Sometimes, before you know it, three months go by. Such is the status of my life, at least. I've been meaning to update this blog for months (especially since I sent out New Year's letters inviting people to read this blog and keep updated on our lives), but now that I finally sit down to write, I've lost track of what it was that I wanted to say. That, also, is the status of my life, I guess. So this will be a short update just to let you know that we are still alive and well...and hopefully I'll be a bit better at getting another update or two in before summer break makes its way around!

Let me just start, then, by throwing out this Gerrit video (because it's what I do by default):

Seriously - this kid just cracks me up. He is learning at a million miles a minute and is a complete joy to have around (most of the time!). A friend of ours has adopted the habit of calling Gerrit's (rather large) belly his 'reputation'...so we can say things like, "His reputation precedes him" and "He is very well known for his reputation" and "He's got such a great reputation!" Haha. It makes me laugh.

In other news, school is going well. We are officially in uncharted territory, this being our first school year adopting the western school calendar. We have never had school on such hot days before. Our air conditioners are working over-time, and it's just the beginning of April! It is very strange to us to think about how many weeks are left of school, since at this time last year we were already on our summer break. The other funny thing that has been going through my mind is, "We only have two months of summer break this year? That's so short!" I guess the four-month break was a little too enjoyable last year!

Michael and I have long-ago settled into our routine of school-home-school-home back and forth-ness during the school day. The last few months have been a bit stressful in that area; we had a lot of weeks of school with no breaks...our 'spring' break of sorts is coming up at the end of this next week, and we really look forward to having a week off from school!

We will be coming back to the States this summer, splitting our time between the Midwest (Indiana and Michigan) and the Pacific Northwest (Washington). We aren't doing the crazy "lets-see-how-many-states-we-can-visit-in-our-summer-vacation" thing this year. You are welcome to make the trip to visit us in the places we will be, though, if we aren't hitting up your area of the US of A.

I'll go ahead and leave this update for now and (hopefully) come back to the blog in a relatively timely manner to throw out some other thoughts/reflections on our lives.