Christmas 2017

Christmas 2017

Todd Swank's Diary for December 31, 2017

Christmas Break started on a positive note for the Swank Family.  Todd, Miss Sheri, and Luke drove down to Rochester to visit our friends at the mayo clinic.  Luke's hepatologist, Dr. Leise, gave us the good news that even though his CT scan still showed there are nodules on his liver, they are stable and show no signs of growth since our last visit in August.  So we get to go another 4 months before our next check-up.  This will get him through his first full year of college without needing to do any new procedures, which sounds great to us!

We also visited his cardiologist, Dr. Baker, and he had no new concerns either.  We feel very blessed and continue to thank all our friends and family for their prayers and positive thoughts for Luke to stay healthy!!

So we celebrated Christmas as a family and were quite thankful for all of our blessings in 2017!

Luke and Avery were good boys this year so Santa gave them nice toys like footballs.

Of course, Todd was especially good, so Santa hooked him up as well.

On Christmas Eve, we drove down to Iowa to visit Grandma Leona and Uncle Jerry on the farm.  

We had lots of fun playing cards together and also enjoyed some good old fashioned Dog Wrestling.  

On Christmas Eve, we went to church where they actually let us play with fire.  Miss Sheri doesn't usually let us do this at home, so it was a nice treat for all of us.

Christmas dinner brought out the turkey and accompanied food.  Good stuff and Good stuffing.

When we came home to Minnesota, we were invited to a really fun party with a bunch of our old friends at the Fowler residence.  As usual, things got pretty carried away so I'm hoping we might have a chance to get invited back again some day.

Avery and I decided to check out the local NBA team and went to a Timberwolves game.

It was our first chance to see Jimmy Butler play in person which was pretty cool.  The Wolves pulled off a great trade with the Bulls to get him and he's already made an impact as a team leader.  I was impressed with the regular chants of "MVP" people were shouting out for him late in the game.

Karl Anthony Towns continues to grow as a superstar and is very fun to watch.  It's amazing to see a talented big man like he is draining threes like he's a point guard.  He's a new generation of player who should eventually lead the team to the playoffs again (we hope!).

Coach Tom Thibodeau sure does yell a lot, but it's nice you can start to see his vision coming together.  The team carried a 4 game winning streak into this game.

We were playing against the Denver Nuggets who were 19 and 15 and had been on a three game winning streak of their own.

It ended up being a pretty exciting game that went into overtime with the home team Timberwolves eventually winning by a score of 128-125.  It was very cool!

The best part of the game was the half time show where Christian Stoinev brought his dog Scooby to do a little acrobat show.  It's just amazing the dog can do this kind of stuff.

The best part of Christmas break has been having our boys at home again.  They seem to get along so much better now that they no longer live together full time.

The worst part has been the arctic freeze we've been dealing with for most of the past couple of weeks.  We've had temperatures as low as thirty two degrees below zero when windchill is added to the calculations.  It makes it kind of tough to take Blue for walks when it's this cold, but he still insists we do it.

We have a rule in the house that we don't walk on the ice until we start to see ice houses and cars out there.  With this cold, they started coming out in droves!

Happy New Year!!!