Christmas Tree 2016 & Shae's Birthday

It's been a long time since I've updated my little blog! I decided last fall to increase the speed of my coursework so that I could graduate in June 2017 which required taking twice as many classes as I had been doing so I haven't had much time for anything except homework lately.


But I finally finished my last class about a week ago so I'm free to do things like update my blog. Let's start with Christmas, shall we?

We started the Christmas season by putting up our tree. This was our first Christmas in our new house so there were some extended negotiations over where the tree would go but we finally agreed on a spot.

Shae celebrated her 18th birthday later that day. We had extended family over for dinner to celebrate. She's all grown up now, I guess! I'm really proud of the wonderful person she is and proud for how she manages to deal with difficulties in her life with grace and strength. She's a responsible, smart, funny, kind woman and she adds so much to our family. She has endured being the first-born (aka guinea pig) and managed to teach us as much about parenting as we taught her.