Family Holiday Letter and Update 2021
Well, here it is December 2021 and it seems like it's been quite awhile since we did our last family newletter! We did a blog post update a few years back (standringfamilyupdates.
Jim is still working at his dental office here in Crescent City. He contemplated building a new larger building here, since it is a pretty underserved area, but decided after weighing all factors that adding on a couple operatories to his existing building, which is in a great spot, made more sense. That will likely happen in early 2022. For our church duties, he and I had been working in the Medford, Oregon temple (our nearest one) on a monthly basis up until all temples closed for the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020. It has not resumed a schedule yet, due to planned remodeling, but will likely start again also in early 2022. We have been spending some more time down in Fullerton in Southern California after Jim's dad passed away on Dec. 23, 2017 and since the following year we bought that childhood home of Jim's (where his dad had lived) from Jim's siblings and now have it as a second home and vacation rental.
Lori-- I have continued working as a part-time speech pathologist with our school district, including through much of COVID where we had to change things up and learn to do tele-speech therapy, up until this June (2021) where I decided that enough was enough and stopped working to devote some more time to other family things. My father ended up passing away a week later on Father's Day (June 20, 2021), so since then, I spent about half my time for the summer and fall in Utah with my Mom (92 years old, turning 93 this month) taking turns with siblings to stay with her in her Provo house. She and my dad had just celebrated their 64th wedding anniversary the month before he passed. I had worked for at least a year with my dad to help edit a book about his life with the Storyworth program and happily it was finished up and ready early in 2021 so he could see it and enjoy it before his passing. I also stopped teaching piano once the pandemic hit. I had been taking some harp lessons and played in a couple Christmas concerts, one with our adult community choir, but that has stopped as well. Life has really been weird for the last couple years, right? Jim and I (and Daniel) did take classes to get our concealed carry permits, to be better prepared in these troubling times. The three of us (and our older son Garrett, too) have all gone target shooting in various locales to hone our skills.
Jim and I celebrated our big 40th anniversary in December 2020 in Cancun at Club Med and it was really, really wonderful! The occupancy was very low and they were all being really careful, but it was a wonderfully relaxing and beautiful anniversary. Then near the end of our week there, we flew our 2 youngest kids, Kira and Daniel along with Daniel's new wife, Hannah, down there to join us for Daniel's 22nd birthday on Dec. 20th and so we got to go scuba diving on Cozumel and had a lovely time before coming back to Southern California for Christmas itself. All our youngest 3 kids (Mark Hunter, Kira and Daniel) have gotten scuba certified along with us so we have been able to go on some group dives with them, which has been fun.
Speaking of our youngest 3 kids, after Mark Hunter (goes by "Hunter" now) and also Kira came home from their missions (we picked Kira up in Tempe, Arizona, which was great because we had wanted to pick up some of our other kids when they finished but it just had never worked out for one reason or another) and they went back to BYU, and did some trips together such as up to Idaho to watch the great eclipse in August of 2017. (Jim and I went up to Philomath, Oregon to our daughter-in-law's parents' house to watch it--just incredible!) We had 4 of our kids at BYU the same time that school year for 2017 (David, Mark, Kira and Daniel) and they even played on an intramural soccer team together. That was fun to watch them! Then Daniel, our youngest son, got his mission call to Mexico City Southeast Mission and left for the Mexico City Mission Training Center (where Kira had also gone for her Spanish training) in March 2018. (We managed to do a big whole-family photo shoot in Utah--during a blizzard!--before he left.) He served well his whole two years (even with needing surgery for a hernia in the middle of it...the mission president had called to see if we thought he should come home for that, but we decided it would be less disruptive to his mission if he stayed-- and that's what he wanted too, so we just had faith that surgery in Mexico would go alright!-- and luckily it did!) and he had applied to stay for an extension, but then COVID hit and closed so many things down and they shipped out all the Americans from his mission (and many others). So he arrived home on April 1, 2020 and had orders to complete a 14-day quarantine. So we let him stay in our ocean view vacation rental here in town so it would be a nice quarantine for him! he reconnected virtually with another BYU student (Hannah Hawkins) that he'd fallen in love with right before he left on his mission and once off quarantine he drove up to Washington State to visit her. Before we knew it, they were engaged (in May) and then they got married on July 23rd down in Arizona where she had grown up and we thought that COVID would be having less of an effect down there, but many temples and other paces still remained closed, so they were married by her father in a beautiful historic venue there. After a honeymoon in Florida, they came to live in our beach house in Crescent City and then the next month (August) when our Medford, Oregon temple opened back up briefly for limited services, they were able to go there with