Another Year has flown by!

Hello to all our friends and family,
We hope the end of 2009 finds you in good health and good cheer and that you are looking forward to 2010. It seems like it was just yesterday that I was gearing up for the whole Y2K
scare and spending New Year's eve in front of the computer server. We know this has been a tough year for a lot of our friends and so many people have struggled with unemployment. We pray that 2010 brings a much better outlook for everyone.

Going through our photos for 2009 we realized we didn't take very many pictures this year! I guess we were so busy doing things that we forgot to take pictures. Maybe I will be able to catch up on scrapbooking if we don't have many pictures.

Boy Scouts and Cub Scouts play a huge role in our lives and we enjoy doing many activities. In February of this year Riley "crossed over" from Cub Scouts to Boy Scouts and is now in a troup with boys from 6th grade up. Ray is still the den leader for Jake's den and very active with the pack events too. It was hard at first to send Riley to weekend campouts by himself with the Boy Scouts since I was so used to always having Ray there at Scout events and knew he would look out for Riley. Ray did go on a couple of the Boy Scout events and enjoyed them.

It was a big year for Riley as he turned thirteen in August and started middle school. He has adapted to middle school very well and kept his grades up. He is also enjoying all the after school activities and playing soccer through school. Jake was a little nervous about being without his brother on the school bus and at school but he did just fine. This way no one can tell on him! He is in 3rd grade and he turned nine this summer.

We did more camping this summer than we ever have! We had several campouts with the Cub Scouts, our annual family campout with Mom, Dad, Kim, Scott, Jenny, Diana, Doug and Bella, and then we borrowed Mom and Dad's RV and camped for a week for vacation this summer. We have a small, low-sided trailer that we pull behind our van which makes it nice for hauling all the camping gear.

In between scout camps, the boys spent most of the summer in our swimming pool! It wasn't a very warm summer and they didn't get in as much swimming as they would have liked. The boys and I planted a garden but it didn't do very well with the cool temperatures either. I ended up buying a bushel of tomatoes since ours didn't every produce enough for canning. I got on a crazy canning kick this summer and canned tomatoes, pizza and spaghetti sauce, banana peppers, and strawberry jelly.

We had a couple really fun bonfire parties this fall at our house. Ray's scout den came over and we carved pumpkins and had a hayride and cookout and then the next weekend we repeated the party with more friends. We can hook up the trailer to our large lawn tractor and take the kids on a hayride and they love it. We go through the fields beside our house and past the woods.

I wish I could tell you where my days go but anyone that has raised children knows the answer to that! Scrapbooking and card making are my crafts of choice and I try to fit those in between the boy's sports, school, scouts, and managing the household! I still go out on a few computer consultant jobs now and then and love the extra income every so often. Ray is still with Verizon and wondering what the future will hold since the part of Verizon he works for has been sold to Frontier. They are in the middle of transitioning to the new company so he doesn't know a lot of details about what may change. Hopefully his job will be secure.

So all in all, nothing too exciting has happened this year but we are grateful to be healthy and have our boys, our parents and our sisters and their families, and are thankful we have a good life. Ray, Pam, Riley and Jake

P.S. Check out the link to the right for 2009 pictures.