Merry Christmas everyone!

On Christmas Eve we discovered that the duck we had planned make was rancid. The grocery store was out of ducks, so they gave us two pheasants instead. Luckily, we found a great recipe and still had a lovely dinner. Afterwards, Rachel relaxed by the fire before we all headed off to midnight mass at Blessed Sacrament.

Hooray for progress! Although Kevin still needs to put in paving stones, fences, and the concrete steps to the backyard, I can now officially park next the house! This was a great Christmas present! He has really worked hard on this for many months. It will look amazing when it is completely finished.

Rachel took these neat pictures of me yesterday at 33/34 weeks pregnant. Thank you, Rachel! What a lovely Christmas present.

Advent is truly the most wonderful time to be pregnant. Waiting in anticipation and joy for the birth of Jesus means so much more to me this year than ever before!

Rachel gets cozy on the couch...

We are so glad she's here for Christmas!

This week Kevin completed the retaining walls around the parking space and in front of the house. So it might not be finished by Christmas... but we are hoping that everything will be done by February!

Tonight we decorated our Christmas tree with our friends Chris and Monica. Isn't it lovely?

Wow! Check out Kevin's progress on the Parking Spot Project! He is now building retaining walls with 60 lb concrete bricks. We are hoping to have it finished by Christmas...

This is also an old picture. Here Kevin is supervising his student and construction helper, Paul, on the removal of his make-shift frame for the concrete wall he had to re-build. It actually worked! Now Kevin is in the process of building the retaining walls. I'll post some more recent photos later...

The first snow in Seattle actually happened a week ago, but it took me a while to upload this photo of the first snow flakes falling outside our house. Seattle practically shut down for three days... for less than an inch of the while stuff. We did have some pretty scary ice, though!

Here I am looking pretty impressively huge at 30 weeks.

Baby is currently about 3.5 lbs and 18 inches long!