We send our love and blessings. In an effort to keep in touch and share our lives with you - our friends and family, we each chose an event that happened this past year to share with you.
Cool Technology — Matthew (16)
This summer we went on vacation to Washington to visit Caleb. From Michigan to Moses Lake, Washington is a 2,100 mile drive. It took us 2 ½ days to get there. We picked up Caleb and went to Seattle to see the city and took some tours. The first one was the Boeing factory in Seattle. Boeing is one of the largest plane manufacturing companies in the U.S. An interesting thing we learned on our tour is that Boeing works 24/7. My favorite part of the vacation was the Microsoft Campus visitor center. 
Microsoft showed all of their products like the Zune HD, Xbox 360, Windows 7, and the Microsoft Surface which was a coffee table touch screen. It was a lot of fun to play with and only cost about $12,000. Later we went to an Apple store to play with the Ipad and Iphone 4. Technology is cool.Cold but Beautiful — John
While in Washington we rented a beach house for 4 nights on the Pacific Ocean, where Washington and Oregon connect. It was beautiful on the beach, but we could not swim there because the rip tides and undertows made it too dangerous. One day we took a drive down the Oregon coast and stopped at Cannon beach. 
We skim-boarded, threw the Frisbee and splashed around knee deep in the very cold water. I reminded the boys that we had swam in the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico many times before, but never in the Pacific Ocean. We all agreed to do it and jumped in and “swam” a few strokes and got out of there fast. It was very cold. The Pacific is very beautiful with rocks and cliffs, quite different from the Atlantic.
Learning Experience — Caleb (20)
Greetings from Washington, this past year has been an eventfully and exciting year for me. In June I finished all the requirements for my Bachelor’s degree and graduated from Thomas Edison State College with my BSBA in Computer Information Systems. It is such an awesome feeling to be done with school after 28 months of study. Now that I have finished my degree I am able to continue learning more skills in my real area of interest, Web Application Development, by accepting a full-time job with CollegePlus!, the company I had been interning with for the past year while earning my degree. During my internship I was working in the CollegePlus! IT department but my new job is leading our internal software development project. It’s been a great learning experience working with many different people in the organization to develop requirements for the software and interacting with the outsourced portion of our development team. I really am blessed to be working in a job that I really enjoy and I am excited to see what God has for me this next year.
Fantastic Season — Jacob (19)
This year, just like the last two years, I played football. Since this was my senior year I really wanted to have a great year. This summer I lifted weights consistently in the off-season. Our team used a weight room at a local school to workout in; that helped me a lot once the season started. We had 25 guys on our team, where in the past we have only had about 15 to 18 guys. That was awesome, because it meant I didn’t have to play as much on defense, plus we could play against each other in practice “11 on 11” just like a game. In our last game we were actually losing by one point at halftime, but thankfully we won the game by one point. I thought about that game a lot afterwards, just thinking how horrible a feeling that would have been to win every game and then end my high school career with a loss. We ended up having a fantastic season; we went 10-0, undefeated!
Challenging — Miriam
In a few weeks I am going to finish what I started over 30 years ago – a bachelor’s degree in Accounting. As I was helping Caleb and Jacob work on their degrees through distance learning, I realized that distance learning would work for me also. I transferred over 90 college credits from Oral Roberts University, Lansing Community College and Michigan State University to Thomas Edison State College, earned 23 credits through CLEP tests, 6 credits through TECEPs (Thomas Edison State College Examination Program) and 15 credits through online classes. I have a few more weeks in my last two online classes and will graduate in March, 2011. These last six months have been challenging for me and my family. We will all rejoice when I am finished!
