2024 Family Christmas Update
Our annual Christmas tree decoration timelapse.
To make up for not sending out a Christmas card the past two years, I’ll be adding an update about our family here. Right now there’s a mix of finished sections and a few that were written a bit more quickly. If I haven’t finished it by the time you land on this page, I’m sorry - extra time has been hard to come by lately.
Hearing from You!
We’d love to hear from family and friends about what’s going on in your lives. Feel free to send me an email or drop a quick message in the form below to let us know what’s new and/or how we can be praying for you.
Family Members
Updates on all the McLendon clan…
Michael
We’ll start with the biggest change in our family - Michael, who arrived in March.
Michael
Michael and his tongue
He’s a super-fun kiddo, great at bringing a smile to anyone’s face. It’s always amazing to me how for each of our children, once they’re here you can’t imagine the family without him. He loves mom and dad and all his siblings, and we all love him to the moon and back! He’s just recently started crawling and seems like he’s cutting a new tooth every day.
Michael on the hunt for a Christmas Tree
Lucy
Lucy Starting 8th Grade
WE HAVE A TEENAGER! Lucy turned 13 this October and started 8th grade this autumn - her 2nd year at West Bay Christian Academy. She gives mom and dad many reasons to be proud, from making National Junior Honor Society last year along with high honors at school to taking on new challenges like Scouts this fall. She continues to be a voracious reader, devouring books as quickly as she can pick them up. Back in the spring she ran on the track team at West Bay and just recently finished the cross country season there. She’s just getting started with basketball for what will be her 2nd season. She’s also active in the youth group at Grace Harbor.
Lucy has enjoyed getting into Basketball at West Bay
Lucy searching for the perfect Christmas Tree
Ethan
Ethan Starting 6th Grade
Ethan turned 11 in August. After finishing 5th grade at Hoxsie in Warwick, he started this fall as a 6th grader at West Bay Christian Academy. This year he played flag football in the winter, Little League baseball in the spring and fall, and ran cross country in the fall. He just started basketball with the boys team from West Bay - a new team sport for him. In his spare time he enjoys reading, Legos, Nerf guns, video games, and working Star Wars into any conversation he might be part of.
Ethan searching for the perfect Christmas Tree
Carolyn
Carolyn Starting 3rd Grade
Carolyn just turned 9 and is a 3rd grader at Providence Classical Academy, a new hybrid classical school that was inaugurated this year. She is active in dance and gymnastics and enjoys reading, crafts, and taking in the beauty of the world around her. She loves to play with Katie and friends around the neighborhood.
Carolyn searching for the perfect Christmas Tree
Katie
Katie Starting 1st Grade
Katie, our six-year-old, is a 1st grader at Providence Classical Academy. Like her sister Carolyn, she’s active in dance and gymnastics. She’s a blossoming reader and loves Legos and playing fanciful games with her older sister and friends.
Katie searching for the perfect Christmas Tree
Meredith
Meredith is a superwoman mother of 5 and wife of 1. She has obviously been extremely busy with the kiddos this year. She spends quite a bit of time shuttling them around from here to there and this fall has been teaching Carolyn and Katie during their at-home learning days. In addition to all this, she’s managed to be involved beyond the family, including attending a Bible conference back in February and helping lead a women’s Bible study at Grace Harbor. She’s an avid reader, always working to learn something new and has found time to read through books on Alexandria, education, and Rome among others this year. She also made a trip to Texas with Michael over the summer to introduce him to family there while I stayed home with the other kiddos. I’m bugging her to write an update herself to put here.
Meredith and her barnacle Michael searching for the perfect Christmas Tree
Ross
TL;DR (Too Long; Didn’t Read summary) version…
I’m doing well, enjoying my job a lot. I’ve been pulling back on time spent on personal activities like Providence Singers and photography as the kids get more and more involved in their own activities. I did have a very exciting adventure with a buddy from college climbing Mount Baker in Washington State back in August.
Long Version
It has been a pretty full year for me. As the kiddos have gotten more numerous and older (and more involved in various activities), I’ve needed to scale back on the number of activites I’ve been involved in, although I still manage to find things to be involved in. Professionally, I’m wrapping up my second year as the product manager for Abaqus. I’ve been enjoying the role. One of the best parts of the job has been the people - from getting to work more broadly with a great group of incredibly capable people in the sturctures R&D teams at DS to having more opportunities to interact with customers as well as folks in the sales and marketing sides of our business, that part of the job has been very rewarding. I really enjoy the chance to present on what our developers have implemented, and I find this new role nicely combines the sorts of esoteric technical topics I worked with when I was a developer with opportunities to communicate and present to a broad variety of audiences, leveraging experience I’ve built going back to theater and choir days in high school.
Speaking of choir, one thing I have stepped back from is Providence Singers. I enjoyed singing with this wonderful group for six seasons, but with a baby coming and kids sports schedules encroaching among other reasons, I decided to hang it up this year. While I took that off, I did put on the job of assistant coach duties for Ethan’s Little League team back in the spring and had a blast with that. Additionally, I’ve gotten more involved in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math)-related student engagements, whether it’s serving as the co-chair of the STEM committee at our office or helping to put on a telescope day at Carolyn and Katie’s school with some of the equipment I used for the eclipse earlier this year. I also continue to help out with sound and tech at our church and suspect I’ll be getting a bit involved in the Scout troop that Lucy has joined.
