2008's gonna be a great year!!

This has become Mark’s mantra. Hopefully 2008 can live up to this.

So, we finally decided to become part of the “cool” crowd and get our own blog. Now, hopefully we can keep all our far away family and friends posted. Here’s a recap of the past year:

Mark has been working at Collins Comfort Masters and wears several different hats, keeping him very busy. His most recent job addition has been overseeing the Home Depot program. In short, Collins Comfort Masters has a contract with Home Depot that allows them to work inside the store generating leads for both the sales and service departments. Most recently CCM picked up a store in Payson and Mark has focused a lot of his time in making this a successful store. He has worked very hard to grow this program and to make it more successful than it has ever been which has quickly earned the respect of all those he works with. Good job Mark!

Erin started nursing school (yeah!) and is loving it. She is now halfway through and has decided that labor and delivery will be her specialty. Her clinical rotations have so far included a nursing home (least favorite), pediatrics, psych ward, labor and delivery, and just a general floor. While this has given her exposure in several different areas it did confirm what she has always known – labor and delivery is definitely for her. We’ll see what the next year holds. We are all so excited for her.

Tarell moved to AZ early in 2007 and it has been so great to have him here. Even though he lives about an hour away from us, we still get to see him more often than when he was in Seattle. He is in 2nd grade and loves school, with recess being his favorite part of the day of course! He also loves riding his new bike with his brother up and down our street. He does wonder where all the rain is but he enjoys all the sunshine.

Brayden has really enjoyed having his brother around more. He turned 3 in November but if you ask him he will tell you he is 12. He has so much personality and is incredibly smart. Everyday he has a new word or phrase that is very atypical of a 3-year old – and he always knows what he is talking about. Lately he has been telling me to “take it easy mommy, everything will work out”. When I ask him what that means he says “just don’t think about your problem anymore and it will work itself out”. WHAT?!?! He also says everything is “Incredible!!” lately. He’s a funny kid.

(I'll get a better pic of him soon - this was Christmas day and he was pretty dazed!!)

We also added a new family member at Christmas. Her name is Zoe, she is a 10 week old Maltese/Shih tzu mix and weighs about 3 pounds. She is adorable and the boys absolutely love her, even Mark loves her although he won’t admit it.

As if that wasn't enough excitement for one year....we bought a house! After several months of looking and almost getting frustrated we found a house that we love. For those of you that are familiar with the area we are on the border of Gilbert and Queen Creek in a fairly new subdivision. We happened to be in the right place at the right time and got a screaming deal on a brand new house that someone else had decided they couldn't buy. Yippee for us! (For some reason these are the only pics we have but we'll work on getting some more of the house soon. We are so bad with the camera lately! But, we did have to show off the backyard - it's bigger than it looks, and we finally have a yard! Yeah!! Also, the kitchen pic was taken the day we moved in...it doesn't always look like this!)

We hope this finds all our family and friends happy and healthy. We wish you all the best in 2008...it's gonna be a great year! We’ll be adding to our blog periodically so check back often for updates.