**Sincere blessings to you all, our family and friends**
You may remember I had been contemplating returning to school to obtain a certificate in Medical Transcription. That has been shelved for quite a while, for one reason that I am still a steady at-home contractor as a legal transcriptionist for the same person as last year (yippee -- finally a stable at-home position!) and also because over the summer we discovered there will be another change to our family in February.
We are expecting our third child on February 13th! If you would like to peek if it's a girl or a boy, check near the bottom of our baby page off of our home page! Otherwise we'll keep it a surprise for you :) This will be quite a change to our family but I know the little one will fit right in!
Christopher is now attending school at Colleen's school. This change came about suddenly at the end of the last school year, when we discovered his class was being moved to a totally different school, and also that his teacher was leaving and going to another school entirely. Upon that change we decided to move him into our home school into its MH class. We have not been able to get back to ice skating this year but hope to yet! We also haven't been to swimming in a while! Chris is going to outside speech therapy as well as what is at the school. Additionally, Christopher is now learning to use a communications board at school and as he becomes more adept on that it will help him greatly in daily life, to be able to communicate his wants and needs on his own. He has a great time staying at grandparents' house!
Colleen is in second grade and getting to know new children this year as there are only three or four students she knew from last year in the class! She also has some new friends in the neighborhood that she plays with every day after school. She also has an out-of-town friend at whose house she often stays overnight and she has a great time with their dog as well! She also had her first sleepovers at each of her grandparents' homes and she had a ball!
Colleen is studying art at the YMCA and won first place in her age at the Lake County Fair! We did take a break from ballet, and got her back into swimming over the summer, but then had to take a break from swimming as well!
Rog is still a regular guitarist for our church band, twice a month! Regularly scheduled choir did not occur this year due to our choir director leaving our church. And with all going on I did not choose to participate in the church play at this time. I hope in a year or so to perhaps get back to some group music! Since April, I have been playing guitar and singing for the 4-6 year olds in the Sunday second service every week for about 15 minutes. It's been very rewarding and so neat to see all the little ones singing along and doing the hand motions and signing that some of the songs have!
Roger has continued to lose quite a bit of weight this year -- altogether in the past few years he's lost about 40 pounds! I had kept off most of the 20 oounds I'd lost in '99 except for about 8 pounds that kept creeping back -- and I'm happy to report I've gained a reasonable amount of weight in over 7 months of pregnancy! We wish you all blessings in 2002, and pray that the next year will bring peace and stability in your lives, even as our nation is not having that peace and stability at this time. God is in control…
Roger's Dorene's 
