As I sit in our living room, looking at our tree and all the gifts underneath (mostly Caleb's!), I am humbled, amazed, in awe, and so incredibly thankful for the wonderful gifts God has blessed us with this year.  We're thankful for God's gift of Jesus- He's not only the reason for the season, but the reason we live!  There are no words that can explain or describe how thankful we are for our sweet baby, Caleb.  I just discussed this with an old friend last night, but before you become a parent, you imagine that you have a pretty good idea about what it will be like, but you have NO CLUE about the depth of love and intensity of emotion that you are truly capable of until that baby is placed in your arms for the first time.  There's absolutely nothing like it.  We are also incredibly thankful that God has worked things out so that I can be with Caleb every day, rather than working outside of our home.  It's so awesome, being with Caleb all the time... I don't want to miss a thing!  We are thankful for our marriage, and for each other... in a world where divorce is as common and as easy as eating dinner, we feel blessed to have the assurance that we'll always be together.  Times may be tough and life can be painful, but we will make it through together.  We are thankful for Walt's job, for both the stability and flexibility it allows him, and also for the relationships we've developed there.  We are thankful for our home... admittedly, being back in our condo was not our ideal situation, but so far, it's really been great for us.  We are thankful for our friends, our family, and the friends who are so close, they might as well BE family... God's blessed us with an amazing support system!  If there's something that we need, I can think of so many people that would drop everything to help us.  That is rare in this life, and we try not to take it for granted.  Every day, I want to pinch myself to see if it's a dream, because I don't think life gets much better than this!  God is so incredibly good.

From our house to yours, we pray that your family would have a Merry Christmas, and that God will bless your socks off in 2009!

Ok, first off, this is very weird for me.  I'm not a journal keeper, writer or blogger in any sense of the imagination.  However, I think I'm going to try it out for a while.

 Well, a week ago today was Melinda's Bday.  We were getting ready for work and got a call from David saying that Kristi was on her way to the hospital for delivery of Abby!  So we started off the day with excitement.  At some point in the morning, I guess Melinda thought she was pregnant and tried a home pregnancy test.  Somehow the test was messed up and so at lunch she told me about it and she wanted to go the store to get another one.  Well, at some point that afternoon she called me over to her office.  When I got there she pulled out the test and it was positive.

I can't really remember the timing exactly but somewhere during that same time I got a call from David saying that Abby was born and everyone was doing well. 

 So we had a pretty exciting day, to say the least. 

 Ok so, I'm not one for showing an extreme amount of emotions.  This whole pregnancy thing for me was very mixed emotions.  I was/am excited that I'm going to be a daddy, however it wasn't in my perfect little time plan.  I wanted to have the condo sold and be in a house before we started trying to have kids.  I had figured some time around spring we would start trying.  Our timing isn't always God's timing so I accepted the fact that we were going to be parents.  Over the weekend I really started to take it to heart and have become more excited.  For example, I had to be the first to buy something...LOL  So I went and bought some Disney baby stuff late Saturday night after everyone had gone to bed.  Thank goodness because we told some people Sunday and they bought something and brought it to us Sunday night.