The Last Post of 2019

We had an incredible year in 2019. It was filled with love, hope, fun, challenges, work, struggle and most of all family. We tried to fill our home with the love of Christ this year. This is actually one of my favorite posts of the year because I get to take a step back and look at what really mattered. Here are the things that I look back on as our big events from 2019.

Goals:
We did not have big goals this year, here is what we wrote at the beginning of the year.

So I guess this year will be a low key goal year, and that's just fine.

I would say, our family goal is to be kind to each other, spend quality time together, and transition to our new life as a family of 6! And that's a big enough, wonderful enough goal for us.

I think that adequately describes how we were feeling and what we tried to do. I feel like we were successful. I think that Shantel would agree that at times this was a difficult year. Difficult to know how to be the best parent we can be, difficult to give all the energy needed to care for this family, difficult to get through the times when when felt down and depressed. However, through it all, we strove to draw close as a family and to our Savior.

Homeschool:
This is one of the biggest successes of the year in my mind. Lydia has been thriving in homeschool. She did fantastic through the spring and into summer. Trying to homeschool with a new baby proved to be a huge challenge and Shantel and Lydia both took on that challenge head on. They had a great fall and Lydia continues to do great. Austin made tremendous progress in his growth and especially in his speech therapy. Shantel was able to balance caring for all four of our amazing Children.

10 Year Anniversary:
Shantel and I celebrated in our 10th anniversary. In truth- we did it without a ton of fanfare. However, I think that is one of the strengths of our marriage. Our love and togetherness is not built on big events, but instead in little moments day to day. Our love grows because we love to laugh and talk and just be together...all the time. At the grocery store, doing dishes, playing games or on vacation...we just love to be together. A 10 year anniversary trip is in the works when Lucy gets old enough.

Lucy:
We welcomed Lucy Holland to our family in June and absolutely adore her. Not just us, but each one of the kids loves and adores and hugs and kisses her all the time. She is so sweet and beautiful. She is such a good baby and fills our home with happiness. We are so grateful to have her in our family and that she arrived safely and healthy.

Lucy's Eyes:
In August/September we began to worry about Lucy's inability to track objects with her eyes or focus on anything. She could not tell we were there unless we talked or made noise. In truth, we have just begun on this journey with her, both her life, and her vision. We have loved so much being with her. We have learned a lot and she has improved so much in her vision. She was diagnosed with Nystagmus and Albinism and we have learned a lot and developed our faith in the Lord. We love Lucy and are so grateful for her.

Basement: 
We decided in August, that we really wanted to finish the storage room and close off the Utility room so that our kids could play in the basement more easily. Next thing we knew, we had decided to finish the whole basement. It has been so much fun to work with my Dad (and Bruce) in the basement. Shantel and I have worked hard and made a ton of progress, and have completed framing, electrical, HVAC, bathroom, plumbing and done our inspection. We also had someone come to hang drywall and do mudding and painting. We are so excited to be able to use our basement space. Scott and then my Dad and Bruce have spent countless hours helping us, and I am so grateful.

As we say goodbye to 2019 and look back on our successes, we can't wait for everything that 2020 will bring.

New Year's with the Walkers

With this scheduled to be the off year for Christmas, the Walker Clan decided to do a New Year's get together and spend 2-3 days right at New Year's together. To kick it off, we started with the Juniper's baby blessing with Matt and Brooklyn in American Fork. It is so cute to see both Lucy and Juniper right together. Lucy is bigger, but they have so many Walker features in them, it is cute.

We took the chance to grab a family picture.

Then we went up to Morgan with everyone a couple days before New Year's. We had such a great time. Shantel and I really enjoy spending time with her family and it is so nice to be together. Jenna and Kevin could not make it, but everyone else was there. We planned to play games as much as we could. We loved that and also just sitting around talking to everyone.

Matt with the two babies.

This picture is so cute, Caleb literally fell asleep in his chair, it was only like 6:30.

The next morning, the kids were so excited for kids pancakes with Grandpa. It is one of their favorite things at the Walker house. It was also fun because we had Brooklyn there who is a real artist. Everyone took turns making fun pancakes. (Not sure if this is covered before, but they are called kid pancakes because Grandpa Walker draws kids with the pancake batter). Austin and Caleb were so excited to help Grandpa make the batter, get everything ready and then make there own pancakes.

We took a lot of pictures with Lucy and Juniper together.

This is a game called Carcassonne. We loved it. We played it basically as much as we could all day. There were a bunch of different expansion packs, so we kept playing with different packs and had so much fun. I love playing games with this group.

That night we were also really excited to play "Dungeons and Dragons." Everyone did prep work the week before to get their characters ready. Matt acted as Dungeon Master. Shantel's character was a Gnome named Elodie Fennsdaughter. She is known as the scourge of the Giants. Meanwhile, I was a half elf that loved to play music and was named Finnoty, "Finn" for short. Elodie and I met a while back and now were joining this crew for an adventure. We had so much fun with the role play and really enjoyed it. Shantel and I have never done anything like this at all, but had so much fun.

We welcomed in the New Year with Sparkling Cider and watching the ball drop.

The next day we had the Walker Cup competition. We started with cookie decorating.

Here are all of the competitors.

And the cookies. They look so good.

Shantel did this amazing Snowglobe and I did this Christmas tree. Shantel's cookie was clearly the best. We also thought the other cookies were so incredible it was hard to pick a favorite. We voted and the combined points led to your team score.

We also did Karoke later on and the kids loved it so much! They had never done it before, but thought it was so fun.

Shantel reading the kids books before bed.

We finished the walker cup with a few more games which included Carcassone and Melissa and Blake took home the title for the 2nd straight year! Congrats to them.

Meanwhile the kids fund a love the next morning for the foosball table.

We gather all our things together and look, we practically brought our whole house.

We had so much fun with the Walker's and such a great New Year's party. We love them very much and were glad to think about what a great year we had!