| 2002 The Year in Review |
| Greetings to our Dear Friends Family! This comes to you with good thoughts and hope for many blessings to you and yours. As you can see from the accompanying photo card, our boys are growing, growing, growing! Like many of you, our year has been filled with ups and downs and everything in between. We wanted to share with you an update of what has been going on. Garrison turned 7 in October, and as you can see, after 3 years of waiting, though not for Christmas, he finally got his 2 front teeth! Garrison is in first grade and has a fabulous teacher, Miss Nash, at Grant Elementary. He has done great being mainstreamed into the classroom, but after a recent staffing, we are probably going to have to have him pulled out of the classroom more to help him deal with the increased and harder work. Garrison loves to play on the computer, build Legos and Bionicles, beat up on his brothers and last spring played goalie on an indoor soccer team. Grant turned 5 in February. He started Kindergarten at Grant Elementary this fall. For a while he kept leaving the �n� out of his first name and driving his teacher, Mrs. Houtz, crazy. She�d say, �Grant, you go to Grant school! You see Grant all over the place! Why can�t you spell Grant?� He�s finally mastered it, and now spells both his first and last name pretty well. Grant loves school. He loves to learn and really enjoys all of his classmates. He is a bundle of energy, and very dramatic! He played indoor soccer at the YMCA last spring with Garrison. He learned to ride a �two wheeler,� last winter, so we�re sure he�ll be tearing up the streets again this summer. Grant is a big helper around the house, likes to help mom with Griffin and loves to read bedtime stories. Griffin turned 3 in March. He had a �Pirate Ship� birthday party, and if you ever go shopping with him, he�ll pick out toys and say, �This is for my Birthday Party!� Griffin is a very active little boy. He loves keeping up with his big brothers, even imitating them. This summer, he was trying to play at a foosball table with his brothers and ended up getting hit in the mouth and getting one of his front teeth knocked out. It probably would have been more traumatic if we hadn�t been through it before. At least it was only one! Griffin got glasses this fall, we found out he was farsighted in one eye and nearsighted in the other. Anyway- he looks just as adorable with glasses! Griffin�s �school� is the YMCA. He goes into the child watch while mom works out and he thinks it is his school. He goes to MOPS (Mother�s of Pre-Schoolers) with mom twice a month. He loves to watch �Dora the Explorer� and �Blues Clues.� He loves writing and drawing and anything his brothers are doing! Jim is still working at Oracle. He was moved back to days in September. It was hard on all of us, because we loved having him working from home and being around all of the time. The loss of the 30% differential he had been making working off hours hurt, too. We�re managing with the one vehicle, though sometimes Danine feels like a taxi driver. Jim still has an interest in model rocketry, but with the drought and the Hayman fire, we didn�t get to do any flying this summer. Jim did get to go to Indianapolis, IN in May for Celebration II. It is the �Star Wars� convention sponsored by Lucas Films. Jim had a great time going dressed in his Jedi costume; his mother-in-law even put extensions in his hair so he looked more like �Qui Gon Jin� Griffin calls him �Qui Gon Jim.� We took a family trip in July to have a kind of a family reunion with the Moncher clan. Jim�s parents rented some time shares in Fairfield Bay, AR, and his siblings and the cousins got to spend some time together. We played in the swimming pool, went horseback riding and even explored some caves. It was a long drive, but worth it to help his parents celebrate 45 years of marriage. Danine is still a full time mom. She has done 3 shows this year, which has kept her busy. In March Play On! opened at the Encore! Dinner Theatre. Of course, Danine missed opening week because she was in the hospital having her gall bladder removed. Looking back, performing 2-3 shows a weekend a week after major surgery for 8 weeks may not have been the best idea, but- �The show must go on!� Danine continued cocktailing at the Encore! after her show closed until the Dinner Theatre closed in August. Danine worked for a short time at a steakhouse called �The Famous.� They hired her to work mostly lunches, and when Jim was moved back to days, she had to quit. She did have a fabulous experience playing �Maria- the Innkeeper�s Wife� in Man of LaMancha at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center in October, and currently she is singing and dancing in the chorus of Once Upon a Mattress. Danine is also active in her MOPS group as the Hospitality Chairperson, and participates in a women�s bible study twice a month. Of course she still loves cheering on the Broncos, watching �Survivor� and Harry Potter! Well, that pretty much fills you in! We hope you will have a joy filled holiday and we wish you many blessings in the upcoming new year! Much Love, Jim, Danine, Garrison, Grant and Griffin |
| Emails: Danine Schell Jim Moncher |
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