We’re back, baby! Happy Holidays! After forgoing it for many years, we were very glad to have professional family photos taken this year in October, in Little Cottonwood Canyon, near White Pine Trailhead.
For 2025, we’ve been enjoying being back in Utah. We have been living in Murray, driving to Sandy for middle school and commuting to Lehi for work.
The boys continue to crush it in school with straight A’s across the board. They’re still devouring books at a rapid clip with the help of their Kindle ereaders (which they received for Christmas last year), the Libby app, and our many library memberships. On the streaming video front, we enjoyed watching through “Umbrella Academy” and “Stranger Things” together this year.
Family trips: Vegas for Spring Break, Park City for Tera’s birthday, Summer vacation to Santa Monica, CA, including a visit to Universal Studios, and a Fall visit to Phoenix, AZ to see family and Djo (the family’s favorite band this year) live in concert!
Home update: We started the process to build a brand new home in West Jordan, UT, with McArthur Homes! We are looking forward to our new home being completed in May, and moving into our new community.
Ashton
Ashton is very thoughtful and kind. He is a joy to spend time with and is so creative. He’s also very athletic and is so good at everything, if only we could find the right activity for him that would captivate him! He got braces this year, but he’ll be done with them in 2026!
He remains interested in gaming, especially Roblox and Nintendo. He’s still writing code in Roblox Studio and working on building his own games, which is so fun to witness. Ashton was very excited to receive a Wii U this year ( thank you Nikko! ), and was able to mod it to be able to play older games on it. He was particularly excited to finally get a chance to play Luigi’s Mansion 1, the original in the franchise, from the GameCube days. Wes enjoyed helping him follow the instructions to load custom code on an SD card, execute it to mod the system, hook up an external hard drive, and run custom ROM’s on the console.
Favorite restaurant: Vertical Diner
Favorite game: Tower Defense Simulator (Roblox)
Favorite book series: Mistborn
Other highlights: Straight A’s in all classes, including Honors English and 9th grade math (while being in 8th grade). Youth Climbing Club at Momentum Sandy.
Dylan
Dylan is very creative and has been developing his skills as a fiction writer. We love reading his novellas! He’s written at least 4 of them this year. He is attending Creative Writing 2 class in school and his interest in this area has accelerated as he acquired a “Freewrite Traveler” dedicated writing device, with an e-ink screen. He brings this device with him almost everywhere (along with a Kindle) and can be found writing in the car, at restaurants, and all the places that we go! One of these novellas was included in the Salt Lake Young Writers Anthology, making Dylan a published author! It is so cool to have a printed book with his writing in it.
Favorite restaurant: Lazy Day Cafe
Favorite game: Kirby Air Riders (Switch 2)
Favorite book series: Bartimaeus
Other highlights: Straight A’s in all classes, including Honors English and 9th grade math (while being in 8th grade). Acquired Kirby Air Riders. Got Unicorn Chocolates for his advent activity. Youth Climbing Club at Momentum Sandy.
Tera
Tera spent a lot of time with her Grandma Vauna this year. We helped find and get Vauna moved into Assisted Living in West Jordan, and then helped to get her moved to another Assisted Living Memory Care facility in Draper. Sadly, she passed in November. Tera was grateful to get to spend more time with her this year, and to give her lots of massages to help bring her some comfort.
It was a year of medical procedures and surgeries for Tera. She’s recovering from shoulder surgery, and a follow up “manipulation” procedure that broke apart scar tissue to enable greater mobility. She’s attending physical therapy regularly and doing exercises at home. We are optimistic that it will all be worth it as she regains mobility and full use of her shoulder next year.
Sad things: Tera’s grandmas, Vauna Peterson & Yvonne Brown both passed away in 2025. We had wonderful services to honor and remember them both. These ladies were both so sweet, giving, loving and fun to be around. They will be missed!
Tera reconnected with some old friends, and made some new ones this year with the start of a new brunch book club.
Wes
SchoolAI continues to be an exciting, rocket ship SaaS start up story. I grew the engineering team from ~10 to ~35 this year, which meant that I spent an enormous amount of time on sourcing, recruiting, interviewing and hiring. This has been the fastest growing team and company that I’ve ever been a part of! We’re continuing to execute on our mission to “make school awesome” and we are succeeding. I feel very grateful to work with this exceptional team of good humans, and to be part of an organization that is making a material positive impact in the world. We are helping to improve school for teachers, students, and other school staff, and we hear about the impact all the time, which is very fulfilling.
2025 has been such a good skateboarding year for me. From visiting new skate parks, to learning new tricks, to regular sessions with friends, it is going to be one to remember.
Books: Wind and Truth, Dare to Lead, Careless People, Empire of AI, Building Knowledge Graphs.
Other highlights: FETC in Orlando in January, TCEA in Austin in February, Winter skate trip in San Diego in February, Spring break in Vegas with the fam in April, Utah ramp tour across the Wasatch front in May with friends, Lagoon amusement park with the family, kayaking with Brayden in May, Father’s Day hike to donut falls with my boys, X-Games with Dave, ISTE in San Antonio in June, Park City with the fam, Santa Monica / Universal Studios in July with the fam, Kayaking with Brayden in September, King of the Sidewalk Skate comp in Ogden in September, Cornbelly’s in October, Phoenix with the family in October, Quick visit to NYC in November, my first F1 race in Vegas in November, Skateboarding with Ashton, Dylan and Hadley at WeJo in November, Mason’s baptism in November, Dylan becoming a published author in Salt Lake Young Writer’s Anthology in December, and holiday time with the fam. Phew! What a year. 😊
