Dear Kids,
      Nora and I had plans to go snowboarding this Friday, but when I came home yesterday, she had left a pathetic little message that she couldn’t go, and I needed to call her. So I did. I said, “You’re not going snowboarding??!!” In a timid little voice she said, “How can I? I’m 15 weeks pregnant!” She said James won’t let her go. I said, “Congratulations. You finally told us.” Of course I’d had my suspicions, but I figured if she wanted to go out on the mountain and have fun, who was I to stop her? Anyway, congratulations to both Nora and James! The next little Mair is due July 9th.
      Last week I started seeing a funny bright curved line in my peripheral vision, on the left side, but I thought I was just seeing the outside edge of my contact lens. Then I noticed it when my lens was out, so I called John. He said I needed to come to Heber immediately because my retina might be detaching. I wondered if it was because I fell hard last week, and he said maybe, but I had to come right then. So of course I jumped in the car and drove to his office. When I got there he dilated my eye, so he could look at my retina, and he admitted that there was only about one chance in 100 that my retina was detaching. It was probably just a “viscous detachment,” where the fluid in your eye pulls away from the retina, and it happens to everybody when they get to be about my age. But he wanted to make sure it wasn’t something serious. He told me horror stories about people who don’t pay attention to their vision–they wait too long, and lose an eye. Luckily we have John in the family, so none of us will ever wait too long. I couldn’t stick around in Heber, so I didn’t have time to go visit Heather and the kids, but I learned that Julie is learning to crochet, and Jacob has inherited John’s old power tools. They have weak batteries. He can turn them on, but he can’t do any damage with them.
      Monica had her bike stolen a while back, but she handled it in true Monica fashion. First she reported it to the police, and then she set out to build a new one. I’m not kidding. There’s a non-profit place in Tucson called “Build-a-Bike,” where you take parts of old donated bikes and put them together to build your dream bicycle. The bikes come from the police department and other kindly people. You have to pay $20.00, but then you can use whatever you want from the old bikes. Go, Monica. She went on Ladies Day. She got off to a good start, but she has to go back another time to finish her bike.
      All last year Grandma kept telling me we needed to get back to work on the ancestor stories. We first printed them about 10 years ago, but now we want to make hard-bound copies with pictures and indexes. (Like, who was at Nauvoo? Who met Joseph Smith? That sort of thing. We did it, partly, with the book we made about Grandma’s ancestors.) Anyway, all last year I kept telling Grandma that as soon as I finished my book about you kids, we could get back to them. So about two days after Christmas, she reminded me. And we’re back at work again. It’s lots of fun. You kids will be amazed to recognize yourselves in your ancestors. Missy, you’ll be very interested in the antics of Grandpa Allen’s dad. They’ll remind you of a couple of boys you know very well.
      I’m also going through “Ackerson Kids” one more time, correcting mistakes, because John wants to print a copy of it on his new color printer, to show me what it can do. So, if you’ve found any mistakes, please let me know. I already have a few on my list.
      I looked outside. It’s snowing hard. Yay! Tom, I hope the storm makes it down to Price. They were even talking about Price on the news, Dad said, hoping they get some snow there.
      Lots of love, Mom