Hello there! Hope your holidays were fantastic. We had an utter blast visiting family up in Utah. We Christmas caroled, looked at the Salt Lake City Temple lights (it was so packed we felt like sardines, but my boys were impressed), went sleding, and opened tons of presents. Ironically, despite our non-existant financial status right now, we had a huge Christmas because of our insurance company reimbursing us for the items that were destroyed in the house fire. Funny how that works out!

For me, the best thing of all was to get a little break from the radio show. I’m quite burned out right now with that, as it takes up almost every waking moment of my time. I’m excited for this month, however, as I added a few new guests to the list like R. L. Stine (Goosebumps series), Mary Pope Osborne (Magic Tree House series), and Daniel Handler aka Lemony Snicket (A Series of Unfortunate Events). And of course there's Dean Koontz, Christopher Paolini, and many others. Take a look below.

We just found out yesterday that Jared (our 3-year-old boy) is going to need braces for his legs. He already had some small braces that went into his shoes. Let's see, his front teeth are missing, his head is deformed, his ears are too low because of the Noonans syndrome, his eyes droop, he has glasses, he has a G-tube (i.e. plastic thing on his belly for night feedings), he has a big scar down his chest from the heart surgery, and now he's going to have braces on his legs. Wonderful! Just one more visual thing for people to notice about him. Despite all that, we think he's a cutie.

This picture is of him "helping" to do the dishes. He's very talkative right now. In fact, we can't get him to stop talking! He's in a special pre-school, and everyone just loves him because he's so friendly and is a role model for speech for the other kids.

This other picture is of me (on the right) as I did an Arrow of Light ceremony for a Webelo cub scout. This week I just got released from cub scouts... again. We'll see how long that lasts. I wish I was still in it, since it gave me a chance to spend time with my twins. I've been so incredibly busy that I haven't had as much time with my family. Since the house fire, I stopped teaching them karate as well. That's one thing I need to get back to doing.

Well, it's been over half a year now since our house was destroyed in a fire. Over a month ago one of the head honchos from Washington came to inspect the house, and he decided to give us everything we want (i.e. repair the house to pre-existing conditions... which the contract states they’ll do in the first place. Go figure), but he needed to get it approved from corporate. He said that would be about 2 weeks.... It’s been over 5 weeks now and we’re still waiting. Dealing with the insurance company is like swimming upstream. This newest scope/estimate is almost 4 times that of their original one! Wow! From the very beginning we were told by two separate contractors that it would cost this much to repair the house. Glad we fought the insurance company on this. We’re not out of the water yet.

What’s crazy is that we just discovered that we were supposed to buy everything that’s getting reimbursed within 6 months. Ahhh! What? We don’t have a house to put any of it in and it's already been 6 months! So we just got a 6 month extension, since presumably we might actually be in our house in that time. I doubt it. Even if we are, we’ll have a week or two to buy everything. I’m guessing we’ll need another extension at that time. This too shall pass. Until next time....