Merry Christmas from the Yoders!

2015 has been a crazy year. Looking forward to a nice, boring 2016!

Mark made a major life change when he decided to switch gears career wise and accept a job with Southern Utah Neurosciences with IHC. He had been working at Premier Pediatrics for 6 years and quit at the end of January. Due to paperwork, committees, board reviews and credentialing, it was two months before he could actually start his new job! Now he is settling in as a physician assistant doing orthopedic spine and neurosurgery. He works mostly in St. George (45 minutes away) but also covers the Cedar City hospital and clinic. He likes the work but is gone from home a lot more, usually leaving by 5:30 in the morning and working 10-12 + hour days, plus commuting.

He took us back to his home state of North Carolina this summer for a Yoder reunion and we stayed at a beach house on the Outer Banks, where he used to live. He got to go surfing every morning with his brothers and loved every minute. He also attended PA conferences in California and Las Vegas, and recertified his national medical boards. Glad that test is over for another 10 years!

Melissa is holding the fort down at home the best she can. The kids keep her very busy and she still enjoys sewing and making jewelry when she can for her etsy shop, and even goes to dance class once in a while. She loved taking pictures of all the lighthouses they saw in Virginia and North Carolina. Her G-ma Mary Murset (last surviving grandparent) passed away on Luke’s birthday in September and that has been hard, she is greatly missed! 

Madelyn turned 11 on December 21^st and is excited that now she is of age to attend Hogwarts. She is in 5^th grade and is still doing gymnastics. She is obsessed with pandas right now and also loves sea animals and LOVED the beach this summer. She is in the library club at school and is always super helpful for her teacher. She is a great big sister, too and is our cat Tiger’s favorite person.

Luke turned 6 this year and finally started kindergarten! He is so smart he actually tested at nearly a 4^th grade reading level, passed off two years of sight words immediately and is reading chapter books for homework. He does very well in math too and is slowly getting the hang of handwriting, sitting quietly and other social skills. He loves computer games, collects tanks, hates wearing clothes (year round...) and is still mom’s sweet, snuggly boy.

Isabelle is 19 months old and is our happy sunshine who is also at that insane toddler stage where she’s destroying something every five minutes. Mom posts the evidence on Facebook and Instagram because she’s trying to have a sense of humor about it. She is already talking and says “There you go!”, “Thank you”, “Yeah”, “No”, “Uh-huh”, “Yay!” “Dada”, “Mama”, “Hi!”, “Bye!” (which unfortunately sounds like “Die!”) “Uh-oh” and “Hi, kitty.” She is super spoiled with all the love the baby of the family gets. She is also a night owl like you wouldn’t believe and regularly stays up till 11:00 p.m. or later.

Hope this finds all of you happy and well. We are so blessed to have you in our lives.

Love, Mark, Melissa, Madelyn Luke, Isabelle and Tiger :)

 

 

 

 

 

NC Trip Day 4: NC Aquarium and Bodie Island

 On day 4 (Tuesday) of the trip, we drove to Roanoke Island to go to the NC Aquarium. Here's a map of the Outer Banks to help visualize:

 Mark was born in Elizabeth City and lived in or around that area until he finished high school. Then he moved to Nags Head with his surf buddy George Starboard (who is still there). We stayed in Avon on this trip. The Outer Banks are barrier islands and are just long, skinny strips of land with the ocean on one side and freshwater sounds on the other. The land inward is the Great Dismal Swamp. And THAT is why it is so humid there.

 Since North Carolina is one of the 13 original colonies, there's all sorts of US History everywhere. We didn't really see any of it (my parents would be scandalized) because this was primarily a beach trip. But it is there! Maybe some other time we'll go see the site of the lost colony and Jamestown and all that.

We saw a dredge ship on the way over. Mark says it's the first time he's seen one. It makes the inlet deeper for boats. This is the skeleton coast--hundreds of ship wrecks and it's because of all the shifting sand. That's also why there are so many lighthouses.

The aquarium was lovely.

Thank you, Rose (my Taiwanese sister-in-law) for this. LOL.

They had animatronic dinosaurs, also.

It was boiling hot that day, though....it was miserable to be outside. (That's Mark's mom in the front. Mark's dad unfortunately caught bronchitis at the beginning of the trip and was sick all week.)

