So Christmas Day has come and gone, and now the New Year beckons on.  Hope everyone has had a Happy Christmas.  We ended up doing a bit more traveling than we should have with Janet so close to her due date.  She was such a trooper and stuck it out a lot more than I thought she would.  My family was very stressful with arranging our Holiday get together this year.  At times it felt as though several of them had forgotten that Janet was 8 1/2 months pregnant.  Everyone was more than generous with gifts, the trials of gathering across the miles were proven worth the effort to see Janet's face when she opened the necklace set from my parents.  We are now back home and trying to clean and get ready for Baby Day.  It's so tempting to take the tree down even though Christmas is only just begun.  The baby's room is almost done unless of course you are looking for a crib or a dresser.  Mary and Joseph did not have a crib for Jesus and so laid him in a food trough.  Mom tells me that my oldest sister slept in a dresser drawer for the first couple weeks.  We found a nice cradle at a garage sale earlier this year and Janet made some sheets for it.  The baby will sleep in it for the first couple weeks, so we can get a crib soon after the new year.  I'm so proud of how well Janet has been handling all of the ups and downs of this pregnancy.  Ready or Not... we're nearly there now.  My next update (as frequent as they are) will be news of the baby.

-M

So, it's been a while...  Where have I been?  Lots of places:  work, home, work, home, work, home...  I've been stuck in a rut.  It's the never ending cycle of life.  Why do I work?  I hope the answer is so that I can live; so I can forget about work and enjoy life.  So I can love my wife, so I can ride my bike, so I can learn more and help my family...  Lately, I've been working the other way around.  I've been, in a way, living to work or working way too hard; letting it take over my life and rule my thoughts and really turn me into a cynical grump.  Here's to more living and checking work at the door on the way out of the office.  I'm hoping that my focus this lent can help me to get out of this rut.  One more reason to love my faith... every year I get a nice kick in the pants to get myself re-centered.

-M