us and some family for them to be sealed for eternity in the house of the Lord! (They even invited Jim and me along on their 1st anniversary trip to Turks and Caicos Island Club Med this summer (July 2021) which was a fantastic locale and trip!) Theirs was actually our 2nd COVID wedding since our son Mark Hunter and his fiancee Samantha Smith (a fellow Frankfurt Germany returned missionary) that he'd gotten together with in Southern California while he was working on his Masters Degree in Electical Engineering at Cal State Fullerton (and living at Jim's mom's house) while Sam was working on her doctoral degree in Entomology at UC RIverside...and they decided to marry in the Newport Beach Temple on March 14th, 2020! I had tried to talk them into waiting another month for his younger brother Daniel to get home from his mission, but in retrospect, I'm glad they didn't! You may recall that was the weekend that a lot of the world shut down, so they were lucky to be one of the last few couples to be married in the temple there before everything screeched to a halt! (I heard on the plane returning home that my school district had shut down for 2 weeks while they tried to figure out what to do!) So Hunter and Sam moved into a new ward area in Corona and never got to meet the members there in person for like a year or something while services were on zoom for so long! Later on in the fall (10/17/20) we held a Drive-Through Meet and Greet reception here in Crescent City for the 2 sets of newlyweds! Daniel and Hannah continued living in Crescent City for the rest of that school year while doing virutal BYU classes and working at Jim's office until this summer 2021 where they moved back to Utah to attend in-person classes this year there, and reside with Hannah's family for the time being.
Mark Hunter (after finishing up his 2018 BYU bachelors degree in Applied Physics) was able to recently complete his EE Masters at CSUF and now is working for Raytheon. He is considering applying to Law School now and is interested in doing Patent Law. Kira graduated with her bachelors in Exercise and Wellness in April 2021 and got accepted to Utah College of Dental Hygiene in Orem, UT where she started classes the very next month in May of this year. She has a year left of that program to complete. Her final 2 years at BYU she was able to again be in the BYU Color Guard with the marching band and we were able to travel to many games to see her perform, though the 2020 fall season only allowed fans in for one game that we could attend...It was still special and great to watch and she was able to graduate having been with Color Guard for all her college undergraduate years! After her mission, she was also able to service as an EFY (Especially For Youth) counselor like her older brother Mark Hunter had done and she really loved that also. Daniel still has a couple years to go of undergrad at BYU (after he used up the UVU scholarship money they gave him and so is now fulltime at BYU). He is again auditioned for and made it into the BYU Men's Chorus (he loves to sing and had done a solo at his high school graduation and in various concerts during high school), and this spring (in May 2022) they are going to do a choir tour to Sweden, Latvia and Estonia! That reminded us of the days when our high school choirs would travel and we would always sign up as chaperones to travel with them so we signed up to likewise go with the BYU Men's Chorus on this trip--especially exciting since it goes to Sweden where most of my ancestors (and even my maternal grandparents) were born. Turns out, due to contact my mother had from her mission there and also visiting there with some of her siblings, that we still have some second and thrid cousins there with whom I've made contact and said they'd love to have us come visit them! We also have some other friends there from a brief previous visit that we hope to see again! After our kids had graduated from high school, a community choir for adults got formed here in our town by a previous high school director with whom we'd traveled and this adult choir also traveled to Europe in Fall 2018 so Jim and I joined up to travel with them and sing ourselves this time. It was so wonderful! We toured through Germany, Poland and Italy and sang in all these amazing historic places, including in St. Peter's in the Vatican! We were in Florence, Italy for Thanksgiving so we had some of our kids fly to join us (Garrett and wife Chelsea, Kira, Mark and Daniel) and we had a restaurant there do their best to do up an American Thanksgiving dinner for us and some of the other choir members that wanted to come. Very memorable! Then Jim and I stayed on in Europe for a few extra days to see a few extra places-- Venice, Berlin, Athens and Stockholm with only a day in each place (and with a couple brief stopovers, like Barcelona)! On the way to Stockholm at a stopover in Kiev, Ukraine, I accidently left my iPad (that I'd been using to take photos) on the plane and they wouldn't let me go back in to get it or I would have missed the connection in a very snowy and kind of scary place!, so that began a months-long journey of frustration and then some miracles for me to be able to make connections with people who were finally able to go back to that airport and retrieve my long-lost iPad successfully and have it shipped back to me! Some people who thought I'd never see it again were very amazed, but I hadn't given up hope! Daniel is also taking gymnastics at BYU now after having done lots of pole vaulting at an indoor club in Utah following his vaulting and track events in high school, including competing at the Region 16 Junior Olympic championships after high school with pole vaulting, long and triple jumps and the 100 meter running events.