 I caught Luke punching the T-Rex in the mouth. I wasn't too surprised.

 

 When we lived in Albuquerque for PA school, we had a season pass to the aquarium. We miss it!!

 

 Look at her on her tiptoes :)

 There were turtles, alligators, otters, sea turtles and tons of fish and sharks, etc.

 

 On the way back, we stopped at Shipwreck, which is a souvenir shop Mark used to visit as a kid. Madelyn was beside herself because it had all of her favorite things.

She bought a scoopful of shells from the tub and some really fancy ones that we couldn't find on the beaches here.

Then, we stopped by the Bodie Island Lighthouse. We pulled off the side of the road and got swarmed by bugs to get pictures through the trees, but it was worth it.

The kids were tired and it was SO HOT and SO HUMID that they just went back in the car while I looked around. Luke was telling me, "I hate pictures!!" in this, haha.

Madelyn was a little more game. For some reason she kept putting her new octopus on her head.

 

 Mark took me to this lighthouse when I was pregnant with Madelyn. It is still my favorite and I have several pictures of it hung in my house.

 Back at the house, Ben let Luke play his Nintendo Wii-U and Luke decided that Ben was his new best friend and wouldn't leave him alone after that.

 Isabelle had this obsession with putting her mouth on the chair bottoms. WHY?!??!! So gross.

 Mark's sister Kathryn gave everyone welcome gift bags with her homemade sugar cookies. Aren't they amazing?! She has a little baking business--check out her site at Decadence by Kathryn.

 Then there was a marathon of Godzilla movies over at the folk's beach house. Just your typical night for the Yoder clan!

NC Trip Day 3: Hello, beach!

 View from the back balcony of our beach house

 Misty sunrise pic Mark took--he got up for "dawn patrol" with his brothers and brother-in-law Emil, who brought a bunch of surfboards, and they went surfing every morning around 5:30.

Here is Avon Pier, a short walk away. 

 This was a Yoder reunion, and here are some Yoders! Mark with his parents, Frank and Kathy, his brothers Mike and David and sister Kathryn.

 Kathy with Sky and Koda, who stayed with us. Koda is only a week older than Isabelle and they live in Florida, a few miles from the ocean. You know what she said? The Florida coast is LESS HUMID than where we were in NC.

It was super fun having two 13 month olds in a non-babyproofed house with a giant staircase!!!

Uncle James and Uncle Mike (who were housemates with us)

 

So, basically what happened on this day was that Mark and the kids went to the beach, and stayed out alllll day, and Mark and Madelyn got massive sunburns, and Luke and Madelyn got tossed around in the surf so much that they were all banged up and scraped and bedraggled. (They had various uncles out taking them out there with surf boards, boogie boards and kayaks.) This was rather unfortunate because Madelyn is a hyper-sensitive person anyway and the sunburn made her sort of grouchy the rest of the week.

By the time Luke came back and got cleaned up, he fell asleep around 6:30 pm and wouldn't wake up for 3-4 hours.

I spent the day in the house getting organized and helping Isabelle to sleep off her jet lag. I kept thinking that Mark would come back with the kids and then we'd all do something together, but that never happened. 

But finally that evening, when the heat died down a little (I had no desire to sit outside in the heat all day anyway) me and my niece Sky decided to take the babies out to the beach.

 

Madelyn was ready for round two so she could collect more shells.

  Koda, despite living right by the ocean himself, hates sand!

 Isabelle, on the other hand, was like, "WHERE HAS THIS BEEN ALL MY LIFE??!" and tried to become one with the dunes.

In her defense, it was really powdery soft sand that was fun to squish around in. Nothing like California shores.

 Here's her amused cousin Ben and uncles Mike and John.

She made sure to put handfuls of it on her head and down her back and everywhere in-between.

Madelyn was really in her element at the beach. She loves marine biology and shells and she was just in heaven all week. 

 Mark took the kids out looking for little ghost crabs that night by flashlight, they thought it was so cool.

(yes, I know my hair, lol)

Isabelle had the biggest meltdown of her life when it was time to go. Full body flails and screams! She must have really had a good time.

 Sky and Koda :)

 Isabelle was eventually able to be lured back into the house by seeing that daddy was there. He gave her a good hose down outside before she got plopped into the bath and left about a pound of sand behind.