We Wish You a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Again, in true Allison fashion, I have been delinquent at updating the blog. So much has happened since I last blogged that I am not sure where to begin. So here it all is, in no particular (or chronological) order:

1- Just before my last day of work for 2008, I found out that I passed the exam I took back in early November! What a relief! So I now have my RAC (Regulatory Affairs Certification), which hopefully will hold some good weight in my new career once I can gain some practical experience to go along with the certification. If you are REALLY curious, and want to know what this all means, you can click on the following link:
http://www.raps.org/personifyebusiness/Certification/AboutRAC/tabid/233/Default.aspx

2- We received some more exciting news just before we headed out of town to celebrate Christmas with our families: our lot has been released! Of course, this all happened just as we and our realtor were about to be on vacation for a few days, so we have been really anxious to get things moving. We are all set to meet with our realtor tomorrow morning to go over things again, come up with our negotiating strategy, and come up with a list of additional upgrades we want in the house above what is standard. Hopefully, we will be able to sit down with the builders later this week or over the weekend to officially write the contract, sign everything, give them some money, and get started with construction. We are hoping to be under construction by the end of January!

3- The weeks leading up to Christmas were full of excitement, despite the fact that we were cramped up in the townhouse, with no Christmas tree (no room in the inn, so to speak), and really no other Christmas decorations either. It seemed sorta non-Christmasy to us. So we tried to get Sarah out to a lot of events to allow her to really experience Christmas. We went to the Apex Christmas parade in early December, we spent lots of evenings riding around looking at Christmas lights and decorations, we attempted to visit Santa at the mall (didn't go so well), we took a ride on the Santa Train in Durham, and Sarah had a Christmas party at her preschool. Since we were going to be in Charlotte on Christmas Eve, Santa made a special trip to Sarah's house earlier in the week. She baked cookies for Santa, and went to bed very willingly in anticipation of the presents Santa would deliver. She was super-excited the next morning to come downstairs to a new art easel and lots of art supplies, a new pair of Dora sunglasses, some new clothes for Emily (her bunny from Build-a-Bear), and a clothes armoire for storing Emily's expanding wardrobe! And of course, her visits to both sets of grandparents also resulted in lots of new toys and books to entertain her. She has really had a good time playing with everything!

We have all enjoyed some time off from work and preschool...how nice to have a break from the normal busy routine! We were all 3 off last week for Christmas, and we are off again this week as well. Sarah and I have enjoyed sleeping in until 8:00 each morning, so next week will be a rude awakening for us!

Hope you are all well and that you had a very merry Christmas with family and friends. We wish you all a safe, happy and healthy 2009! I'll post again in the New Year!