2023

To our family and friends, 

Welcome back to our second annual digital edition of our Christmas letter! 

Camryn – Camryn turned 6 this year and has been excelling in everything active as well as in first grade. She has become a great reader and loves to do math problems just for fun. She's been in year-round gymnastics and participated in her first meet in June. She played soccer again this fall and is really improving her ball-handling skills. She continues to have fun snow skiing, swimming, and most recently rock climbing. She lost her first tooth and a total of 4 teeth this year so far! 

Blake – Blake turned 4 and is the happiest kid doing pretty much anything. He really enjoys basketball and baseball around the house, so we will start him out in those sports next year. He too enjoys snow skiing and is swimming and diving like a fish. He is so proud of himself for learning to read and is ready to start Kindergarten this coming Fall. 

Briana - Briana continues to work at Seattle Children’s Hospital, splitting her time between Bellevue and Seattle campuses, and the Prenatal Center. She volunteers in Camryn’s classroom once a month and on many field trips which can be a bit chaotic, but fun. She was published again in JASE as co-author with one of the cardiac fellows in an abstract on accuracy of echocardiograms performed by adult-trained sonographers on neonates with congenital heart disease, and she is in the editing phase of co-authoring a manuscript on accuracy of pulmonary vein Doppler in pediatrics with pulmonary vein stenosis compared to pressures obtained in the Cath lab. She is also finalizing her own manuscript on equity of echocardiograms to submit in less than a month.  It’s a busy end to the year! 

Phillip – Enjoyed skiing with the whole family this year. Camryn loves to go fast, and Blake has yet to feel a need to stop, which keeps him on a leash. His job remains hybrid, but when he does go into the office, his commute is a little further as his office moved from Federal Way to downtown Tacoma. He continues his role as a project manager primarily supporting projects for the US Navy. Work travels were limited this last year, but he did travel to Portsmouth Naval Shipyard in Maine last May to observe an ongoing construction project of a new dry dock.  

We were able to celebrate the wedding of three special couples in our lives this last year - Crystal and Doug, Jordana and Philip, and Nathan and Jessica. Briana and Phillip spent a long weekend down in Arizona where Briana was honored to be a bridesmaid in Crystal’s wedding. We made it back to one of our favorite camping locations on Galiano Island, after COVID keep us from going since 2018. We enjoyed great weather, time with friends and family, rock climbing, paddle boarding and tons of games.  

We had a short vacation with the Olson family in Idaho at a water park and also a long weekend with friends at Lake Chelan. We celebrated Phillip’s birthday eating and drinking our way through San Diego in a kid free weekend, where we enjoyed some rest and relaxation and a comedy show. Amid all our travels, we started and finished our long-awaited primary bathroom, laundry room, and kid’s bathroom remodel which we are absolutely in love with.  

Phillip and Briana were lucky enough to have our parents watch the kids while the two of us look a long, very relaxing vacation to Thailand for our ten-year anniversary. We stayed at the same resort in Phuket as we did on our honeymoon. We spent one week decompressing in Phuket, mainly at the beach and pool, before heading north to Chiang Mai where we visited an elephant sanctuary, watched a Muay Thai match, and took a cooking class. We then spent one final day in Bangkok where we visited the Damnoen Saduak floating market and Maeklong train market before heading home.  

We are so blessed to have the family and friends that we do and wish you and your family a Merry Christmas and Happy 2024! 

Love, 

Phillip, Briana, Camryn (6) and Blake (4)