As for our other older kids-- Jimmer (Jamie) is continuing his work in Utah as a dentist. He still works some days at the Lexington Heights Dental office he's been at for several years, and he recently had a new office built and now works there in his own office 3 days a week at Vineyard Heights Dental. While it was being built, he spend the fall during construction coming to Crescent City and working in our dental office on Fridays and Saturdays commuting from Utah! It was nice having him here for those times and working with Jim in the office. I also worked at the front desk for much of the time when he was in the office to book his appointments and collect the fees for him. He and his wife April just had their 6th child this year, a little boy named Brigham. Previously in 2019 and late 2018, all our married sons had new babies during that time! Jimmer and Jason had boys (Bowen and Miles) and Garrett and David had girls (Navy and Lucy). Jimmer and April had pulled through some hard times-- after losing their 4th child as an infant due to a heart defect, just a few months later they found out that their young 2 and a half year old daughter Mazy had leukemia, so that was a devasting time. Amazingly, she has pulled through it to a cure thanks to lots of prayers and the great care at Primary Children's Hospital. Now she is doing well (she even got to dance on stage with the professional Ballet West company in Salt Lake), and their family also moved into a beautiful brand new house in American Fork, UT about a year ago.
Jason is continuing working as a doctor in Nephi, Utah both at 2 clinics and at the hospital in the emergency room and delivering babies. He was the first in our family to contract COVID early on in 2020 due to exposure from a patient. They bought a house in Nephi and we had our big family Thanksgiving there shortly after they came there in 2017, in their huge basement area downstairs. My parents and sister Caralee's family were able to join us also. Jason's family has had some challenges with their 2 youngest kids being immunocompromised so they have had to stay isolated at home for a lot of the pandemic, but things are starting to look up for them now in that regard. They did manage to take a driving trip up to see us this fall in September and the weather was gorgeous for river floating, beach combnig, cookouts, etc. so they had a grand time! Our oldest grandson had come visiting, too a couple years back (while his dad was working with us in the office here), for his birthday and we similarly showed him all around the redwoods,drive-through tree, beach, aquarium and so forth. David's family came last year for a similar visit. It's great to have kids bring their families back for visits!
Garrett applied for and got accepted to a one year Biomedical Sciences Masters degree program at Midwestern University in Glendale, Arizona, and then did so well that he was one of the first in his class to be accepted to their dental school for the following year. We all were so happy for him and felt it was a great blessing and answer to prayers for him. He is now in his final year of dental school and will finish in June 2020. We had hoped he may be so inclined to come back to Crescent City to work here with our office for a couple years at least, but they (he and his wife and 3 kids) have decided they really like Arizona for a lot of reasons so are likely to stay there for awhile to work when he gets finished. Since Garrett decided not to work in Crescnet City, that was one reason we felt that it would be good not to build the huge new office but just add on to the one we already have. One of our nephews, Michael, came to live with us during the summer of 2020 to work in the office also, and see how he liked dentistry and he ended up liking it and applied to the smae Masters program that Garrett had done at Midwestern and then he was able to get accepted to dental school also and started this fall at the Chicago campus of Midwestern University.
