Our Christmas Greeting!

The Definition of Decorating

Watch, and be amazed.

As Cliff Mentioned

And as you all evidently already know, Christmas preparations are in full swing, and I, for one, am ecstatic about it all. Just the first couple of notes of "Silent Night" on Mix Ninety-Two Niiiiiiiiiine... and I've lost it. Don't even think about singing "I'll Be Home For Christmas" around me or you're sure to get snot in your face.

But anyways.

The tree is up.



The Christmas cards have started coming in (and ours are finally designed and ordered!)



Cliff's cube has been decorated.



All but one Christmas gift has been purchased. We've had our fare share of Hot Nogolate around the house (uh, yeah, it's hot chocolate made with egg nog and milk). The Christmas parties have begun. We've sung carols a couple of nights with different groups of people. The decorations are still finding their way into new places in our home.









Overall, we're loving everything about this season despite its hustle and bustle!

Friday Funny Christmas Cartoons

Ok. I just saw these a little bit earlier and thought that they were pretty funny. Hopefully, you will as well. -Cliff-

That Time Of The Year

Hey there everyone! It's been a while again since I've written a blog so I thought that I would take a moment and do one on this wonderful Wednesday morning. We are a little less than 16 days away from Christmas and it is that time of the year when we are all either starting or finishing up with plans for the holidays and decorations.

It's been a pretty crazy last few weeks and we are about to wrap up the decorations at home. We did get our tree up last week and it really looks great in the new house. I'm sure Kristine might get a picture or two up of the house before Christmas. We also were blessed to be able to travel to Raleigh to visit Kristine's sister and brother-in-law, and niece and nephew as well. It was a wonderful time and also difficult at the same time when we had to leave since we only get see them around once a year on average.

I wish we had more time and money to see the members of her family a whole lot more than we do but I guess we just have to be thankful for the time that we do have with our family when we can see them during this stage of our lives. I'm sure that every family across the country deals with emotions and feelings like this from time to time but the holidays do seem to make one reflect on things more than other times of the year. Again, I'm just thankful for all that we have been blessed with in our lives.

Work is going great and I am spending my days working inside of a giant present (literally) as a result of my crazy decorating idea for my cubical and the intense decorating that has been going on all across the building. There has been a competition here at work the past week for each section of the building to decorate their area and today it should all be done and ready to be judged. There are around 16 different areas in the building that have decorated by the individuals teams in those area and there is quit a bit of creativity and variety in every area. I wish you could be here to see it all. It looks great!

Kristine has been crazy busy with work at Belmont and her photography business (which is doing wonderfully and really taking off the ground). Also, I would say that just keeping up with me and being an awesome wife is more than a full time job itself. Hopefully she will be able to finally get some great rest over the course of her vacation time around Christmas and New Years. She deserves it!

Life is busy for sure these days but it is really nice to stop for a moment during the day and think and reflect on why we are all doing so much to decorate and celebrate the season. To think about our wonderful families and friends and how lucky we are to have all of them. And to know that God is in all of this and it all would mean nothing if he hadn't sent His son.

Those were a few of my thoughts as I have been going through the morning and I thought that I would take a moment to make sure that I reflected on them and to share them with everyone as well. I hope that your day and week is going great as well and that maybe this post will fill your heart with a little holiday cheer!

My Life Was Changed...

...in only a matter of minutes, just a few moments ago.

It went from this:

to this:



Thanks to this pretty baby:


and to the subject in the pictures above... also known as my amazing husband!

No more standard flash-in-your-face for me - I'm going mobile! WOOHOO!


Thank you to Shane and Zach & Jody for being a part of Cliff's sneaky but oh-so-wonderful surprise Christmas gift!

P.S. Please never-mind the state of our apartment. It is, shall we say, suffering from post-traumatic Christmas syndrome... or something like that.

Well, Where Do We Start?

