It's The Most Wonderful Time of The Year!

I love Christmas! It makes me so happy to come home every night from work and see our Christmas three shining in the window. Christmas lights make me smile like a little kid and Christmas music warms my soul. Belton has a fantastic drive through lights display out by the lake. It's 5 miles of Christmas lights, each display from a business or organization in the local community. We haven't been yet this year but have gone the last 2 years and it was amazing. This year we are planning on driving to Marshall, TX (home of my college) to see the Christmas lights there. They have a ton of Christmas lights and it is beautiful. I just learned that the courthouse alone has 125,000 lights on it. Jonathan has never been to see the lights and I can't wait to show him. I'm hoping to see some friends while we are in town. It will be good to go back. This next week we are going to be mostly in the Dallas area hanging with our families. It will be nice to be off for a week and hanging out with our families. Plus eating lots of yummy Christmas goodies.

Work recently has been good. I did about a week of nights in the hospital but now I'm doing night time urgent care clinic where I only have to work for like 4 hours a night, which is FABULOUS! Although, working nights for a whole month gets old, no dinner dates with friends, no seeing my colleagues/friends at work. I love the people I work with and I enjoy being with them everyday. Some of the people I work with have become my closest friends.

Our foster care excursion continues. Last weekend we went to Austin to the Christmas retreat. We hung out with 2 great foster kids for a few hours which earned us a few more hours of observation. These kids were so much fun to spend time with and get to know. We also got to talk with some other experienced foster parents, which is a nice resource to have. Now that we are so close to having kids sometimes it can seem overwhelming. We still aren't officially licensed although there have been a few possible children for us in the last week that we had to say no too. They all had higher needs (medical and otherwise) than we are certified for at this point. We don't want to take kids that in a few weeks when they are made a higher level of care and we've formed a relationship with them they have to move because we aren't licensed for that level of child. We've begun looking at bigger vehicles. Our current ones can only hold 3 car seats and because Jonathan is taking care of our friends little girl we already have 1 car seat in the car, which limits the number of kids we can take to 2. We'll be buying a bigger car in the next few months I'm sure.  Here are some of the pictures my sister took recently.

Hope everyone has a safe and Merry Christmas! 

~until~