Greetings from Kansas, and who says Christmas is over?!  I didn't have timely access to a printer last year, so we've got 2 busy years to catch up on (and yeah, I know it's February!)...

 

It's been an eventful couple of years, no joke!  Where to start?  I'm no longer working as an Investigator for U.S Investigations Services.  After 6.5 years of work with USIS, and 6 beautiful months of unemployment--the latter of which I recall with great fondness--I've been employed since June of this year as an Employee Relations Representative at Multi Service Corporation (www.multiservice.com).  I'm basically in Human Resources, but we don't have to do anything with payroll or benefits; that's an entirely different department, so we only have to do the fun stuff, like screening, interviewing, and hiring!  It's a great job, I really like the company, I dearly love my coworkers...but the pay is really awful, so I'm enjoying the job while I can afford to, and soaking up the experiences I can add onto my resume.   

 

My favorite news to share with you all (in case you don't already know), is my engagement to Adam Laufenberg!  He and I met through mutual friends (dude, it's a long and dramatic story, just ask my mother!) around November of 2006, became friends around February of 2007, starting dating each other in November 2007, and became engaged on our annual camping trip for Catholic young adults over Labor Day weekend of this year!!  The wedding will be held on All Saints' Day/Halloween of 2009 in Kansas City, and we are very excited.  He's everything I never dreamed I'd find in just one person, and reminds me nearly every day that he's the luckiest man alive.  He's definitely been worth the 30-year wait!  He's from Western Kansas, graduated from the University of Kansas with a degree in Psychology, his mom and stepfather (Debbie and Chris) live in Topeka, his sister and her family (Amanda, Chris, and their baby girl Kennedy) live in Tulsa, and his brother and his family (Wesley, Angela, their daughter Jennifer, and Angela's brand-new pregnancy) live in Garden City, KS; he's gainfully employed as a Corporate Trainer for CBIZ, teaching medical billing.  His job has him travelling for at least 3 days every other week, most often to Tulsa, but lately also to Shreveport, LA and Little Rock, AR.  His constant travel tires him out and is sometimes hard on both of us, but he's being paid well for it and is looking at a likely and impending promotion, so the additonal income is very welcome, especially while we're saving for a wedding!  We may even be able to afford a honeymoon!! 

 

Last Christmas (2008) was an especially blessed Christmas for all of us.  God, in his extreme thoughtfulness, made it possible for Adam and I to travel up to Wisconsin to celebrate the holidays with both sides of my family, complete with my parents and my sister Abbie--those who know Abbie well know how nearly miraculous that was!  It was a truly memorable Christmas; Adam and I drove all through the night a day ahead of schedule--through the densest and most persistent fog we'd ever experienced--in order to beat a winter storm to my grandparents' house, were promptly snowed in, facilitated introductions between Adam and nearly my entire extended family, were awed by Grandma Rita's crafty gameplay during a round of "Apples to Apples"  (Grandma:  "I've never played this before...oh, look, I won!"), watched Aunt Teresa's tiny dog Tinkerbell establish comically incontrovertible dominance over Abbie's huge doberman Leilu, taught ourselves how to play Canasta, and watched in amazement as Adam sculpted a 7-foot-tall snowperson--complete with rosy cheeks, blue scarf and mittens, thanks to liberal use of food coloring--in my grandparents' backyard over the course of 2 days.  We didn't realize how special that Christmas was until sometime later...over the course of the following year, the declining health of my mom's parents has led to their change of residence, as well as that of their neighbor and my Great-Aunt Rose, leaving both the Riegert family homestead (est. 1800's) and my grandparents' home of many years standing empty and awaiting new owners.  It's been a very difficult year for my mother and that side of my family, also due in no small part to the death of Great Aunt Matilda in October of this year.  I'm truly grateful that Adam was able to visit the places and meet the people that have been so important in my life, before everything changed so completely. 

 

This Christmas was blessed in its own way; my parents drove down from South Dakota to spend the week with us.  We watched a collection of our favorite Christmas movies--A Christmas Story, Lampoon's Christmas Vacation, and Elf--attended midnight mass at St Anne's at the far more convenient hour of 10:00 PM, had a lovely evening of Yahtzee and a dessert called Chinese Chews at my "pseudo-parents" Margie and Dan Coon's house, and cooked and ate a complete Christmas dinner in my little apartment and it's correspondingly snug kitchen.  Our goal was to do all of the major cooking so that my parents could relax and be served, and although I'm pleased to say we were fairly successful in that area, Mom still found things around my apartment to clean, despite Adam's and my efforts to prevent her from doing so by cleaning the apartment before my parents' arrival!  Well, my theory is that she cleans not so much because I'm a huge slob (which I'm not, I swear), but because she cares, and wants to help us out with our role as hosts.  My parents are so cute!  It was close quarters at my apartment, but I love my family so much, I don't mind sleeping on the air mattress in the livingroom where my cat Benjamin might decide to pee on me while I'm sleeping.  Which he did.  Yeah, he's lucky I love him so much! 

 

My fuzzy baby Benjamin is also doing very well, thank you.  He and his Uncle Adam--soon to be his Dad--get along beautifully and are very comfortable around each other.  Ben turned 8 this year, is a very healthy 9.5 pounds or so, and is very excited about visiting Dr. Josh in the new year so that he can be sedated and his teeth thoroughly cleaned.  Okay, maybe he doesn't exactly know about that yet, but he'll thank me someday when he doesn't develop periodontal disease in his back teeth! 

 

And aren't you excited that it's possible in the relatively near future that I may actually be discussing my human children with you? 

So those are the highlights!  I hope you all had a happy and blessed Christmas, and that you have a wonderful new year!

 

All our love from KC,