to expect a 5-7 day stay in the hospital. She was out in four days! We are thanking the Lord for His intervention on her behalf. And Amy is thrilled that she can now begin to eat “lumpy” food again! We still have to be careful, but she is definitely doing better! Praise the Lord!

A more recent project is learning how to use diffusing and reflecting umbrellas in photography. One of our first targets was a cake…

The first photo is without the use of the umbrellas. In the second, the sharp shadows were eliminated by bouncing and diffusing the light.

Now to learn how to use these for portraits. (And, no, we didn’t have these tools during the baby photo session.) I’m sure it will be an exciting learning experience.