We've got hundreds of pictures on our camera (thanks to my THREE new 4GB CF cards!!!), a mini-DVD's worth of video footage, stacks and stacks of stuff (both new gifts and old finds) all throughout the living room, nearly 2,000 more miles on my gem of a car, and some great memories of time well-spent with family.

I wanted to be home so badly once we finished our hour and a half detour on Skyline Drive in Shenandoah National Park, simply because I was tired of the car. All week I had been waking up and reorienting myself to being somewhere else, somewhere different. Then last night when we crawled into bed after opening up a week's worth of Christmas cards, exchanging the last of our own gifts, and cooking up some DELICIOUS crab cakes my sister-in-law sent us back with, I got kind of sad. Not that we were home, of course. But that we were so far away from my family that we had spent a good stretch of days with.

There were some surprising moments of sentimentality throughout the week in the form of gifts from Mom and watching old home videos and sorting through a lot of my old stuff at Dad's. Stuff that's getting boxed up (or that I confiscated to bring back with me) to make my bedroom more of a guestroom. Which I understand, completely. I guess it's just we're so used to everything happening quickly when we go to visit my family and yet, even in just a short amount of days, everything felt a little less visit-like and a little more normal.

I think Cliff had a great first-introduction to spending the actual holiday of Christmas with my family. Christmas Eve morning we woke up, had one of my favorite breakfasts (breakfast casserole), and exchanged gifts with Mom and Marcus. Then we packed up, hit the road for about three and a half hours, and went straight to Grandma and Grandpa's for Christmas Eve celebrations with everyone. Everyone being Cliff and me, my grandparents, Dad and Sue, my ten aunts and uncles, my thirteen cousins, and two guests. Yes, that's thirty-one people (in case you were counting).

Then Christmas morning we woke up and exchanged gifts with Dad, Sue, and Sue's parents who stayed the night with us. We another favorite breakfast of mine, and a speciality of my dad's - Eggs Benedict, and toasted to a bittersweet morning of quiet with mimosas. It was a good morning and then a great night at Sue's brother, my uncle Steve's house, with plenty of company there as well. Company being Cliff and me, Dad and Sue, and my (step, just for clarity's sake): grandparents, brother and sister-in-law, niece and nephew, five aunts and uncles, six cousins (plus one future-in-law), and three cousins, once removed. And again, that's twenty-five. Whew, right? (p.s. I found this great site about labeling cousins "once-removed", "second", "twice-removed", etc. It really helps when you've got a big family!)

Friday we had the fortune of driving out to my sister's dad's house about forty-five minutes away to visit while her while she was staying with them (on her first Christmas break from COLLEGE!). She wasn't at Mom's (evidently) while we were there, so I have to say that having Bob, Jodi, and Owen not too far from Dad's is rather convenient in instances such as this! We had lunch, exchanged gifts, and had a great visit thanks to everyone's hospitality...

Friday Uncle Steve had everyone back over for a Texas Hold'em Night in his basement, a game which Cliff plays none-too-often and was really not too excited about throwing away $10 for. Don't get me wrong, he enjoys it - a lot. It's just he hasn't played in, oh, two years and wasn't feeling like this would be his big night. But he was a trooper; he borrowed a couple of bucks from me (to make his $10), zipped up his jacket up to his chin, and put on my sunglasses. And what do you know... he won! Cliff took first, Dad took second, and my cousin Andrew took third. And now it looks like maybe someone who was so insistent on buying a poker set a few years back, might actually get some use out of it!

Saturday was a day for coffee and breakfast at Dunkin' Donuts, cleaning out the room and watching old videos, and a family get-together at Aunt Margy and Uncle Dave's new house in New Market (complete with dinner from a surprisingly great BBQ joint in MD called CarterQue).

As with last Sunday, yesterday was our travel day. Long, windy, and a little rainy... but beautiful, safe, and enjoyable. I think we finished with LOTR somewhere around Knoxville and then talked about anything and everything we could think of until we pulled into the parking lot in front of our apartment.

And though I was a little sad, I smiled as we made about five trips back and forth from the car to our little home thinking that anywhere with Cliff is as close to home as I'll ever get. I'm so thankful for that.

