January Update

A lot of you get my brother, Ken’s, monthly updates too, but a lot of you don’t.  I feel like I need to explain the snarky comments at the beginning of last month’s update.  Those were directed toward Ken and those who get both updates—you know, family humor.  If you don’t get both updates, you probably just thought I was mildly crazy, which is probably true.

He started his update this month with news about his latest grandchild.  And, honestly, I’m not copying him, or maybe I am, but I’m going to start this month’s update with news about my first grandchild.  Hazel Felicia Sommer was born on Tuesday, January 6, 2015 at 10:30PM.  She weighed 7 lbs, 10 ozs and was 21 inches long.  Mom Ella and Dad Cody and baby Hazel are doing fantastic, and the grandparents and many aunts and uncles are overwhelmingly proud of this amazing gift from God.

One of her first pictures. Cody texted this with her birth announcement

From our visit to the hospital - baby selfie

Read to go home from the hospital

Visiting Grandma and Grandpa. We wanted to talk, but...

...she wanted to sleep

She will get plenty of loving with all of us around.  Ella’s friend, Elizabeth Gloege, is here now from North Carolina visiting them and helping out, and Cody has had two weeks off from work to be a Dad.  He has to go back tomorrow, so now the sisters start arriving.  Carissa and Caitlin are coming up from Philadelphia this weekend, and Kortney is coming early next month.  We’ve told Ella she should have had quadruplets so we could all get more turns holding a baby, but we’re making do with one beautiful one.

We celebrated Christmas since I wrote last, of course, and it was really fun, as usual.  Once again, we were blessed to have the whole family home for Christmas, plus Carissa’s boyfriend, Matt, and Caitlin’s boyfriend, Ben for at least part of the time.  I love having a house full of my kids and the people special to them.  One advantage this year is we had three places to house people, with ours, Hannah’s, and Ella’s.  That made a little more room at night anyway, although most days everyone was at our place, which is what made it so much fun.

Zuzu in the holiday spirit

Many hands making Christmas brunch

It's always a party when we get together!

Ready for Christmas

Mat: "I wonder which ones are mine?"

We’ve enjoyed the football playoffs even though our hometown Bills are out of it, once again.  But my hometown Seahawks keep finding ways to win.  I’m not sure my heart can handle many more victories like yesterday’s, however.  I had choir practice and evening church to attend last night, so I only got to see the first hour or so, and that’s when it looked pretty bad for them.  But the updates I got on my phone through the evening improved my mood a lot!  And, being Bills fans around here, we’d love to see them crush the Patriots in the Super Bowl!  Go Seahawks!

My family enjoys expressing our talents, sometimes better than others, but always lots of fun.  We started last year doing a family Christmas Extravaganza, so this year was our second annual event.  We do songs, poems, skits, etc.  It’s rather goofy and not always very good, but sometimes we amaze even ourselves.  This year’s biggest hit, I’d have to say, was my son-in-law, Cody (the new father, but this was before his baby was born), doing “The Twelve Days of Cody.”

Krista and I went out this past Friday with Hannah and Kevin for dinner and a movie.  We saw “American Sniper.”  I’d have to say it was pretty intense, and I wouldn’t recommend it for teens or younger.  It had what they call “strong” language (I’ve always considered that language rather weak, personally), but since that is most likely accurate to those kinds of situations, I couldn’t say they added it to the movie version.  Anyway, it was a good story, and we enjoyed our time talking and being with our daughter and her husband.

Welcome to 2015, and I’ll talk to you all again in February!