Dear Family and Friends,
Here we are at the end of another fabulous year! I always
love sitting down to write our Christmas letter and seeing how blessed we have
really been. The daily trials,
challenges and struggles don’t seem so hard when we look back over the year as
a whole and can see all the blessings.
Our family has had a great year and are so very blessed.
Oakley just turned 17 and is a senior in high school. Where has that time gone?!?! We are in the
thick of filling out college applications, scholarship applications and trying
to enjoy her senior year along the way.
Oakley’s highlight of this past year was when her and her duet partner,
Brooklyn, were chosen among hundreds of other pro dancers to dance off for not
only one MVP, but TWO MVP’S at
Nationals. What an incredible night!
They have put so much into dancing over the years and that alone made all the
hours and hours and hours in the dance studio worth it! So Awesome! She is in
the process of trying out for a tour team to Italy next summer. We will see how that goes.
Dallin is 15 and towers over his mom now. It is hard to discipline him when I have to
look UP at him. Hahahaha! He is a
great kid! He knows how to work hard and works his guts out every opportunity
he gets. He worked 60+ hour weeks easy
this summer right alongside his dad building bins and on the farm. He is definitely our best help! He is a
freshman at the high school. School
doesn’t come easy to Dallin and has been the cause of several tears and fights
with his mom already this year. He has
to work so hard for every good grade he gets.
He has just joined the FFA program and seems to have found something he
likes! Hallelujah! He should be able to get his drivers license sometime this
week or next and is super excited about that! Me too! :)
Rhett is 13 now and also as tall as his mom. I’m pretty sure when all is said and done I
am going to be the shortest person in our family! :( Rhett started at the
junior high this year and is doing great! He is such a social kid and has a
million friends. He really enjoys
school. Crazy that this is the same kid
that as a little boy I would pray through tears every night that he could just
find ONE friend. He has been blessed.
Rhett and Dallin both got bows for their birthdays this year and he
discovered he could out shoot his big brother.
It has made for some fun competitions.
Rhett is looking forward to getting on the ski hill and is counting down
the days till it opens.
Laiklie is 11 and in 5th grade. She is our last one at the elementary. She has had an interesting start to the year
with her teacher having a baby just one month into school. But things have settled down and seem to be
going smoothly now. She is so much fun!
She loves helping her aunt next door with her babies, being with friends,
dancing with her big sister and she just had her Christmas piano recital. She has also had the opportunity to take some
tennis lessons this summer and fall through the school and is actually pretty
good at it. She came home with a candy
bar on the last day telling me she was the winner of the entire competition. She is also going to be an orphan in the
drama club’s production of Annie that is coming up quickly.
Ryan is busy farming and I am busy with primary and filling
in at the school when they need me. We
follow the kids around and swear that our lives are crazier now that they are
big than when they were little. And
those were some pretty crazy years. ;) We were fortunate enough to take the
kids on a cross country RV road trip from Washington DC – home this fall. We stopped at every history and church
history site we could squeeze in along the way.
It was an INCREDIBLE trip and so much fun to spend a week together in an
RV. We had a blast!
We hope this letter finds you all well. We think of you all often and count our
family and friends as one of our greatest blessings. May we all remember the Savior as we celebrate
this beautiful time of year.
With Love, The Hawkins family