A Christmas Greeting!

It's Christmas Eve Morning

And surprise, surprise, I'm the only one up.

Every morning that we've been here, I've slipped out of bed and found a comfy place on the couch to plant myself on and make a dent into the good, easy read I picked up at the library. Usually it's another hour or so before someone makes their way from the back bedrooms or from the upstairs loft and half tiredly - half crankily join the world of the living.

This quiet time I relish. And on this particular morning that we're celebrating our Christmas here before hopping in the car later this afternoon, it has a particularly refreshing quality that I don't want to take for granted.

Reflection is so lovely and essential. It's a wonder I make it from day to day when I don't stop to think about cause and effect, beauty in difficulty, lessons in life and the like. I think that's what time like this is most useful for, because I find in reflection that it is easier to talk to God. To simply pray. And to find that I am grateful for so much more than I remember to thank Him for on a regular basis.

In this season, I am most of all thankful for the gift of a new and abundant life through Jesus. And that we have every reason to expect and to hope in Him. And that Christmas is so much more about giving than receiving and that I guess, with age, that's finally starting to make sense and become a reality to me. Though receiving is half the beauty of giving, don't you think?

Anyways, I'm rambling.

But we've had a great time here... walking around a memorial and the mall in Norfolk... taking in beautiful views at lunch and on a boardwalk stroll down at the beach... and best of all, watching movies, playing games, sharing meals, and snuggling with the cats here at home. I'm sad to be leaving in a couple of hours but grateful that our time with family isn't over just yet...

We'll be in our way to Maryland to visit with dad and the rest of the family up there, starting with Christmas Eve at my grandparents' house tonight!

I'm Better Now

And more educated about Belmont than I ever had been before!

The correlation? None. It's just that I was able to make it to my New Staff Orientation today because I woke up this morning feeling absolutely 100%. Heck, I even got Cliff out of bed for us to go kick some bootay at the gym. (Which is also where I learned that "that guy" obviously didn't get my letter. How dare he.)

And I will not fault my choice of eating establishments. Heck, I don't even know where I got the first bout from (my choice of making my excellent homemade chili wasn't it because I was the ONLY ONE who got sick... though I haven't eaten chili since) and who knows what the deal was with RuSan's. I can safely say that it will be awhile before I go for sushi again... at least the lunch buffet at Ru's. Man.

So now, on to the being educated about Belmont thing. I spent the whole first half of my day in an orientation for new staff members going through the ropes of how a great deal of this organization works. From communications to campus security, voicemail and staff giving, we got the lowdown and it was really a unique experience for me. One in that not a whole lot was surprising but I felt kind of like I was re-learning a place from a whole new perspective and that's just cool. The five of us sat around with a representative from HR for lunch and talked about the biggest hangups or challenges we face in coming from where we were to now being at Belmont. The perplexity of my situation is that two years at Vanderbilt only counts for a little bit of "somewhere else" and that my biggest challenge is in coming back. Back here in this office. Back in a whole new capacity. One I am still transitioning in, obviously.

Speaking of, I've spent the whole afternoon trying to figure out my communications strategy for while I'm out of the office for the next week. Because I'm the lucky-duck with pre-semester programming that warrants lots of questions from our parental and new student constituencies. But oh well, at least it's a vacation. YES, VACATION. WOOHOO, FREAKIN' HOO! I'll tell you what I've missed most these last couple of weeks was the luxury of getting off for a good month around this time of year. But I'll tell you what, a whole week after the last two months is pretty exciting!

We've got a LOT to do in the next thirty-six hours before heading out for Mom's early Sunday morning. Not the least of which is helping at graduation tonight, finishing our Christmas shopping and present wrapping, doing laundry, packing, cleaning my car, getting the oil changed, gassing up (the car, of course), oh and hitting the (CHRISTMAS) PARTY OF THE YEAR! I can only hope/believe/have faith that it will be as wonderful an experience as last year and I look forward to seeing all of Lampo and Co. donned in their festive apparel for the big event.

