Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas! I'm just chilling by myself right now so I figure I'd break my rule of only blogging once every 3-4 months again. I'm very grateful that my husband is home for Christmas this year. He volunteered for staff duty today since most people either went home or have family visiting and it's just us so we can delay our Christmas festivities. His plan is to pop in and out until his shift is over at 5. He came home for breakfast and we opened gifts. He definitely went overboard this year. I told him to choose something from my amazon wish list that I really just keep for myself and he bought almost everything off it. Someone will have to remind me to trim the list down to 1 or 2 items before he looks at it next year. Although I have a feeling I will be completely overlooked next Christmas which is definitely ok with me.

I tried to get a Christmas picture to post here since he had to wear his blues today but it didn't quite turn out. He looked pretty spiffy but me with no makeup, having not brushed my hair and looking unusual large. It was not quite the look I was going for and there was no time to fix it.

The cat is almost completely out of the bag about our little blessing to come. I find after 3 months of keeping it secret, it's really hard to just let it go. Sometimes I forget that there are people who know. I also realized when my parents asked me who Shiggy was that I probably should have kept the "Shiggy/Tim" in our Christmas card. Now I will have a poor illegitimate child with an identity crisis.

I find the more people who know, the more anxious I get so I almost wish we kept it as our own little secret. I'm not quite at the excited phase yet just because I seem to spend most of my time worrying. Maybe if I give it a couple more weeks. I know I have a bunch of wonderful people who have been praying for us and continue to pray for us.

Now I'm just waiting for our Christmas dinner date at 9PM. I could say we're going out that late because we're young, hip and cool but in reality all the restaurants are booked up for Christmas. I'm just hoping we can both stay awake until then.

As this year starts winding down, I am so grateful for all the blessings that have been bestowed upon us. We have great friends and family. My husband made it home through another deployment and hopefully will not be deploying again anytime soon. We're ready for our next great adventure!

Happy Birthday, Jesus and thank you for making it possible for us to have a Merry Christmas!

A time of reflection...

It's been kind of a rough week for me. My cousin passed away a few days ago and it has me stuck in a tunnel of emotions. She was a distant cousin, who was quite a bit older than me. Honestly, we were never close. She tormented me when I was little with comments about my weight, acne, and just about anything you can make a young girl cry with. She wasn't trying to be mean. It's just the Chinese way.

She was one of those people that I saw almost every time I went home, usually at some kind of family function. I had no idea she had beaten cancer once only for it to come back. She and her husband have 2 daughters. One of the girls is a senior in high school and her older sister is a freshman in college. Not that there's ever a good time, but what an absolutely awful time to lose your mom.

It brings back a flood of memories for me. That's about the age that I found out my mom had cancer. I was away at college and my family was able to hide it from me for a few months. They finally decided to tell me because they figured I'd notice that mom had no hair when I came home for Christmas break. They even tried to convince me that it wasn't cancer, they were just trying to treat her condition aggressively with chemotherapy. Going back to school after that break was really hard. But God decided that it wasn't her time to go. I can't imagine what those girls are going through.

Then I thought about my uncle. He passed away unexpectedly from a heart attack in his 40's also about this time 10 years ago. I remember I took a break from my finals to go to his funeral. He has 3 beautiful girls and a handsome boy. They adored him and things were difficult without him. I think it's part of the reason my cousin has put off marrying her boyfriend of 12 years.

I don't think my cousin's family believes in God at all but I just hope they can still feel his comfort through their anger and sadness. I don't know how you get through these times without God. I hope those girls remember and cherish every single one of their memories of their mom, even when she was yelling at them to only drink skim milk so they don't get fat. It's funny, when I was younger I took a lot of offense to what she said to me. Now I know it was her way of showing love and concern. Please pray for the Chung family.