Considering the fact that I rarely leave the house, I personally don't have much to report. My classes have started, and this semester I will be taking course on autism, scientific inquiry, stuttering, and voice disorders.  I am also currently working with 3 child clients and 1 adult client. 

However, for the Lundgreen family as a whole it has been quite the busy few weeks. 

• Rachel and Liv celebrated their birthdays December 26 and 28, so the night of the 28th we booked a hotel in Scottsdale and shopped around to celebrate.  The next morning, Liv's long-time boyfriend went to the airport to begin his mission, and only a few hours afterwards we had to be at the airport to pick Adam up because his mission was ending. When Adam got home, we celebrated yet another round of Christmas.  Dallin, Adam and I opened our presents together, and then everyone opened sibling gifts. 
• Dallin and I celebrated New Years by hot tubbing with his 15-year-old sister Liv, their 17-year-old cousin and another teenaged friend. The teenaged cousin and I chatted about politics, and we almost all missed midnight because we forgot about time in the hot tub.  The only reason we got out in time was because the teenagers remembered their curfews, which they were late for.  We ran out to the front yard, where the neighbors were blowing up their celebratory explosives, and then Danny and Rachelle made the traditional New Year's waffles. It was certainly nostalgic for me--6 years ago, Dallin asked me to be his girlfriend on New Years.  I wanted to post the full story on Instagram: it was my first party, and I was going with Dallin and his two stepbrothers, the three of whom were NOT supposed to be going to this party. They crafted this whole lie to trick their parents into thinking they were elsewhere (Parley and Dallin were supposedly at one location, and Cooper was supposedly at Porter's) and then they made their separate phone calls to their mom to confirm the lie. Afterwords we all had waffles at the Urnesses. Back to the present--Dallin did NOT want me to share the story on instagram because 6 years later he still didn't want Rachelle to find out. But then as he was telling the teenagers why he didn't want me to post about our dating anniversary, Rachelle shouted from across the house, "Dallin! You are so loud I literally just heard the entire story!" 
• Mom finished her surgeries. It has been several years since the process started...She got a radical hysterectomy when I was in high school, a good decade since her own mother succumbed to ovarian cancer at age 52. My mom was supposed to get a double mastectomy the week of Valentine's Day, but since that was around the time coronavirus started entering the U.S. the surgery got postponed till the fall. She had to wear expanders for several weeks to prepare her muscle and skin for the replacement implants, and then in the end of January she was finally able to get the implants. While she was under, she also got a tummy tuck to repair the skin and muscle damage done by having 6 babies and 2 miscarriages in 9.5 years.   Rachel and I are now 23 and 24 and hoping to get genetic testing done soon to find out if we have the deadly BRCA-2 gene like our late grandmother and her late aunt, our mother, our 2 aunts, and our cousin. Obviously we hope that we will beat the odds, but knowledge is power, and we are so grateful that our mother and aunts have taken these radical but crucial steps to prevent an early death. 
• I got vaccinated for COVID.
• Adam and Liv moved to Hawaii since their school is both online. Adam goes to BYU and Liv goes to BYU-H. 
• Liv surprised everyone with a mission call to the Adriatic North Mission in Croatia, Serbia, Slovenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina! Rachel and I accidentally found out because Olivia started talking about putting her papers in when Mom was on speaker phone, but aside from us, the parents, and some of her closest friends in other states, no one else knew. So we got the family on a Zoom call, and Olivia said, "Hey, wanna watch Lexi open her mission call?" She could not for the life of her get Adam to show up in front of the Laie temple with the rest of their friends...he doesn't know Lexi very well so he didn't care about being on time. Finally he came, and they asked one of their friends to say an opening prayer. Clearly this girl wasn't in on the secret because she asked for blessings on Lexi as she opened her mission call. Then Lexi went up, excitedly holding a piece of paper. "Dear Sister Lundgreen," she started. "Oh wait! Hey Liv, I think you should come up here and read the rest of this." Everyone was FLOORED. I felt a little proud because an hour before the call I had a thought, "What if she got called to Croatia?"
• Cousin Paige and her new husband Nguyen, whose small temple wedding we attended right before Christmas, had to spend a few nights at our house.  They just moved into an old 1940s home, but after their bathtub flooded with sewage they were dismayed to learn that an old crack in the pipe had led to tons of roots to tunnel through the pipes. In addition, it was likely last year's earthquake that caused two of the pipes to become dislodged so that almost nothing could go through. While that got fixed, we got to enjoy a cousin sleepover as they stayed in our guest room. They kept apologizing for the inconvenience, but it was honestly a blast!