State Competition

Here is Blake's cheering section at the State Wrestling Finals in Tacoma. Ann flew in Thursday night to be with us. She was suppose to go to a conference with Keith (my mind went Blank where it was, but it was some place warm and nice.) Ann decided to fly home instead. We were excited to have her. Erin took almost all the photos for me while I used the video camera. As you will see below she did a great job. Mickayla was SICK of wrestling. She chose to play at Camille's instead of coming with us. She reported to us that she had a great time at Camille's. Some of the time at the wrestling match I think Dad would have rather been playing at Camille's. It got really noisy at times. Any very boring at times also.

The Tacoma Dome was so full of mats that you couldn't take a picture of all the mats in one photo. Ann took these pictures to give a feel of how massive this competition was.

This is the side that Blake wrestled on. There were 16 mats. The 4 A schools wrestled on the 4 mats closest on the right hand side and one mat on the left hand side. We could see the wrestling very well from our seats.

Blake lost his first match in the State competition. He pinned the guy in the second competition and lost his third match. It was an exciting day.

Blake is pinning his man. He did great. He was able to pin him in the second round.

Reed and Blake joyfully talking after Blake's win. They were both pretty excited.

These are all the boys that went to State from Redmond High School. It was Redmond High School's best year ever. Only 4 boys were able to wrestle. The other 5 boys were alternates. There are also 7 coaches in this picture. One of them is Reed.

Regional Competition

Reed has had a great year doing some volunteer work. He has enjoyed being an assistant coach at the high school. It has been a great experience for him. He has even been asked to be an assistant coach for a free style wrestling club. He wants to do it. He will be starting working at the Tire store again on Monday. He is hoping his schedule will work out so he can do both.

Mickayla is enjoying the Wrestling match. She really got so tired of being at the wrestling matches. I started bringing movies for her to watch. She has been a good sport about spending so much time in High School gyms.

Blake took 4th place at the Regional Wrestling Match. He fought hard to make it to 4th place. He did awsome. Now he heads for State this weekend.

Redmond High School Wrestling is #1. For the first time since 1967, Redmond High School wrestling took 1st place at Kingco Wrestling tournament. What a year for our guys in Wrestling!

Christmas morning
Christmas morning line up. Will is not to excited about all of this. Mickayla was a true believer though. The night before water was linking into Mickayla's room from the roof damage. We didn't know about it until the rain storm hit that night. I got Mickayla settled down in a dry part of her bed and to sleep before Kim and Reed went up on the roof to try to protect the Mickayla's room from anymore water damage. Kim and Reed were putting the tarps on the roof and using heavy planks to weight them down. It was horriable noisy but I didn't think much about it. The next morning Mickayla woke up and said that she heard Santa on the roof the night before. I told her I heard him also. I told Santa he better loss weight. He was to heavy and made to much noise. Mickayla was very excited!

Will didn't understand that he needed to be excited about Christmas. He soon figured it out. This picture is of all the kids coming down the hall to see what Santa brought. 

Christmas Elves strikes again

We stayed with the tradition of being Christmas Elves 

Everyone helped decorate 

Wind storm
A strong wind storm hit us Dec. 14th. It was just one day before Ann came to stay with us. She ended up camping out with us. We went 5 days with out electricity. That means no heat. We all did well. We all had something we could not wait to do when the electricity came on. I think all of us could not wait to sit on a toliet seat without worry of frost bite! I feel bad that Ann had to suffer through it with us, but she was a good sport. Our house doesn't look that bad from this picture but we found out today that we will have to have the roof replaced and the ceilings in Blake and Mickayla's room replaced. The damage was worse than we thought. We are still very grateful we are all well and our house came through as well as it did.

Our neighorhood was hit hard by the storm. This house is 5 houses from us. IT was hit by 5 trees. It's chimney is gone.  

This is a house at the top of our street. 

This truck wasn't very lucky. It's engine was in very poor shape after this tree landed on it. 

This tree fell between the house and the two cars int he driveway. It was amazing.

It took two of these dump trucks to haul the debris from our yard alone. This picture was taken from our front yard. 

Reed, Blake and Scott kept warm moving debris from the yard to the street. I didn't get a picture of Scott working. We sure appreciated his help getting this all moved. 

This is kind of a cool picture of us playing games. It wasn't really this dark, the next picture shows it being a lot lighter than it was. The amount of light was kind of in between these two. .

We had fun playing games by candle light. You can see by how we were dressed that we weren't freezing. Even Ann just has a sweater on. We were warm in the living area. Now the bedroom and bathrooms were a whole different story.