Christmas Card 1996

Merry Christmas
We hope you are having a wonderful holy day season celebrating the birth of the one and only Son of the one and only true God. The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. More importantly, we hope that you can personally stand before God the Father one day and claim that Jesus Christ is your elder brother.

Rebecca Faith is Fifth
We are now really odd numerically. Five of us makes life a little more complicated. On our annual trip to King’s Island , we spent the whole day in the rain with new three week old Becca. Kevin recognized that we must not stop at three children unless someone always wants to wait at the exit of the amusement park rides.

Carmen Enters Rat Race
Our oldest child enrolled in a rigid twice a week, three hour long preschool class at Immanuel Baptist Church. She really enjoys going to school like the big kids. Mom and Dad also forked over $12 a year to the parks and recreation department for tumbling classes.

Summer Vacation
We took a summer vacation to Sunset Beach on the Carolina coast with John, June, Michael and Amy Rutledge . We postponed the vacation by one day because of hurricane Bertha but had a blast anyway. We caught some crabs and had some entertaining nights out with five children.

Adam Goes West
This is the year of the cowboy for Adam. He is completely outfitted with Ben’s old boots, new cap guns (with holsters) and red cowboy hat from Grandma and Grandpa Etsinger. He also has a horse on a stick. We named the horse “Mr. Red” because of a red spot on his forehead. We later discovered that the red spot was not part of his coat but merely an inspection sticker that was easily removed. The name stuck.

Kevin Reaches Gold
Reaching Gold Medallion status in Delta Airlines frequent flyer program was the most significant thing to happen to Kevin in his career at Lexmark. This means that now every time he travels abroad he can fly first class and stay in attended “Crown Rooms” at airports.
This is really important to Jackie as she waits hand and foot on three very impatient children alone for weeks at a time.


Carmen Teaches Adam
Adam knows his ABC’s, has learned to write and is familiar with repeating integer series mostly as an over spill of Carmen’s academic pursuits. She’s a great big sister.
His writing skills began with scripting the letter “E” only to discover that although there is an “E” in Carmen there is no “E” in Adam. Dad pointed out that since there really was no orientation to the “E” when written on scrap paper, it could also pass as a rather square “M” that is in Adam. Progress continues with “A” and “D”.

We think Adam is really advanced for his age mathematically from his understanding of repeating series. When playing hide and seek Carmen and Dad have a long time to hide because Adam counts to ten in the following manner. 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,8,9,10,11,8,9,10,11,8,9,10,11 ...

Jackie In Beauty Contest
At Thanksgiving, Jackie, Cheryl, Shirley and their mother all put $2.50 in a pot to be collected by the lady that lost the most weight by Christmas. So if you send us candy before Christmas, Kevin and the kids get to eat all of it.

This is the first Christmas in six years that Jackie has not been trying to get pregnant, pregnant, or recovering from being pregnant so we are looking forward to a less stressful time traveling this year.

Blue Eyed Becca
If you have seen the six month pictures of Carmen and Adam in the bucket, you will notice that Becca is not the same. Becca has blue eyes and is not as heavy, rugged and rough as Carmen and Adam were at her age. If Becca is to survive, she will become tough. For now, we are enjoying her petite differences. She just started crawling at the end of November and is making attempts to pull down the Christmas tree.

Happy New Year!
As the Eby family heads into 1997, we are listening for direction from God. The Lord has begun a stirring in Kevin that we believe will call us into something different. We don’t have a clue as to if this means we will be heading to the Far East, Russia, South America or possibly as drastic as moving across the street.

We pray that you will look forward to God’s new mercies every day of 1997.