Pinkston Family Christmas Card

Hi, everyone!

This year has been ... wow. It's been a year. In lieu of cards (although, to be honest, when do I ever really do cards?) I'm posting this here so you can all see it and know that we're thinking of you.

We started out the year of 2014 living in our trailer home in Orem. Matt served as the ward employment specialist and I was the second counselor in the Relief Society, and we both loved our callings and were happy to be able to do some real good. I released Tulips and Treason, the first in the Omni Orchids series (spinoff on Secret Sisters), and kept growing Trifecta Books, my publishing company. Matt worked for GoPro, doing customer service for their cameras, and then later found a better job working for Digis, doing customer service for the Internet.

In the early summer, we got a very wild idea and decided to move. We've been thinking about it for a while, but things hadn't quite panned out. After a lot of prayer, we decided it was time to make things pan out. We started dejunking our house and doing some minor repairs, and put it on the market in August. Literally six days after we got an offer, we moved out ... Yeah, it was a really fast process, so fast that we ended up living in a friend's basement for two weeks while we found our new place. Thank goodness for friends!

Our new home is located in Bountiful, and we really like it. It's an older home, but has been updated in several ways, and has four bedrooms (one more than we had before), a family room (which we didn't have before), a giant laundry room/storage room (we were able to get rid of our storage unit), and covered parking. Hooray!!

It's also really close to the Bountiful Temple, and we've spent a lot of time there feeling the Spirit and soaking in the peace there. The kids and I liked to sit on the grounds and talk about cool gospel stuff ... until the weather got cold. (That's where the pictures of the kids, below, were taken.) We've been here since the middle of September.

Matt has really had his share of adventures this year. In addition to putting up with me, he got to manhandle our belongings into the new house, do a copious list of honey-dos, use his mad skillz to get the small car off the freeway and parked safely when the engine decided to blow, changed jobs from Digis in American Fork to Unisys in North Salt Lake, cope with the gearshift in the van when it decided to come completely off in his hand while driving on the freeway (our cars have had a hard year too), and has been a real trooper through it all. He's become very adept at using the train and bus systems in our area while we've had all this car drama. In the meantime, he's still growing his freelance genealogy business and loves working with his clients, finding their ancestors in unusual places all over the world. He's writing a book about genealogy for beginners, and will be publishing it at some point during 2015. He'd also love to write some books about the areas where he does genealogy, but that'll be another year or two down the road.

As I mentioned, I've been busy running my publishing company, and decided that since I wasn't busy enough, I should take on a new pen name (Paige Timothy) and start writing sweet romances. It's a new venture for me, one that I didn't anticipate doing previously, but it's been a lot of fun. I'm still doing a ton of freelance editing. During the move, I really hammered my body, particularly my back and hips, and by early fall, I was pretty much bedridden. My chiropractor diagnosed me with sacroiliac syndrome, which basically means that my hips don't know how to behave themselves. I have been helped a lot by my chiropractor and a cranial/sacral therapist and am starting to see some improvements. At the moment, I'm down with a bad virus, but that's temporary, so we won't even worry about it.

Caryn turned eighteen this summer, which I can't believe. Who said she could do that? She graduated from seminary, and after she returned from her final year at girls' camp, we went to the Humane Society and adopted a dog for her. The dog's name is Belle, and she's perfect for Caryn in every way. Caryn is settling in to our new area really well. She's attending the young single adults' ward, and plans to serve a service mission next summer when she turns nineteen. She has continued with her artwork and writing, and wrote fifty thousand words in November to win National Novel Writing Month.

Ammon went on Pioneer Trek this summer and had a great time. He also finished up his first year of seminary and started his second, recently turned sixteen, got his patriarchal blessing, and will soon be ordained to the office of a priest. He's six foot three now ... yes, that's right. He's very, very tall.  This irritates Caryn, who is fully one foot shorter than he is, and he's constantly mistaken for the oldest in the family. He is in the process of looking for a job, and he's still very much into electronics and building things with bits and pieces of wires and things that I don't even know what they are, but he does. He's currently learning Javascript.

Joseph turned thirteen this summer and hit a growth spurt. He's now taller than Caryn (okay, it's time we just faced it. Everyone's going to end up taller than Caryn at some point or another. Sorry, kid.) He's been really active in Scouts, and he's getting the hang of things in our new ward. He's still a very avid reader, and he's been drawing his own Pokemon. His health has continued to improve (hooray!) and he's doing awesome. He still loves bearing his testimony every month in fast and testimony meeting.

Benjamin just had his tenth birthday, and he's now a Webelos. He loves playing on his DS, writing original songs on his electric keyboard, and basically keeping us laughing. He's making new friends in Primary, and gave his first official sacrament meeting talk a couple of Sundays ago when our family was asked to speak. He is naturally a really good speller - his editor mommy is glad for that.

So, that's what's going on with us! We've gone through so many changes this year, it's incredible to fathom. I guess we're living proof that if you want to make a change and feel it's the right thing to do, you should go for it. It's been scary at times, really scary, but we've been blessed every step of the way. The Lord is good.

We're excited to see what happens in 2015, and we wish you all a very Merry Christmas and a fantastic New Year!