Christmas Letter 2019

The whole clan:  Top: Tim, Nikki, Emma, Ada, Elsa, Ben. Bottom: Eliana, Ezra, Carys, Chris, Everett, Dave 
Thanksgiving, 2019

Greetings family, friends, and Gentle Readers!  2019 is quickly speeding by, and we would be remiss to let such a year go by without sharing the abundant blessings of God we have enjoyed this year.  So here are just a few aspects of 2019 for which we are very grateful:

Family:

We have been blessed with great family time, times of working together, and times of crisis that have caused us to grow and appreciate one another.  In the great family times category, we have enjoyed a winter break in the White Mountains with Ben and family,  several trips to Tucson, a couple visits to Los Alamos from the kids, meet-ups with Dave's sister and brother as they took Marilyn to their homes for visits, a 60th anniversary get-together for my parents with all the Hanson originals, a bike trip in the Gila Wilderness,

a fall cousin's camp at the Grand Canyon, and Thanksgiving all together in Los Alamos.  And Marilyn, Dave and I will head to Tucson for Christmas.  In the working and crisis category, we helped one of my sisters move, got through illness and injury and aging with all parents and watched as they returned to health, rejoiced when Ezra recovered from a particularly hard-hitting bike fall that resulted in a concussion, and when Tim was hit by a truck while bike riding and escaped with only a few bruises and a bent wheel.  How gracious God has been to rescue, save, and revive us over and over again!  Here are a few photos of our family time:

The PHX crew on the swing in our front yard

The Hanson originals in Albuquerque: Anne, Jeni, Chris, Mom, Matt, Dad, Gwen, Jeff

Cousin's Camp V at the Grand Canyon

Carys and Ada playing in the East Fork of the Jemez River

A big city adventure with the Tucson crew

Cheering on Daddy's excellent bike race in Silver City, NM

Cousins

Swinging was a different matter for the Tucson crew at Thanksgiving

Everett has the best belly-laugh

Happy Thanksgiving!

Provision:

As we continue into our second year of retirement, we continue to marvel at the provisions of God.  He has provided for us in every way. We have been able to do some amazing travel to places like Utah and Oklahoma, Germany, Austria, and Hungary, Arizona and Colorado.  According to Google, I have traveled a distance equivalent to going 1.3 times around the world this year (which is amazing and kind of frightening.) And in the ups and down of all these miles, we have been spared serious illness, accident, or castrophe.  And we have enjoyed the journies and God's amazingly beautiful world and people on top of it.  We have an abundance of friends along the road, both nearby and far away. Here are a few photos of some of the places we have been and the people we have seen:

Marilyn and Dave as we visited some petroglyphs outside Canyonlands National Park in Utah

Tim and Nikki in Silver City

Gila Wilderness, NM

Grand Canyon, Arizona

Cruising down the Danube with our friend Pamela

Nuremberg, Germany

Regensberg, Germany

Passau, Germany

Meeting up with Kris and Paula Lundgaard in Vienna

Budapest, Hungary

Health:

Though we have seen our share of struggles this year, we are at a very blessed place with our health.  While Dave still struggles with long-term consequences of his previous treatment, he is now 27 years in remission from stage 4 metastatic melanoma.  That is an amazingly abundant blessing!  He has found some help in dealing with some of the symptoms, for which we are very grateful.  And I found myself just last week explaining to someone that I was a two-time breast cancer survivor , who has been treating an auto-immune disease for the last 7 years, and am now able to at least try stopping some of my medicines because my disease is stable without any flare-ups.  We are awed at God's blessings to us!

So as we look ahead to 2020, what surprises are ahead?  I'm sure there will be challenges, but I know to the core of my being that there will be blessings to meet those challenges, and joy to surround them.  Our prayer for you, dear family, sweet friends, and Gentle Readers, is that you may know the abundance of our good God in the coming new year. May we all see his provision clearly.

Christmas Letter 2018

Well, the cards are off, Advent is rolling along, and it is time to report here, and post pictures of the highlights of the year.

Before I do that, for the sake of balance, let me list a few lowlights:  dealing with bodies that have been through a lot is a pain, sometimes literally. Watching as our parents age is also difficult. And living in this broken world is downright hard sometimes for all of us.  That said, we have much to be grateful for!

I am going to work backwards from the biggest, most recent event of the year, towards the earlier ones.  This year, we officially added another granddaughter to our family. Eliana Jean Yaritza Finnegan (E3) has been part of our family since she left the hospital and entered Tim and Nikki's care over a year ago.  But at the end of October, she became part of our family forever.  Adoption is such a sweet doctrine, and now it has been made more real to all of us as Tim and Nikki opened their family to this sweet daughter!

In September, Dave and Chris enjoyed two weeks in the Northeast: Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine.  We had never been to that part of the country, and it was glorious!  Highlights include rivers with waterfalls (and real water flowing), covered bridges, Acadia National Park, the Maine coast and its lighthouses, and spending time with dear friends.  It was a wonderful time.

Just before we went to New England, we had the privilege of some extra time with Ben and Elsa's girls while Ben and Elsa fought a hard battle against an infestation of small vermin in their apartment in Phoenix.  Their loss was our gain, and we enjoyed several weeks with Ada and Carys, while their poor parents and baby brother fought the good fight in Phoenix.

Late June saw us celebrating our Fourth Annual Cousin's Camp, with the parents and the littles and various other friends and relatives joining us to celebrate July 4th, all at our house in NM.  It was our first time to have 4 cousins attend, and our first time to have a boy! We had great fun sleeping in the camper in the back yard (the forests were closed due to fire concerns), hiking at Bandelier, doing crafts, and building a fort in the backyard.

All of these fun events were made possible by one major event that happened in May.  After 34 years at Los Alamos National Lab, Dave retired.  He set immediately to work renovating our bathroom, and hasn't slowed down since.  Since he was retiring, I decided this would be my first year in about 30 or so that I would not teach anything.  It has been a nice change, and I was ready for it! It has been wonderful to have a more flexible schedule, but what they say about retirement is true: we can't figure out how we ever had time to work!

One of our first fun retirement activities was to take up kayaking in an inflatable kayak.  We spent the summer enjoying the local reservoirs, and it has gotten us back to swimming laps at the local aquatic center!

Spring break in April found us gathering in the middle-of-nowhere-- quite literally!  We met outside of Chiricahua National Monument in southeastern Arizona for a week of hiking and relaxing, first with all the grands and their parents, and then with Chris' parents.  It made for great memories!

So, looking back, 2018 has been a busy year, full of change, full of challenge, and doubly full of blessing! We have been amazed over and over again with God's goodness to us, and His presence with us. And we pray that as our New Year begins, we will be ready for all the blessing and adventure God provides, as well as all the challenge and trial He sends. We know He will provide His presence to us as we walk the way before us.

May you also be ever in His presence, dear family, fond friends, and gentle readers. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!