Wow! It's been a LONG time since we've written a post. It's been a long time since I'VE written one (this is Matt). So, what have we been up to? I could say "not much" but to us it seems like a lot.
1. Jess is "in a family way" or "in the way" as it used to be said. Exciting! Little Baby is due around the beginning of June.
2. Abby started Nursery at Church a few months ago. The first few weeks were tough dropping her off, but she has gotten WAY better at it. Now, after the closing prayer's amen, she yells "CLASS!!!" She just loves going to nursery. Probably because they have marshmallows...
3. In May of this year Jess officially walked at her college commencement/graduation ceremony. She finished classes last December - and Abby and I are SOOO glad! It was tough doing that with a single car and a baby that was still nursing. Abby and I had to go with her to make everything work out better.
4. We paid off ALL of our debt!! It was all student loans and took about 21 months or so to pay it all off. It was really hard, but probably one of the best things we could have done for our marriage and family. That's a place I never want to be again - loaded with debt.
5. Abby is growing up so fast. She is still small for her age, but is really bright! At 22 months old she has learned the basic colors, a lot of the alphabet, and can count from 1 to 10 most of the time. Sometimes she counts 1, 2, 3, 96. It's just her silly self! She has really come a long way with her vocabulary and can understand some complex instructions (ie do this then that and you will get ___). As you can tell, I'm a proud dad!
6. I am still working for my church's IT department. I've been on a project that is going a little slowly, but I've been learning a lot. I've actually gotten to take some advanced Linux training courses and will be doing an F5 training in January (on load balancing).
So, as you can see, we haven't done a whole lot - about 6 things this year. So maybe it's more than that... We had a garden plot this year and learned a little more about growing vegetables. We got a lot of tomato and zucchini. Jess made a yummy salsa with our tomato and we froze TONS of shredded zucchini. We will probably have to start making zucchini bread loaves as gifts for others.
When we get some more pictures of Christmas celebrations we will post them.
Merry Christmas and love from,
Matt, Jess, Abby, and Baby