Now off to start working on those to-dos!

Group Dance

Does anyone else dream of putting on a large dance production to this song?

Sleigh Ride - Leroy Anderson

Because I most certainly do.

I'm Excited

To at least be planning to get in bed by 9PM tonight. I was so tired this morning that I realized my first thoughts when waking up were of planning when I could go to bed tonight. Isn't that sad?

As much as I've loved working on projects lately, my sleep life is being deprived at the expense of not neglecting ol' Clifford in our time together in the evenings. So after we've had chat, dinner, and hangout time, I end up hovering over the keyboard reinventing moments while he keeps vigil on the couch - sometimes watching television, watching me work, or watching the back of his eyelids. What he doesn't know, though he can read here of course, is that half of my digital craftiness these last two nights was spent working on one of his Christmas presents. Fortunately for me, he gave up early in the fight last night, and while he lightly snored away, I made most of the final touches on a gift I am uber-excited about.

Speaking of excitement: our Christmas cards came in the mail yesterday! This whole week, as more cards from other people have come in, I've been on pins and needles waiting for ours to arrive so that we can send them out. And not only the time-sensitive nature of it all but the actual card itself, considering I invested a lot of myself in this process. For my first stab at self-portraiture and card design, I am really happy!

And I guess, in keeping with the Christmas theme, we're officially halfway through with gift gathering so I guess that's a little exciting, as well!

O, Tannenbaum

I just love our Christmas tree.

And I don't know that I've ever felt such an affinity for an artificial tree as I do towards this one. I mean, the one at mom's is pretty cool and was always my favorite to put up. And Grandma and Grandpa's is a monstrosity, taking up half their living room and is decorated with ornaments dating back to the days when my dad was known as "Peabody." So those are definitely sentimental to me for many reasons...

But I love our tree.

We put it up last night (evidently), and this morning the first thing I did when I walked into our dimly-lit-by-the-just-risen-sun living room was plug the tree in. And I stood there for possibly 2.5 minutes just looking at it, in all its glory.

It just makes me happy.

As does hanging the stockings, filling empty vases with bead garland, and pulling out the Christmas towels... all while listening to Pandora Christmas stations. Last night was so fun!

Oh, My!

After that last post, I happened to look at the date and whoa... one month until Christmas. That's so hard to believe! It always feels like everything starts moving really fast after Thanksgiving, like life somehow speeds up just for Christmas. And then it's over just as fast and life slows down, again.

Case in point: next week we'll get back from Cleveland to come home and decorate, go to the first of a handful of Christmas parties, celebrate an early Christmas in North Carolina, and on and on and on. I just looked at our calendar and can't believe how full December is, already. Anyone else having this complex?

Excited for Christmas

Cliff asked me last night if I was excited about Christmas, and you would have thought he had three heads the way I looked at him. My immediate answer was "Of course not! It's not even Thanksgiving!" He was astonished. He lives for Christmas! And sure, I've been mapping out gifts for our family and occasionally pondering what needs to be done post-turkey to get our little apartment ready for the holiday, but I just hadn't felt it yet.

The leaves are still on the trees (despite last night's rain), there's still pumpkins and pumpkin-flavored creations everywhere, sugary candy corn still sits in candy dishes across this nation, and good grief - it's only the seventh of November!

And then, strangely enough, a comment from mom requesting an e-mail with our holiday plans came and in drafting my response, it hit me: I'm excited for Christmas! (Getting free coffee in a red cup at Starbucks the other day probably helped to subliminally cause such emotions...)

Of course that means nothing in the grand scheme of things; we'll still hold off on decorating, listening to cheery seasonal music, drinking our first peppermint mochas (well, hot chocolate for Cliff) and gift-gathering for a few more weeks. But I can't wait for it all!

A Piece of Cake

Okay, so maybe not - but we did it. And I say we, because I couldn't have dealt with half of the stress of this semester without Cliff and I am sure I added undue stress on him in the meantime. The paper is in, and I am done for the semester. It's Monday, December 17th, and I am finally done.

