The Atsma Family Christmas Letter

Dear Family and Friends,

May God bless you as you wrap up the current year by reflecting on his love and begin the new year with the hope and encouragement that come from being united with Christ. 

Last winter we actually had snow in OR. 

I dearly hope that this letter is not in lieu of Christmas cards, but momentum runs against me.  I can't think of a year since I've been married that I have gotten out all my cards on time. If you've gotten a card from us consistently, I have no explanation.  If you haven't, it's nothing personal.  It's just the season.  Sometimes I wonder how life was simpler for my parents because Christmas was always ready when I was growing up.  The cards were always sent, the goodies were always plenteous, and the stockings were always hung at least two weeks before Christmas.  The only answer I can come up with is only that we had no Internet back then. 

Notice the fireplace.  That was one of our major projects this year. 

The theme of our year has been the provision of our Lord and God, specifically centering around our new  house.  Last year in October, we moved into a pleasant little two bedroom house in Forest Grove, Oregon, comfortably priced because the previous tenants had taken less-than-stellar care of it, and proceeded to make it our own.  This year we have learned the joys of refinishing floors, of painting, of installing a woodstove, of laying and taking up flooring, of replacing appliances, and even laying a bit of tile. 

Our house has a large yard with several fruit trees, and we have learned how to prune and when to harvest.  I've gotten back into canning and jam making, and Seth has been experimenting with fermenting cider.  It's a great comfort to open our pantry and see pears and plums and applesauce, but man, it was a lot of work in the making.  I didn't always appreciate the comfort when I was peeling our organic pears (we all know that organic can simply mean buggy, right?) or splitting prunes in a stuffy kitchen, but we do appreciate it now. 

Seth is in the middle of his fourth year as a customer service engineer at ASML, a Dutch company that makes micro-processing machines for Intel.  His workload has been growing considerably toward the end of this year as Intel expands in our area, and next year, he expects it to grow even more as the company installs three new machines (when I say machine, you should think of something roughly the size of your dining room that makes lines smaller than a human hair).  Seth also serves our church as a pastoral elder and is thinking about chaplaincy ministry in the near future. 

Annika is growing by leaps and bounds.  In fact, every time family sees her, they say, "Has she grown?"  The answer is yeah, probably.  She is in first grade this year, and seems to enjoy school with moderation.  The homework is never a problem for her, and she has a large group of classmates that she counts as friends.  She is passionate about everything she does, especially her artwork, and we hope to get her involved in music too in the coming year.

I have been picking up some ESL tutoring at the local universities.  There is currently an influx of Saudi Arabian students in the U.S., and I've had the privilege of working with several of them to help them become more proficient in their English.  I've also started substitute teaching a couple of days a week.  On Tuesdays, I meet with an ESL Bible study group at our church in addition to a little bit of work in the church library and some music with the praise team when they need a flute. 

We took a break for a family reunion this summer, so most of my extended family finally got to meet the "elusive Seth" and vice versa. Then Seth and I competed in my first (his second) Warrior Dash this fall.  Seth spent a couple of weeks in Eindhoven for training with his company. But for the most part, we've been here enjoying the fruits that laboring in one's own house can bring and remembering that the future is always opening up in front of us, one providential day at a time. 

Much Faith, Hope, and Love to Everyone. 

Seth, Jennifer, and Annika

 

 



And another thing. . .

One of the things that I love about tutoring is the incidental knowledge that I pick up while I'm instructing my students in reading and writing.  The same thing happens with substitute teaching.  Is my student working through a unit on thrill seeking?  Guess what I get to learn about.  Does the high school need a basic geometry teacher?  Guess who's getting a refresher course in interior and exterior angles.  This past semester I have learned a number of things I wouldn't have encountered otherwise:

1. Wilkie Collins wrote the first real detective novel, a book called The Moonstone, which set the pattern for almost every detective novel (or at least English detective novel) since, including anything mentioning Sherlock Holmes.  So when I stumbled across a copy in my parents' basement,  I read it.  Not bad.
2. Blue light is a major factor in human health.  Applied in the right times in the right ways, it can completely reset our internal clocks, for good or for ill.  Electronics are a major source of blue light, particularly because we focus on them so intently, but even the brightest flourescent lamp does not project as much blue light as a cloudy winter day.  Blue light during the day is good.  It forfends depression, soothes aggitated nerves, and keeps people awake.  Blue light at night counteracts all those good things by short circuiting the circadian rhythm, an internal shift that can also lead to diabetes, cancer, and in general a higher mortality rate.  Having struggled with depression, I took notice of this information. 
3. 11 teenagers die every day from accidents related to texting and driving. 
4. Alternate interior angles are always congruent.  Consecutive interior angles are always supplementary.  Coordinating angles are always congruent.  And if you really want to confuse a student, put five different variables inside two pairs of almost parallel lines when all you really want is x, which happens to be in the top right inside corner, and y, which is directly across from it. 
5. Radiocarbon dating is only for rocks with organic matter in them, and the numbers of all rock dating methods rarely come back consistently with each other.  
6. Second-graders can understand scarcity.
7. Seventh-graders do not remember 9/11, but I remember the collapse of the Berlin Wall.  That makes me historical. 

It's fun, learning all these new things and being refreshed in things that I haven't studied since high school.  And then to apply sometimes. I told Seth about the effects of late night blue light, and we switched our alarm clocks (our last was a bright green light) to something dimmer, and the change might be improving our sleep.  (It's too early to tell.)