Christmas Letter

Dear friends and family-

We hope that you are having an enjoyable Christmas season. We failed to send out Christmas letters last year... the most important thing you missed was the birth of our third daughter, Jinnie Antofagasta, on 10/30/2006. 2007 has been a year of growing girls and family fun for us.

Dave no longer works for Meridian Gold...they were bought out by Yamana Gold, a Canadian gold company, a few months ago. So far the change has not affected us much. This year he has been in charge of employee negotiations at the mine, and after much preparation & negotiating a strike was avoided and both parties are happy. Dave is happy serving in church and tries to squeeze in a golf game every now and then.

Kim’s time is filled with being a wife & mom. This year she has started teaching two different group piano lessons; one to Hailey & two of her friends and the other is for adults from church. Hopefully when we leave Antofagasta there will be others to take her place at the piano. Recently Kim has started working towards her Bachelors Degree again. BYU-Idaho is starting an online degree program and she is a pilot student. Kim also keeps busy in church with her callings as ward (& basically Stake) pianist and 1st counselor in the Stake Primary Presidency.

Hailey started Pre-Kinder in March of this year. Much to the delight of her teachers (and parents) she decided her Spanish was good enough to speak with her teachers (last year she was embarrassed because her Spanish wasn’t as good as her English)! In fact, they say she talks a lot and is very inquisitive. Besides loving school, she also enjoys her ballet and gymnastics classes. She is a very literal thinker and loves to learn.

Ava has grown up so much during 2007... especially the last 1/2 of the year. She is starting to speak less Spanglish as her understanding of the difference between English and Spanish improves. Ava is our little helper. She is a hands-on learner and loves to help out in the kitchen. For her birthday we gave her a children’s cookbook and her interpretation of the gift was that her new responsibility was to help with everything in the kitchen. She is constantly moving her stepstool around the kitchen to wherever the action is. Ava can hardly wait to start Mini-Kinder when summer is over. Stitches in her tongue and a doggy biting her bum are the parts of the year that Ava remembers most... she is our family clown.

In January we traveled with Jinnie to the US Embassy in Santiago where she became an American citizen. She has dual nationalities, and the Chileans just love the fact that she is one of them. It has been a year full of ear infections for Jinnie. In August she had tubes put in her ears, but has still had several ear infections since then (just not quite as many). Hopefully she will grow out of it soon. Despite her pain, Jinnie is a very happy little girl and started walking soon after her 1st Birthday. Her favorite words are ‘mama’, ‘dada’, ‘this’ and ‘hola’.

Some things we did as a family this year: Most recently we survived a 7.7 earthquake with 30 aftershocks larger than a 4.0 in one week, and continue to feel the occasional aftershock. In February we moved from our house to an apartment with amazing views of the ocean. We truly enjoyed our time in the US. The Ponczoch & Wilkey Family Reunions were great fun, as well as our couple of weeks with the White’s. Kelsi (Kim’s sister) joined us on the return flight to Chile and the rest of her family came a couple of weeks later. We had such a great time... we would love to have any of you as visitors this coming year;). Merry Christmas and Feliz Navidad to all!

Love, Dave, Kim, Hailey, Ava & Jinnie Ponczoch