While I’ve had a few very focused photography endeavours this year like the eclipse and a few notable nights with aurora appearing in the skies over New England, I’ve generally gone out less for the purpose of photography. It’s not something I’m setting aside, but in the current season of life a larger balance of my time rightly goes to family as opposed to going out to catch as many moonrises, thunderstorms, and autumn landscape scenes as I used to (although I do find occasional opportunities to get out with the camera).
I did have one big adventure this year with Matt, a friend from college and husband to Meredith’s undergraduate roommate. We try to go do some sort of crazy outdoors thing every few years and this year we went with his brother-in-law to Washington to climb the Easton Glacier route up Mount Baker, one of the glaciated volcanos in the Cascade range. It was my first time traveling on a glacier and it was a blast. It was the most I’ve prepared for an adventure like this - as I get older I realize how much I’ve historically been able to lean on my youth for physically demanding tasks and how that’s not really going to be a viable option now and going into the future - so for this trip it was quite a few hours spent on the stair machine with a sandbag-filled backpack on my back as well as some training hikes up mountains to our north (including one up Mount Washington’s Tuckerman’s Ravine with Tim, another very good friend here in Rhode Island). Our Baker trip was with a group led by a team of guides since glacier travel was a first for all three of us, and it ends up there are quite a few hazards you can face like falling and sliding for thousands of feet, stepping through a snowbridge and falling into a crevasse, or getting lost on a large slope in the middle of a cloud. Thankfully our very capable guides were well-versed in all of these hazards and how to mitigate them, and we successfully managed the ~4500 vertical-foot ascent from base camp to summit in a weather clearing on our second day.
Heading up the “railroad grade” section towards base camp, the old lateral moraine of the Easton Glacer on Mount Baker
Mount Baker (or Kulshan if you prefer indigenous names) from the Deming Glacier side
Family Events and Outings
The year had a number of exciting family activities.
Travel to Texas
We made a number of trips back to Texas to see family. Thank goodness for credit card airline points.
- We kicked off 2024 in Texas visiting family over the New Year holiday.
- Meredith took Michael to Texas this summer to introduce him to grandparents and other family.
- We made a family trip to Texas before the school year started to get a little more time in with family.
Getting Outdoors
We love the outdoors and try to get the family out as much as schedule allows.
Ski Getaway
After a couple of good seasons learning at King Pine - a small ski mountain in New Hampshire - we felt it was time to stretch our legs a little bit and go for a somewhat larger ski area. So, we headed a bit further north and had a lot of fun at Bretton Woods over the February break. Lucy and Ethan are solid skiers who have mastered blue slopes pretty decisively, and Carolyn and Katie managed to work their way up to skiing a few blues with dad by the end of our trip this year. In addition, we greatly enjoyed the “ski club” at West Bay, where once a week for six weeks students and chaperones leave the school a little early and head to Wachusett mountain for an evening of skiing. We’re looking forward to what the coming winter brings in terms of opportunities to ski - hopefully more snow than we’ve had the past couple of winters!
Katie and Carolyn at the top of the lift at Bretton Woods.
Mount Monadnock
As I was getting warmed up for Mount Baker, I took a day off in the summer to bring Lucy, Ethan, and Carolyn up Mount Monadnock in southern New Hampshire. They did great, and I didn’t even end up missing anything at work because the Crowdstrike crash happened the same day! Being on the mountain with the kids sure beat sitting at my office staring at a non-functioning computer screen!
Heading up to the summit of Monadnock.
Mount Wachusett
After I got back from Mount Baker, we made a whole-family trip up Mount Wachusett. I was particularly interested in how Katie would handle a hike that gains 1000 vertical feet. She handled it like a champ!
Celestial Events
It has been a pretty stellar year for exciting things happening in the sky, and we’ve had a number of opportunities to get out and see some of them.
Eclipse Adventure
Originally planned to be a trip to Dallas, weather ended up making us shift plans last minute to rent an RV and drive it with Lucy, Ethan, Caroly, Katie, and a bunch of friends from church up to Vermont where we took in totality in Derby Line, literal feet from the Canadian border. Between the unparalleld spectacle of totality and the most epic traffic jam I’ve ever been in traveling back through the Franconia notch in New Hampshire, it was quite a memorable experience.
Aurora Chasing
We’re at a solar maximum which has yielded several exceptionally strong geomagnetic storms that resulted in aurora that were visible in New England. We had two opportunities - one storm in May that Ethan traveled with me to Rockport, MA to see (Lucy was at an out-of-town track event) and another in October that all the kiddos were able to take in under clear skies in Rhode Island.
Ethan taking a spectacular aurora storm in May
Comet
As if eclipses and aurora weren’t enough, we got a really nice comet back in October. I dragged the whole family down to Oakland Beach one evening after it became a good northern hemisphere target to see it first hand when it was bright enough to be spotted with the unaided eye, even in light-polluted Warwick.
Comet C/2023 A3 Tsuchinshan-Atlas setting over Greenwich Bay with noctulescent clouds
Church Update and a Request - Grace Harbor
One of the things that we have been extremely grateful for in New England is our church, Grace Harbor in Providence. Each Sunday there is filled with wonderful Biblically-centered preaching, rich worship, and warm fellowship, and in it’s relatively short history we’ve had a significant ministry of helping equip other churches and pastors in New England. Over the 10+ years we’ve been members the church has steadily grown to the point where we’re at-capacity in our rented chruch facility in downtown Providence. Because of this, we recently purchased an old manufacturing space just west of downtown that we’ll be renovating into a space to gather. As part of this, we are undertaking a fundraising campaign to fund the purchase and construction. Our church would cherish your prayers for this effort as we work to grow God’s kingdom in New England.