Goodbye 2015!

Enjoying our crazy New Years Eve party as just the three of us this year! It was so nice to be able to enjoy each others company without a huge group of people over at our house! And Austin was being such a character! He gets sillier the more tired he gets ;).

I have mixed feelings about saying goodbye to this year. Yes, we went through some incredibly hard trials that could have bulldozed us to the ground if we let them. But we also had some incredibly beautiful moments that seemed to make up for all the bad. Josh's Dad died, but Evelyne was born. My Dad was almost killed and will never be the same mentally or physically, but Sadie and I got to spend more quality time with him while he was stuck in the hospital than we have in the past ten years!! Josh and I have struggled with keeping our heads sane and our bodies functioning with the craziness of having two kids only 21 months apart, but we have also had major breakthroughs in our relationship and have learned to love and support each other even in the worst of times. I personally have struggled with so many things this year... body image after having my second child, trying to maintain a house of order and cleanliness while chasing a naked two year old through the house or wiping up poop and spit up from the carpet, while also maintaining a career and trying to salvage what little time to myself I can find. That seems to have been the hardest part of this year for me. I have found myself taking care of EVERYBODY else but me and it has been hard to say the least. Josh has been excelling at his job with Wells Fargo which has been a Godsend because we really needed him to find a job he actually likes and stick with it! However, he has struggled with the fact that he barely makes more money than he did when we lived in Utah as newlyweds, and if you  know Josh, that is a hard pill to swallow....

Although Art's death was incredibly difficult for all of us, it also opened up an amazing opportunity that neither of us had ever really thought of, or had the money to pursue. Art left us with enough money from his life insurance policy to pay off our townhouse and still have money left over in the bank! At first we were thinking we would use it to sell our home and purchase a bigger place, one with a back yard for Austin to run wild in. But then I was confronted at work by a friendly Nurse Practitioner who planted the seed in my mind to go back to school and get my Master's Degree! I gave her all of my excuses, and explained how I don't know if I could handle one more thing added to my plate. But somehow she talked me out of all my negativity and I found myself coming to Josh with the idea. For about two months we have talked, planned, prayed, fasted, and finally I came to the conclusion that I am going to do it! The amazing part is we actually have the money from the life insurance we recently received to make it happen! We both have felt like this was the one last gift from Art to help us out in life. He was always there to help pay for things when we were broke, or to just be there as a counselor when we needed advice. Now, even in death, he is helping his family. I tear up every time I think about it. So I have started the application process and should know in a couple months if I got in or not. I decided to do the part time online program which will take a year longer to complete, but it is very important to me that I am still able to be there for my family.

Josh has been told by his manager that he should be receiving a promotion sometime this year (fingers crossed) because he is doing such an amazing job! Let's hope so because my going back to school means more expenses and we already have more than enough of those!

As for the kids, they have grown beautifully over the past year. Eve has been such a blessing to our family and we all adore her. Because of her birth, Austin has been forced to grow and learn how to share attention which has been amazing to watch. Yes, we still have moments multiple times a day when they are both fighting for our love and affection and will literally be fighting and pushing each other to get to my lap. But behind the sibling rivalry there is so much love. Austin becomes genuinely concerned when he hears Eve cry and Eve starts crying the second she sees that her brother has become hurt (which happens a lot since he is a very active little boy). I have pondered a lot about whether we will have more kids, but for now, I think we are both happy to just enjoy these two. I don't know if our sanity could handle another crazy LaFeber added to the mix!

We celebrated New Years Eve at home and had a great time! We put the baby to bed and then stayed up with Austin for a while. He was in such a silly mood! He kept wanting to wrestle with me so I let him have it!

Wrestling the A-man down to the ground!

His giggles cracked me up!

Oh Austin, you make life exciting!

After we put the goofball to bed, we spent the rest of the night having our own little party! Austin kept coming out of his room and spying on us from the stairs. It reminded us both of when we used to spy on our parents. We had fun talking about everything that has happened in 2015 and playing board games. We laughed hard, ate Christmas candy, and had a really great time! It was so nice because Josh and I rarely get moments like that alone. It made us realize that we need to make more time for us to be silly together in 2016. We didn't quite make it to midnight but we did watch the countdown in New York City on the TV. It's funny how having kids makes you more exhausted than you have ever been in your life! 11:00pm feels like 3:00am!!

I hope and pray that 2016 will be good to us. There have been tons of scary events going on in the world, but I have faith that God will keep us safe. It also helps that we inherited a bunch of food storage from Papa Art :).