Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

I hope you were able to find our family blog from the note in our Christmas card. Please leave us comments-all you need to do is click on "Comments" and you can leave a note for all of us or individually to a post. Please check back for updates. We decided this was the easiest way to share our lives with friends and family. Ryan is giving up baseball in the Spring which will free his schedule for college trips-so we may be looking you up! We're hoping to take a nice trip on Spring break, since we only have 2 more before they start heading off to college. We're a pretty tight knit group, sharing a house w/3 teens, lots of Guitar Hero and Rock Band. A big basement with a "baffled" home theatre is sounding pretty good about now. At least we like the music, hard to believe they're playing all our retro music. I need to get a video of that and put it up. Frank's pretty good on vocals!
PS-Be sure to click on the link to Katie's finish at state (above right)-sorry about the quality, but it captures the excitement-btw, it's sounds like Frank, but it's another dad yelling "KATIE!". We were just happy to be there, maybe next year we'll be better prepared to video.

Michael

Michael (13) is a 7th grader at TMS and is doing well. He seems to be growing faster than his brother since he is already 6'0". He is playing basketball for the middle school team now (need to get some pictures posted); which means Dad doesn't have to coach anymore (yeh!). He also had a great cross country season, too and is looking forward to track (the mile?) and some spring league basketball. When he is not busy with schoolwork or sports, he can be found playing XBox live "Call of Duty-V World at War", which appears to be his real passion. Anyone know if it's possible to make money being an expert at that?

Basketball

Ryan (17) is a junior at Tippecanoe HS and this is his first time playing on the varsity basketball team. At 6'5"+ & 200#s, he is the tallest player on the team and plays center and forward. He plays tough defense and gets his share of rebounds while keeping the opposing big guys in check. He usually scores inside but he has a consistent outside shot too. He says he is also cleared to shoot 3s, if it is "the right 3", according to the coaches. He has started the last few games, but shares play time with some of the other forwards. Tipp graduated two really good players last year - the leading scorer and the league's leading rebounder, so this year's team of mostly juniors is still trying to figure things out. Ryan appears to be in the mix, for now anyway and we are thankful for that.

Ryan inducted to NHS

Ryan was inducted into NHS this week. He's been keeping up with his grades, despite being busy with sports. Basketball has started and he seems to be holding his own as Tipp's biggest center, 6'5" & 200#s-wow, still remember him as a baby! I'll try to get some pics up soon.