Merry Christmas

Dear Family and Friends Merry Christmas!!!

We hope all is going well for you and your family. We love getting to see your blogs, Christmas Cards, chat with you on the phone, and the visits we have had with some of you in passing now that we live out West!

This has been a very full and at some points crazy year for our family so we thought we'd fill you in on some of the highlights from 2009

- Lance Accepting and Externship position for his last year of Grad School in Spokane Washington

- Selling 1st home in Indiana

- Kathleen starting and finishing her own In-Home 2 day a week preschool program

- Mariella Ann Nelson arriving 6 weeks early on April 2nd

- Spending 4 weeks accepting lots and lots of help from Family and Friends while we went back and forth to the NICU while Ella recovered from a lung infection

-Lance finishing up his last year of course work and finals while going back and forth to NICU and keeping life together at home.

- Packing up our house in May and saying goodbye to good good friends

- Blessing Ella in Indiana before leaving

- Driving cross country with 2 kids, a wonderfully generous and helpful Aunt, 2 Cars, a moving Van, and a new-born on an apnea monitor while making stops in Utah, Idaho, and Montana to visit family along the way!

- Unpacking and moving into rental house that was rented sight-unseen and finalized while in transit.

- Kathleen having surgery to remove a lump on her neck that thankfully turned out to be a cyst.

- Enjoying a Summer of Ella getting off her apnea monitor and doing wonderfully, and visits to and from Family.

- Mia getting her first pair of Glasses after being diagnosed with amblyopia (aka. lazy eye).

- Maddi getting potty trained! Yeah only one child in diapers. :)

- Fun fall visiting family in Seattle and Montana while Lance attended a couple of conferences in Indiana and Florida.

- Lance beginning the interviewing process for jobs. (We are hoping to have things finalized by the end of Jan....so stay tuned!)

- Enjoying more visits from Family and Friends in November and December. We have just been eating up this time living close to everyone!

We are so grateful for the many many blessings we have been given and are continually given on a daily basis. Lance and I have decided that being the parents of 3 little girls under 5 is definately our greatest challenge but getting to watch them grow, learn, develop their own relationships with each other, and to see their individual personalities emerge is the most rewarding experience we could ask for. And we are most grateful for the Savior in our life and the blessing we have to celebrate his birth at this time of year.