Holiday update

We celebrated Christmas with Dustin's parents a few days prior, since they were headed to Oregon on Christmas Eve. Dustin and I opened our presents to each other and we both did a pretty good job picking things out. Dustin rocked his platypus t-shirt for multiple days.

We don't understand the snake reference either

The dogs did indeed receive the new collars I had been drooling over on Etsy. Though they don't sport the flowers except for special occasions, they still look pretty dang cute in the collars themselves. I'll try to post a few photos of them in their collars at a later time.

On Christmas Eve, Dustin, Britni and I headed up (separately, as I had to work till 11:30 pm. Hellooooo holiday pay!) to Ashton to open presents Christmas morning (read: LATE morning) with my parents, Brad, Kelli, Andrew and the kids. Dustin and I were pretty spoiled, getting a Wii from my parents. We set it up immediately after getting home and I played Final Fantasy for 4 hours the first night (yep, I'm an RPG junkie). After opening presents, the rest of the Garz gaggle came by for the annual Christmas party, where my mom got to show off her new photobook of our wedding (Teresa got one too!). We threw together a bunch of wedding photos into frames for different family members and it was fun to see them open them. I'm pretty sure I made my Uncle Bob tear up a little with the photos of him and his granddaughter Layla.

A note on the photobook: They were done through MyPublisher.com (we got a gift certificate as a wedding gift from my cousin Macy and her husband Sean), which is a pretty awesome site. Dustin spent a ton of time touching up photos and making everything perfect, and it really turned out great! I can't wait to add the photos from our courthouse ceremony & honeymoon and have a copy of our own!

Dustin spent a lazy week after Christmas watching Netflix on our new t.v. (D finally broke down and got a Vizio from CostCo, because our projector keeps having issues) and hanging out with the girls. Britni headed off for P.T.  rotations in St. Louis, so we'll be entertaining Kieko for the next 8 weeks (only 7 now, I guess). I'm hoping to use some of my new PTO to take a long weekend to go visit.

The girls hanging out and letting Dustin sleep in

I've been working a lot. I'm happy to say that I am now a full-time employee of EIRMC (yay for benefits!). I start my normal schedule (Mon-Fri 7am-3:30pm) on Monday and am looking forward to many many weekends off in the future. Needless to say, I've wheedled down to having only 1 other job on the side. I'll be keeping my PRN position with the Pocatello Women's Correctional Center, since it's only an hour a week or so.

Dustin and I have started considering buying a new car, since we'll have two full-time incomes and it's a possibility that Dustin may be the one driving out to American Falls every day in the near future. Big Red is not exactly reliable these days. The Silver Bullet is doing great, but I sure have racked up the miles with my commuting the last couple years.

We'll be headed up to Missoula tomorrow to see Heath, Angel, Alex and Max and do our Christmas thing with them. I'm still hoping that Alex and I can go see 'Tangled' since I worked the entire time the kids were in Pocatello last. Snow-shoeing is also in the cards, so we'll be trying out Sophie's new booties to see how well they keep her feet snowball-free.