Fall

Dear family and friends,

We are so happy to be in October and officially into fall! Fall is Emily’s favorite season—she just wishes the leaves would change color here. David says they always do here too, yet she still goes through leaf withdrawals.

Since the last time we wrote, David has finished four weeks of Family Practice as well as eight weeks of Pediatrics. He tries very hard to balance school, his family, and his calling. According to Emily, David never complains about his schedule or responsibilities, and is very good about making time to play with William and spend time with her. She’s not sure how he manages so well, except that he is being blessed. He is really enjoying getting to directly apply all that he’s been studying the last two years.

William is now six months old! He is able to sit up on his own, which has opened up a whole new world for him. He seems to enjoy the new perspective. He does quite a few “push-ups” throughout the day, and often rolls over and back and forth, but is not yet to crawling. We suppose we need a little more time before he gets into everything. His latest trick is to make himself fall back from a sitting position and bounce on our bed. We love to watch him so excited. At five months he started eating baby cereal, and immediately loved it. William also loves his peas, carrots, green beans, pumpkin, and squash. He has also been experimenting with a few consonant sounds, including “ba”, “ga” and “da”.



After weeks of Emily shopping around, we finally settled on some curtains for our living room and kitchen to replace the ancient hand-me-downs that came with the house. Trying to find curtains that match our particular furniture and room color schemes, while trying to be economical, turned out to be a formidable challenge. Attempting to enlist David’s opinions on the matter was, by his own affirmation, futile, so Emily made the choice herself.

One of Emily’s Cub Scouts keeps her smiling; he stumped her at 20 Questions because she couldn’t come up with the planet Zena (the hotly debated tenth planet). How many of you could have gotten that? The next week when they were talking about prayer, he sincerely suggested we thank Father in Heaven that we are the third planet from the sun, and not the second or fourth. (We would burn up on Venus and freeze on Mars, of course!) He’s a smart 8-year-old!

Emily started teaching violin lessons to a beginner 6-year-old girl named Kylie, and they are off to a good start. We were a little concerned about William interrupting the lessons at first, but things have worked out great so far. Kylie’s parents have been pleased.

Emily has also really enjoyed some more crafty activities lately. After some experimentation, she finally figured out the trick to making homemade baby food with our food processor, which she finds very fun now. She recently enjoyed attending an enrichment class taught by a lady in the ward who makes cutout sugar cookies professionally, and looks forward to trying out some of her tricks. In addition, after about a year of making ice cream with mixed results, we’ve figured out the right factors to making it great. We are currently enjoying some very strawberry-y ice cream. The other day we had David’s family over, and his Dad thought it was store-bought.

We have started trading baby-sitting with two young couples in our ward so that we all can have regular nights out with our spouses. So far it has been a cinch: everyone's baby goes to bed without fuss around 7:00, so even when its our turn to baby-sit, we get the evening to ourselves.

Recently we enjoyed going out to an upscale steak place called Smith & Wollensky thanks to a gift card Emily’s boss gave us when Emily quit work and a special they have where you “pay your age” after 9:00 p.m. for an appetizer, entrée, and dessert. We estimated that it was normally a $150 meal! We were very impressed by the quality of the food and the service. They had great steak and HUGE slices of out-of-this-world 5-layer cake. It took us the next 3 days to finish our slices! It was a very memorable experience for us.

Yesterday, David surprised Emily with tickets to a Dallas Symphony performance. They performed Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto, Borodin's Polovtsian Dances (with full choir), and some contemporary atonal piece that we didn't like very much. The contemporary piece had a misguided attempt at light choreography during the purformance that left us underwhelmed. The night overall was very fun. We even chatted with an artist who was displaying some of his paintings in the symphony hall lobby.

That’s about it for us right now. We hope things are going well for you!

Love, David, Emily, and William