I'm baaaack

Hi again - so sorry for the long delay between postings. Quite a lot has occurred since my last post. First, I'll start with the fun stuff. We went to the Jones' house to watch the Iron Bowl this year - we had a great time with lots of great food, but the game was terrible! :( Maybe next year... Maybe Turner Gill can turn us around! (I'm quite sad about Tubby leaving but must look ahead to the future.) The boys and I had to run errands last week, and since it was the first week of December, it was officially game on for wearing Christmas clothing. Woo-hoo! The boys have SO many Christmas outfits, I just hope I can fit them all in before January! :)

See their matching light-up Santa socks? Carter picked those out (I wanted the less flashy reindeer ones).

Carter made a gingerbread man from a kit Cheryl gave us - thanks, Cheryl! This was so much fun, and we still have 3 more that we look forward to decorating!

We went to the new Bass Pro Shops yesterday to get the boys' picture made with Santa. This is what we ended up with:

Notice anything missing? Carter started crying like we'd chopped his arm off as soon as it was our turn, so we didn't even attempt it with him. I don't want to force him and make him have bad memories of Santa. I also have random flashes into his future whenever there are pivotal moments in his life, and wonder if he'll think of me like Joan Crawford's kids did. This is one of my foremost parenting tools ;) He did, however, manage to talk me out of 50 cents to play a shooting gallery game.

I'm neither hunter nor fisherman but this store is really cool... Alan and I have been to several of them, and we think this new one here in B'ham may be the best yet. Even though you can see the store from the interstate and from the road, you have to go around the world (through a nature trail for cars) and it takes about 10 minutes to get to the store. It feels like being out in the wilderness somewhere...

Today, Carter and I made lots of crafts. We made Christmas door hangers, other Christmas art, our own Advent calendar of sorts, and bird feeders! Here is the Advent calendar we made... I put sections of Hershey's Kisses into cellophane wrap, separated by ribbon, to designate each day left until Christmas. This way, we can cut off one section every night and when we get to the last one, Carter will know that it's Christmas! Thanks to Kathy from Holly's mom's group for this idea :)

Carter was very excited to make pine cone bird feeders - he was so proud of this one!

He was also very excited to hang them up so the birds could enjoy them. He found 3 different sized pine cones, and made one for the daddy bird, mommy bird, and baby bird :)

Also today, I baked a double batch of my mom's most famous cookies and they didn't turn out very well... Good thing I thought to take a picture of what I thought might be an issue down the road! There are only 2 eggs here - one of them was a twin!

We've done lots of other fun stuff over the past week or so - almost too much to remember! Now on to other news... Alan's company is suffering along with most other companies during this tough economic time. They announced the layoff of several hundred workers (a big chunk of their workforce). We thought we were safe, but we thought wrong... Alan was laid off on Friday, which made for a bit of a depressing weekend. We had to skip our Sunday School Christmas party - one of the major highlights of the season because it's sooo much fun! We didn't need to spend the money on a babysitter and opted to stay home instead. I did enjoy hearing the stories the next day though - hopefully someone snapped a lot of pictures! This year was the first year everyone was supposed to dress up like their favorite Christmas movie character - I hear Cousin Eddie was the funniest (complete with multiple changes of clothes for the different outfits he wore in the movie).

We aren't too worried about the financial situation at this point though (although we are accepting diaper donations, as always - ha!)... We have a little money saved up to last us a short while, and we know that Alan can always go back to consulting, or possibly contract work if necessary. We also know there isn't work here in Birmingham and we aren't willing to move at this point, so that may be likely (sigh - more travel). However, he met with HR today and learned that he will get a pretty sizable severence package, relatively speaking (we didn't expect much since he hasn't been there very long, but we were very pleasantly surprised). Oh, and there is one group in his company that is sponsored by their clients - the clients pay big money for them to keep these people on staff. Therefore, that group isn't affected by layoffs because clients dictate the number of those positions. Well, one of those positions just came open and he has an interview tomorrow. Please, everyone say a big collective prayer tonight, and hopefully this will be the right job! The HR person also said we would get to keep the severence package, and he would come back on board in January - so it'd be like getting a nice Christmas bonus and taking the holidays off :) I don't want to get my hopes up too high, but I sure do hope this is the right one... I'll keep everyone updated. In the meantime, don't worry about us, but please pray for us!