David, after finishing up his BYU Bachelors and Masters degrees in Mechanical Engineering (doing his masters graduation ceremony the same day his brother Mark Hunter had his bachelors degree ceremony) is working for for a biomedical company and they live in Midvale, Utah near Salt Lake City. They bought a house and have been working on lots of home projects together in their house and yard to make it their own. His wife, AmberLee finished up her BYU degree in Family History and worked for awhile at the church history library in Salt Lake and is now working on her Masters Degree along with being mom to their 3 kids.
We have still managed to do some trips and reunions despite these crazy times. Before the pandemic, we had taken our staff to Hawaii for the American Dental Association convention and some of them, including me, even tried out skydiving! What a thrill! (Later just this Spring, Jim and I and Daniel and Hannah went to Hawaii again, staying at Hilton Hawaiian Village, and this time Daniel and I went skydiving up from an even higher height! A "fun" mother-son acitivity--haha! :D Very exciting! Jim and Hannah watched us from a safe distance on the ground and hoped we'd make it down okay!--We did!) Jim and Kira and I are going to the Big Island of Hawaii right after Christmas to check it all out! Should be fun! Probably no sky-diving though...just some scuba diving and volcano climbing! Jim and I had gone on a cruise just about a month before the pandemic hit, and we do plan to do another one early in 2022 around Valentines Day. In May of this year, we took the dental staff to a convention after a long break from that, and this one was the Texas Dental Association in San Antonio Texas (where our oldest son served his mission-- we tried to get him to come along, but since his wife was about to have a baby, that didn't quite work out!). We did have fun visiting the Alamo and taking the river boats along the River Walk and going up in the tall needle-like building and I won the convention exhibit hall scavenger hunt contest. Later Jim and I went just ourselves to this year's ADA convention in Las Vega and the California Dental Convention in San Francisco. Then earlier this month, Jim worked with Garrett on a dental service prject in Arizona and we also visited Medieval Times in Scottsdale with their family. Loads of fun! Last year around this time we had attended a Christmas Fair at the Scottsdale Fairnont Princess resort and it was beautuiful and fun! My 2 sisters and I got to take a driving trip down to Capitol Reef National Park a couple years back (2018) and we also stopped and stayed at our cousin's Bed & Breakfast at the historic Spring City Inn nearby there. We saw the Manti temple, too. Just after my mom's 90th birthday, we had a mini reunion in Provo at a church building near them, celebrating her milestone birthday (and held it on my birthday in January 2019) and all Mom and Dad's kids were able to come and surprise them! Plus lots of the grandkids and great grandkids, too. Aunt Connie (at age 95 came as well, which was great, since she passed away later that year. This year, we had our big Thanksgiving gathering down further south in Utah near the Manti area, too, by Palisade State Park.. We had a big cabin (we traded stays with some people for our vacation rentals) and we got to ride some quad runner vehicles and we played a Thanksgiving weekend "Turkey Bowl" with soccer this time at a park, and I even scored my first soccer goal, taking after my kids finally, who have all scored lots of those in the past! Last year for Christmas we had many of our gang at the Fullerton Rose Drive house but did a "zoom" family Christmas program with those that couldn;t be with us. This year we (and Kira) may have to do something similar as most will be with in-laws. We are happy with the memory of the times that we all got to be together like Thanskgiving this year and also a Memorial Day long weekend at Aspen Grove Family Camp by Sundance Utah where we all were able to come and we had SO much fun with all their great planned activities like rope climbing course, and tennis, and escape room, and swimming and arts and crafts and lots of kids activities and planned/prepared meals for all campers! It was really the best! And we visited with my parents on their 64th anniversary afterwards, which was very precious..
Anyway--- We hope this next year will bring worldwide improvement in many, many areas and we wish for love, peace, good health and safety for all! --The Standrings
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