Merry Christmas from the Nysetvold Family!
Elissa is Supermom. She’s running Rivendell Academy, our home school, as well as teaching at the South Houston Area Performing Arts Co-op (SHAPAC) and playing piano for their choirs. SHAPAC is a one-day-a-week deal that gives the kids some social and artistic exposure, and the rest of the week, they get Singapore Math and a Charlotte Mason curriculum. She’s also found time to finish a draft of her next fantasy novel, sew all kinds of stuff, and revitalize her blog as a Substack. And she has kept us all playing board games every Sunday after church, especially Space Base. Her pick for Book of the Year is Brandon Sanderson’s “Wind and Truth” (as of this writing it’s not out yet, but she’s willing to bet on it).
Elanor (1) learned to walk and is starting to talk. Favorite words include “cookie” and “head.” She loves having her hair brushed. She gets a lot of love from her siblings–sometimes more than she wants.
Marie (4) finished “Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons” early in the year, and is now reading Magic Treehouse and “Book of Mormon Stories.” She did a three day, 15 mile backpacking trip to the South Rim at Big Bend National Park a couple months before her 4th birthday, carrying her own backpack and sleeping bag. (Tom, Dan, and Will made it too.)
Will (7) loved picking our blackberries as they ripened this year. He read “The Hobbit” and finished the Harry Potter series. Brandon Sanderson’s “Skyward” is also a favorite. He enjoys Lego, Minecraft, and Minecraft Lego, but also playing with a bottle rocket launcher and biking in the cul-de-sac with friends. He says his favorite hike of the year was Charlie’s Bunion in the Great Smoky Mountains (8 miles, 1886 vertical feet).
Dan (9) makes some outstanding monster cookies. He’s reading Plutarch and Shakespeare for school, and he’s started in on the Heinlein juveniles on his own time. He enjoys playing Kerbal Space Program every chance he gets (after his room is clean, he’s practiced piano, he’s read his challenge book for the week, for a limited amount of time on Saturday…). Thanks to homeschool flexibility, he got to see the solar eclipse under the path of totality, with family, on his birthday!
I (Tom) am still trying to keep everything inside the pipes, keep the lights on, and so forth as Reliability Manager at the Valero Houston Refinery. It’s a lot of fun, especially when it works. I enjoy having great people to work with.
At home, I finished a draft of my science fiction novel and sent an alpha version to a few people. For lovers of Orson Scott Card, the Old Testament, and Standard Oil, it’s the story of a family-nation trying to win their freedom, with two parallel plotlines generations apart. And it’s set on a young volcano world where their only hope for true independence is to have their own core tap–think of an oil well, only for molten iron and geothermal power. I am currently revising and hope to put it out into the wild late next year. Let me know if you’d like to read a beta version sometime next year and/or hear about the release.
In other literary stuff, I produced a free ebook edition of The Discourses of Brigham Young. And I wrote an essay on what The Book of Mormon has to say about recent events around Israel; it has an interesting parallel case of a messy existential war across a religious divide, and how men of God navigated many resulting dilemmas.
I think my favorite new read was the one volume version of Carl Sandburg’s Abraham Lincoln biography. In fiction, “The Curse of Chalion” by Bujold and “Kim” by Kipling were excellent. I also expect Sanderson’s “Wind and Truth” to join the list.
As we celebrate this Christmas season, we remember our Savior, Jesus Christ. Thanks to his birth, teaching, atonement, and resurrection, we look forward to eternal life together as a family. Merry Christmas!
