Is it the end of the year already?

Wow. Another year gone by. This one has been eventful, but overall a pretty good year. Based on my last blog post (in APRIL!), everyone knows I have a new son, now 8 months old. I think I also covered the fact that we bought a house. Shortly after the baby was born, I was laid off from Genesis, and spent about 3 months on unemployment and taking care of the kids. Since then, I've been working at Community Health Care, in the Davenport office. I stay busier, and have a lot more variety in my work than I did with Genesis, so overall I'm really enjoying my new job.

Once I started working again, Allison quit to stay home with the boys. She is also babysitting a 4 month old boy now, for one of her former coworkers. At least, she is when we can keep everyone in our household healthy enough to have the baby over.

We spent Christmas eve with the Mom, Brad, & Joda, visiting Grandpa Dunn's and Dad's houses along the way. Unfortunately, we were all miserably sick (especially me) on Christmas day, so we didn't make it to Allison's side of the family.

Connie just came up last night, and the boys opened presents from her. William has got so many toys now that I don't know how he'll have time to play with them all. Ryan got several great presents, including a project kit called Snap Circuits. It's basically a bunch of electronic components (transistors, resistors, diodes, etc) molded into hard plastic with snaps on each end. Using the metal snaps to connect various compoents, you can build all kinds of electronic projects. He played with it all evening last night, and loved it. He built a touch lamp, a radio transmitter, a motion detector, and a handful of other projects from the book last night. It's definitely a hit.

We also got a new TV this Christmas. Dad came up one weekend and helped me mount it on the wall and run wiring to a nearby closet to install the Tivo etc in. Mounting it on the wall was MUCH easier than I expected, and it looks great. We used some money we got for christmas to buy a Blu-Ray player, and it's installed in the closet too. Just yesterday I got in the remote control booster system I ordered, and tore some of the molding off to run wires to the closet yet again. At least now I can use the remote control while in front of the TV. For the last few days, every time we wanted to use the Blu-Ray player, we had to have one person in front of the TV telling the other person in Wililam's bedroom which buttons to push on the remote. FUN!

Tonight, it's New Year's Eve, and we're going to Michelle's for the evening. As I understand it, Tony has some entertainment planned for the evening. Then, another long weekend. It's going to be rough having to work a full week next week. Well, I think that about covers the last 8 months or so. :) Any questions?