Saturday, December 25, 2010

Merry Christmas

From our home-SWEET-home to yours.....
...we wish you a merry Christmas!!!

{Tolman Family Christmas 2010 Newsletter}
Life is a beautiful gift, and we have truly been blessed during the 2010 year. We have felt a strong spirit of LOVE in our home this year! We’ve had several uplifting, as well as upsetting, experiences. We acknowledge that each experience has made us who we are today, and we are truly grateful for our many blessings.
Our biggest experience in 2010 year was purchasing a new home for our family! We were finally approved in April, we moved our old mobile home off the property in May, moved into our 25-foot travel trailer for 3 weeks, and we watched as the ground was excavated and cement was poured and our new manufactured house being set in place. It was a frustrating and exciting time for our family! In June we moved out of the travel trailer and into our new home, and we have truly loved being in our new home these past 6 months!
Vacations were cut back this year, due to scrimping and saving to pay off our debts and purchase our new home, and we have been blessed as a result. Instead, we took smaller and shorter trips closer to home. Kala traveled to Spokane this spring to see her Grandpa Perkins, and we took family vacations this summer to visit Josh’s Grandma & Grandpa Parsons in Montana and to southeast Idaho to play after the Rex Tolman reunion.
Endurance is one of Josh’s strong points. He just completed his 10th year working as Superintendent for the Salmon Valley Golf Course, he’s in his 3rd year volunteering his time as an elected School Board member, he is the treasurer for the Idaho Golf Course Superintendents Association, and he got called to be the 1st counselor in the ward Elders Quorum this fall after being released as the Ward Missionary Leader. To rephrase, enduring meeting after meeting has become one of his strong points! He’s a hard-worker, a wonderful husband, and a great dad. I appreciate him for his efforts in supporting our family financially, physically, and emotionally and for providing us with our comfortable home!

Ammon, our oldest, is 10. He is a sports fanatic; he’s an avid fan of the NFL and NBA and PGA, and he plays a sport each season: golf, football, basketball, & bowling. He likes making money, too, and he worked this summer raising 4-H pigs & mowing lawns. With this year’s earnings, he’s bought himself a new laptop, a set of golf clubs, a new golf pushcart, a Nintendo DS, and he’s invested a lot in his future mission savings account. He’s a straight-A student who excels in reading, and he’s involved in scouts and piano lessons, too.
Toddler Kanyon is 3 and is potty-trained (well, mostly). He goes to preschool 2 mornings a week, and the rest of the time, he loves being home alone with mom during the day. He has fun playing anything electronic: the computer or wii or Nintendo DS. He’s super smart, and super moody, too. He’s happy when his big brothers come home from school, and he loves playing with them—but only as long as they’re doing what he wants them to! For the most part, his sleep patterns have improved, and for that we are very grateful!

Home-making has become Kala’s specialty. She cooks, bakes, and preserves food, and she loves making dinner each day for her family to enjoy. She’s organized the home and put everything in its new place. She has a passion for blogging and scrapbooking and photo-taking and music and performing. She volunteers in the school, and started substitute-teaching this fall, which she thinks is so fun! She also started teaching an adult Sunday School class, and it’s starting to grow on her. She loves being a wife to Josh and a mother to 4 boys.
Older twin Jonah is mom’s helper, a wonderful big brother, a pro at sharing and giving, and is social and sweet. He is good at coloring and being creative, and he has many friends in the first grade. He liked scoring goals for his soccer team this spring, and he was a good worker in the pumpkin patch all summer.
Micah, the younger twin, is fast and quick, loves to learn and read, likes to feel involved and is a great student. He is competitive and likes to be the winner! He is smart, he likes to be in charge, and he is happy to be 7. He had fun helping others get their pumpkins at the patch this fall and playing soccer with his team in the spring.
Every second, every day, every year our family continues to change and grow. We are grateful to travel through life together as a family, and we are so grateful to have family and friends like you who help us along the way! From our home to yours, we wish you a Merry Christmas, a New Year full of happiness, and we send you our LOVE! Sincerely, The Tolman Family

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