Merry Christmas Everyone and a Happy, Healthy, Prosperous, Waveful New Year from the Leoniks.

We've had a great healthy year.  Although we didn't take any real exotic surf trips this year we did manage to get  three awesome weeks down on the Outer Banks...Easter....Third week of June and third week of September.  There's been a lot new things that occurred this year as KT turned 17 and Kallie turned 7.  The new pup....Sparky....has blended in perfectly with the family...he's kind of like a mix of Shadow our last dog and Zephyr my first dog.  Scroll on down below as we share some pictures and words about the year 2006.

Kate
Kate is 17 and a junior at Middle Township High School.  Kate is still doing really good in school.  Her GPA is 3.97 and she's taking AP courses in Physics, History, English and Pre-Calculus.  She is now driving and has her own car.

Kate started the Middle Township High School Surf  Team.  It took a bunch of people to really get things going but Kate started the whole process.  The Team took third place in their first New Jersey State Surfing Championships.  Kate made it all the way to finals.   Kate did great on the competitive surfer scene and is currently rank #1 in the ESA South Jersey District Junior Women's Division.  She also took first place in the 2006 Nun's Beach Invitational and fourth place in the RipCurl 2006 Grom Fest in Belmar NJ.

She's currently looking at Colleges.  University of  North Carolina Wilmington,  Villanova,  Princeton are some colleges that's she's thinking about.  She played Volley Ball this past year as well as Powder Puff Football.

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Kallie
Kallie is 7 and in first grade.  She has the same teacher that Kate had when she was in first grade,  Mrs. Lisa Ludman.  Kallie is already working on getting straight A' s.  She wants to get a new car when she starts driving.  She's already reading a great deal and doing math.  Kallie and Sparky are really good buddies.

 Kallie's surfing keeps getting better and better.  She did the Ocean City Surfing Association(OCSA) Series this past summer and wound up taking fourth place in the "Boys and Girls 10 and under" division....not too shabby for a six year old.  She also surfed really well in the Nun's Beach Surf  Invitational.

She's taking Dance and Swimming Lessons.  This past October she caught a 36 inch long, 16 pound Striper off the Avalon 8th street jetty.  She hooked it and brought it in...most of the way before she got really scared thinking that she caught a huge shark.  She made the local papers for this feat.   She also scored several goals in Pee Wee Soccer.  On our last trip to Hatteras in September she got to drive the truck on the beach...working the gas and the steering wheel.  She's been doing a good deal of  Go-Karting in the back yard.  She is also writing songs and performed several of her compositions for the Cape May County Songwriters.

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Sparky
You never really know what you're getting when you get a puppy....but we got real lucky with Spark...he's really a sweetheart....real smart.....a little devilish at times....well behaved....he gets the paper every morning.....when he drops his bombs he always goes into the trees....he loves to run.....he's great in the car....mostly barks only when necessary....he loves the beach and loves to swim.  He's always playing with Kallie and is frequently her shadow.  This summer Kallie and Spark were playing on the great room level deck(second floor)...Kal was spraying a hose and Spark was biting at the water stream...Kal accidentally directed the hose stream over the railing....Spark jumped over the railing!!!!....I estimate the drop to be roughly 18 feet....Kal came running down the stairs and out the front door... screaming.."Spark jumped off the deck"...."Spark jumped off the deck"....I thought for sure he was a goner.  She came back in the house with Spark...slightly limping....this lasted for only about 15 minutes and then they were both running around the house.  Unbelievable!!!!.... he was about 10 months old at the time and did a Peter Pan off the second floor deck and came strutting back in the house.  Fortunately, he never attempted it again.

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