HI!

Hi Everyone -

I have heard that many people are glad to know that Micah can drink from a cup, but want to know what he can do now! I'm going to give you a verbal update instead of an update with a picture or video (mainly because I don't know how to do a pic or video). :-)

About Brett: He is supposed to graduate August 2009 so he's applying for jobs. He submitted 42 job applications to Universities with Engineering programs in the top 65. He is also in the midst of filling out an application for a prestigious post-doctoral fellowship with IBM as well as applying for industry jobs. In the midst of all of this he is finishing up his programing, experiments, and writing for his dissertation. Soon (hopefully!) he'll be traveling often for job interviews. It's exciting but crazy!

About Sarina: In January Sarina wrote an exegesis paper and sermon which she preached yesterday. A representative from the Pittsburgh Presbytery came to hear the sermon and evaluate her. She goes before the Committee on Preparation for Ministry on Wednesday to present her statement of faith and be examined, then Presbytery on Feb 5th for the same thing. If all goes well, she will be ordained on Feb 22nd! The service will be at Eastminster Presbyterian Church in Pittsburgh @ 3pm and you're all invited! Needless to say, there have been a lot of things to do in order to get everything completed. My Mom came to visit last week. Praise God! Before that I was only able to work on my myriad of things at night after Micah went to bed. I'm not sure how I would have finished everything if she hadn't come. Thanks Mom!

About Micah: Micah is 18-months-old. He is Mr. Constant Motion and Mr. Chatterbox. He's so much fun! He's running everywhere now and constantly has ideas about what to do next. He loves to talk and has a lot of words. Yesterday evening we went out to dinner and we asked Micah what he wanted and he said, "Soup!" In addition to soup, his favorite food is waffles, which he asks for often: "Faffle?" A new phrase he said yesterday is, "No way!" hahahaha! He also loves art. He likes to draw with pens, crayons, markers, and colored pencils. He likes to paint with finger paints and water colors. I'm sure he would like other mediums, but that's all we have at home! (I need to go shopping.) He always wants us to write "a Y!" or "a M!" He can do dots, lines, scribbles, etc. Yesterday he created his own signature: a super-spikey M followed by a frilly spiral (my interpretation, of course). He laughs now whenever I write it with sound effects. Today we were water-color painting a picture of the bus from the movie Cars and he wanted to paint the stars yellow. When he finished them all, he wanted me to paint more stars so he could paint them yellow. He knows his colors (his favorite is brown, followed by red, green, black, and purple), he can count, he can name most letters, he knows animals and their sounds, and all manner of vehicles. Wow! Brett and I are constantly amazed at how much Micah knows.

He is also a very caring person. Here's a cute Micah story to leave you with. This happened about a month and a half ago or so. I was upset about something (can't remember what) and I was crying in the kitchen. Brett was comforting me, of course! Micah came in from the living room when he heard me and said in a high pitched imitation of what I sounded like, "Mama, mama." He came to me and wanted to sit in my lap. By this time I had snot all over my face and Micah knows all about Kleenex and what they're for. So, I asked him, "Micah, would you get me a Kleenex, please?" He got this look on his face like, "I know how to do this!" He bounded off my lap and tore into the living room. Brett followed him and found him standing in the middle of the living room looking around with his arms out - he was looking for the Kleenex box. Brett pointed it out to him and he raced over, grabbed about 15, then tore back into the kitchen and thrust them up to me while trying to climb onto my lap at the same time. Oh! It was so cute and fabulous! I sat him on my lap, smiled, thanked him, and felt much better.

We hope that you are all doing well. It means a lot to us that you check our blog, even though we have been remiss at keeping it updated!

With much love,
Sarina