It is Brooklynne's 31st birthday today. She is a special woman and I love her to death. I can't imagine life without her. Here's a picture of us at our rehersal dinner. It's crazy to think that I love her more today than I did eight years ago. If you see her, give her a squeeze and tell how great it is that she was born today!

I don't blog as much or as regularly as I used to. The blog used to be a great way to keep in touch with people, but other folks started using twitter and facebook, and most of the blogs I followed kind of started drying up. Then, I took on this house project that takes up almost all my free time, and my own blog has suffered.

Still, there are people that only keep up with me through my blog's feed, so I wanted to share some sad news with you guys--last week Brooklynne and I lost the baby we were expecting to be born later this year. We don't have a real explanation for it... the heart just stopped beating for some reason. Obviously, we're wrestling through a wide range of emotions, but time will bring healing, and we praise God's faithfulness even in these tragic circumstances.

On a more trivial note, this week also brought sadness to my heart in the firing of Butch Davis--not that I disagree with the move, or care one iota for Davis's situation--but because I feel very pesimistic about our chances for success after this season. We'll probably do alright this year before recruiting tapers off and the NCAA penalties come down, but don't expect to beat state, and don't expect a bowl game. And I'll go on record now... we may be competitive in any given game, but I predict we will not be competitive for the league title for another 10-15 seasons. Everett, please prove me wrong, but I'm afraid we have been consigned to 3-8 football hell for the all of the foreseeable future.

More pictures after the jump....

I'm finally putting some pictures up from the beach. Mostly the kids--more pics after the jump.

Last night was a tough game to watch. I have two suggestions for the Heels: start making your free throws and stop taking 3-pointers. An ill-advised 3 is essentially a turnover and we left a lot of points at the line. I don't remember who I was talking to yesterday, but I said if we hold smith to under 30, we'll have a chance to win. Unfortunately I was right.

Silver lining--we still control our own destiny. Win the rest and we still win the ACC, and I would rather win in March than in February.

Just for a pick-me-up, here are some pics of the kids.

Recently, HJ has been a real challenge. She is very headstrong and she is prone to fly into screaming fits if she doesn't get her way. Most of the time she's great, but occassionally she gets into a pattern that brings Brooklynne and I to the end of our ropes and we find ourselves asking what else we can do.

This weekend, there was a night when Beau was crying (he is being weened off his binky) and HJ woke up kicking and screaming. It was not the first fit she had thrown that day, but this time, she was so worked up that she couldn't even stop crying and shaking to tell us what was wrong. I wondered if she saw that Beau was getting attention by crying, or if she had had a bad dream and was having a hard time separating her dream from reality, but whatever the case, the fit went on for 30-45 minutes without either of us being able to calm her down. Brooklynne and I were exhausted from working on the house, we had not had good sleep in the past few nights, and felt like we had twin infants on our hands due to the prolonged late night fits.

Anyway, in desperation Brooklynne and I turned to prayer. First, we prayed with HJ (though she would hardly calm down enough to do it), and then we prayed together for peace, patience, love, kindness, and wisdom.

The results were incredible. HJ calmed down and fell asleep. Brooklynne and I felt relieved. And despite the lack of sleep that night, HJ had a great day (behaviorally) yesterday. This made me wonder if prayer has not been central enough in our parenting process all along. We have always prayed for our kids and with our kids, but not so much as an intregral part of guidance, discipline, and care for them. Praying has been more about teaching the kids to share their lives with God and asking God to protect/bless them--but not so much about prayer as a tool of including the Lord actively while instructing and nurturing them. I'm starting to feel like I should shift my focus a little.

I'm ringing in 2011 with a new urge to blog, so here I am. Not much news for today, but I wanted to get on the board for Jan.1.

We celebrated Christmas in Utah this year. I had to come back early for work, but Brooklynne and the kids will be back Wednesday, so I'm kicking it alone for the next couple of nights.

The Wasatch Front got 18 inches of snow on Thursday, so we took HJ skiing for the first time. She did pretty well. She could manuver and keep her balance, but had trouble stopping. I asked her what was her favorite part of the day and she told me "riding the magic carpet." The simple pleasures....  

Beach week is about half-way over and we've had pretty good luck so far, although tarballs about the size of large pancakes started washing up yesterday. We're going to try to collect some and bring it back in a jar if possible. We saw a couple BP guys on patrol, and there is some kind of large-scale operation maybe 500 yards off the coast right in front of our beach house. Anywho, we've suspended swimming, probably for the rest of the week, but we got a couple good days in before the oil arrived and here are the pictures so far. We'll have another update about the conditions on the beach later tonight. Click "continue reading" for the rest of the pics.

For the last post of 2009, I'll leave you with pictures of our three kids, which we took today as we finished up a round of disc golf at the park. Congrats again to all the 31-Day Challenge winners. Remember to email me your snailmail addresses.