Dear family, The question I get most often these days is, “How’s married life?” in no other format than that. It’s always the same question, posed in the same way, because I guess it’s a common enough inquiry where I live that it’s one of the standard questions right up there with, “How are you?”…

Dear Family, You already know how scatterbrained I am, but just in case you needed a reminder, I’d like to share a story: I had a panic a few minutes ago when I looked at my watch and realized that it was the twenty-sixth, meaning that there were only two days left in February. Then,…

Dear Family, On or about Wednesday, January 8th, Hannah married Emma Porter during a small ceremony in their apartment in Orem, Utah. I never expected I would devote the first sentence of two consecutive monthly letters to announcing the marriages of two of my daughters, but here we are. Until relatively recently, I never expected…

Dear Family, I feel a little silly writing about anything in this month’s letter besides the obvious, but I feel like Christmas, at least, deserves some page space. Fortunately, this year’s Christmas did an excellent job of setting the stage for a union of two families. Luke and I seem to agree that everything is…

Dear Family, Sophie married Luke Wonnacott shortly before noon on Friday in the Washington D.C. Temple. The rest of the month is kind of a blur. It’s New Year’s Eve and I don’t have a lot of time to write, but let’s see what I can remember. Apart from being a last-minute addition to the…

Dear Family,  Insert obligatory self-deprecating joke in place of an apology for how late this letter is. To my credit, I made the commitment to myself to get it done before Christmas, and given how much of the body of this letter has been completed, I think I might actually manage to keep that. Take…

Dear Family, There are so many mundane things that become more exciting when done alongside people you care about. One of those things is, it turns out, flying on a tiny little airplane across the country to a place that people in Utah call “Washington,” even though the most sensible thing to call it is…

Dear Family, Crystal learned this month that if you need a good spine surgeon, it’s really helpful to be Roland Kent’s sister. If you are a faithful reader of my letters (and have a good memory) you already know that Crystal’s back surgery last spring — performed by a surgeon more conveniently located to us…

Dear Family, This month, I just love people. I’ve been getting better at interacting with important people in my life in the spare moments, and I’ve noticed that they’ve also been trying a little harder to spend time with me. And it just makes me so happy. A friend from a previous semester stopped by…

Dear Family, Hopefully all of you have learned by now that if you don’t want the details of your latest health challenges chronicled on the internet, then you’re probably better off not sharing them with me. I have genuine concern for how you’re doing — and I’m actually good at keeping secrets. But you have…