Meanwhile, I've started to feel like the "big baby" that always emphasizes and whines about how much stuff she has to do. It comes to the point where it's so repetitive, and all my grown-up friends who work real jobs everyday are probably past the point of caring. But that's silly, because this stuff matters and it has been quite a challenge.

It's silly in the same way it's silly for my husband to think he was childish for having a hard time with the fact that he chose to accept our brand new camcorder over trading another guy for an XBOX 360. Over and over again I insisted that he could trade because you could just see how badly he wanted it, but he wouldn't let himself do it. And while it was miserable, seeing him so internally frustrated, I was just so... proud. He didn't take it for a lot of reasons, most of which included it being a drain on our already minimal time together and time with the Lord, as well as having something to capture the memories we have yet to make.

Either way, we were so blessed on Saturday night by Cliff's company. It was a night of great food (the BIGGEST SHRIMP I have ever seen) and good company, as well as a ton of unexpected turns throughout the evening. Every company employee walked away with one of any of these items (digital camera, camcorder, $300 best buy giftcard, iPod touch, xbox 360, nintendo wii, playstation 3, garmin gps system, or a 32" flatscreen television), a $50 giftcard to their choice of a couple of places (include Bonefish - YES!), a Dave Ramsey Show Softshell Jacket, a Lampo ornament, and an extra-large profit sharing check. It was crazy and at one point, felt mildly like a version of Oprah's "favorite things" episode. My favorite part (besides getting dressed up), though, was singing "Silent Night" in a candlelit room of about 400 people. So refreshing...

In other news, we survived all of our festivities for the weekend and are excited for the next two weekends spent with family (especially a long overdue trip home to Virginia Beach).

This week, I am braving the masses and actually doing our Christmas shopping. I always tend to save it for later, and rather enjoy the pace of last-minute shopping. We have managed to buy for three of our nine nieces and nephews and for my mom, so that's a start, right?

Okay, so besides that, I'm reading and while I have a few ideas of what I'd like to take a gander at, I'm open to suggestions. So, if you've got a moment, shoot me a comment and recommend five books you think I should read over break, because the more variation, the better. I plan on revisiting some Donald Miller, maybe a little Elisabeth Elliott, and then the sky's the limit. I'd love to hear your thoughts!

Glorious.

I just finished my second to last assignment for the semester. This was the presentation on the paper that's due Monday. Ah, the smell... the taste... of freedom. I'm almost there.

I'm starting to dream of the taste of my freedom celebration meal with Sarah on Monday, the feel of non-school books and my journal in my hands, and of high tea on the front porch, not touching my daily planner for at least three weeks, eating lunches with the hubby, beginning our Christmas shopping, playing car games on our endless holiday journeys, celebrating the birth of our Savior, seeing my family and feline friends (unfortunately, sans Max), and drinking as many Slurpees as humanly possible in the five day period we will be anywhere near or on the eastern seaboard.

This week has flown by. Hosted the ladies group Monday night, baked like a crazy person, cooked some tasty meals, worked on my final paper, prepared for this presentation. Now, tonight begins a string of Christmas and other celebrations - Cliff's team tonight, our Sunday School class tomorrow night, Cliff's work on Saturday, Rob and Kristin's baby shower on Sunday, and my work on Monday.

A couple in our Sunday School class is expecting this weekend! This will be the fourth baby in the last four months and there are still three on the way - one in January, one in May, and one in June. Let's just say we've been eating a lot of donut holes in class. But it's fun! And then Amy's expecting in March and that's a whole miracle in itself! We're pretty content right now to be without child, but can't say it's not exciting to see so many people blessed by the addition of a new family member. We look forward to that day... But for now, there's graduating, travelling, jobs, and a bit more of life to live for us, it seems, unless God decides to surprise us.

Well the pizza should be here in class soon, and then I'm off to meet Cliff at the Moore's for a night of dessert and relaxation. Awesome.