On any other day, you can’t get the kids up and moving to save your life, but this morning at 3:30 am, Patrick sprang out of bed and even the normally slow-to-rise Emily was up with a minimal amount of cajoling. They were excited beyond belief.

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Now there’s an easy way to add a post to McClellandfamily.com: Sara and Wes hand out the birth announcements for their new baby boy, Hunter, and I scan it and slap it up. Hunter William Norman tipped the scales at 8 lbs, 8 oz. and 21 inches. He was born on February 8th, 2011 making Lisa and I great aunts and uncles for the second time and making Les a great-grandparent also for the second time. At his little brothers baptism on March 6th, Wyatt, 2, loved showing off his new bro and never missed a chance to cuddle him or kiss him.

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Filed under things we don’t want to forget that Emily said is this little gem…Daddy: “How was school today, Emily?” Emily: “Good. We made babies in science class today.”

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Burried deep in the damp basement of McClellandFamily.com we keep a box of old archived blog posts. Every so often we dig them out, blow off the dust and publish them here on the new and improved blog. (They were originally posted in that sappy old blog with that racist logo.) Rather than leaving them there to perish or simply bringing them forward to this blog and filing them by date where you would never see them (honestly, does anyone really read posts from 5 or 6 years ago?) we file them here under a catchy title usually with the word “archive” in it. That’s a hint: For you regular blog readers, search the word “archive” and you may see stuff you’ve never seen before. Here’s what we’ve brought out of that damp basement lately:

To my wife Lisa on Valentine’s Day 2005: A lover’s day poem written by Steve and a photo or her lipstick-written response! Originally posted February 14, 2005

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In the deepest recesses of the recycle bin we discovered a recently-tossed, two-page story, hand-written by Patrick, about our trip to Turks and Caicos in the Bahamas. The trip in February of 2008 is well documented on this blog but until now I believed that I was the only one taking notes. No one in this household, short of Patrick who was 6 at the time, knew that he was

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Serene Lakes Days is a standard for this family. Once a year Serene Lakes families all get together to participate in events from horse shoes to three-legged races to running to cycling. This year was no different except for the fact that we didn’t participate in much. The adults spent the weekend working on the outdoor shower and refinishing the row boat.

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Certain is it that there is no kind of affection so purely angelic as of a father to a daughter. In love to our wives there is desire; to our sons, ambition; but to our daughters there is something which there are no words to express.

– Joseph Addison 1672-1719, British Essayist, Poet, Statesman

Click the photo(s) here to see a larger version.

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Emily didn’t just graduate from sixth grade, she graduated with honors. Her friends and family would have been proud just to see her strut across the stage and receive her certificate of promotion, but at her 6th grade promotion ceremony Emily was awarded the American Legion Award, one of only two such honors bestowed upon

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