Way overdue!

Hello!!

I apologize! I am WAY overdue for an update!! Time just seemed to slip away from me in December!! There's a few things to update on too!! :)
First of all, this blog is being written from good ole Des Moines, Iowa! That's right! Not nice..warm..sunny...Texas, but freezing, cloudy, cold, Iowa! (Can you tell I miss the Texas climate?) Danny and I came home for the Christmas/New Years holidays, my work was kind enough to give me 3 weeks off from work so that we could come home and see our families for the first time since July! It was really great to come home and see our families after being gone for that long, there was even a fresh blanket of snow that fell after we got home! I can't express how nice it will be to come home to snow and ice for Christmas and then just leave it all behind when we go back to Texas...now that's MY kind of winter!!
A few days after Christmas, we expanded our fur baby family and adopted two new sugar gliders! We found out about them from a friend of a friend and she was just willing to give us everything with them for free provided they were going to a new home! Their names are Sydney and Melbourne and are the cutest things ever!! We were a little worried introducing them to Kiah because I had read that the bonding process of one sugar glider to another took some time (several months to a year even and sometimes not at all!) and here we were attempting to bond two already bonded gliders to Kiah. Little did we know we had nothing to worry about! For the first few minutes after putting them together they kind of ignored each other and did their own thing, then started to sniff each other and walk around where the other was. We figured this was a good sign and tried to put them in a cage we had for them with lots of toys to play with and watch them. Once they all got in there they all started jumping and climbing around on their toys. Eventually the two new boys got tired and climbed back into their pouch to go to sleep...Kiah crawled over to their pouch and kind of peered in like "can I please come in?" and crawled inside. They all curled up and went to sleep and have been fast friends ever since!!! Talk about getting lucky with them all liking each other!! It's funny to watch them all play together because they have such different personalities and you can tell that Kiah and Melbourne are best buddies, but while Kiah and Sydney seem to get along they still squabble like siblings do. :)
Danny and I rang in the new year together celebrating with all of our friends we haven't seen since the wedding which was really fun! We all pitched in and rented a hotel room together that did balloon drops and served champagne at midnight and spent the whole night playing games and catching up and probably taking waaay to many pictures haha. It was so much fun though, and I missed everyone SO much! It was so great to be with our friends again!! New Year's Day 3 of our friends came over to my parents house with Danny and I for a southern style New Year's dinner :)
Danny's first semester of grad school grades were posted as well, and while he may not be 100% happy with them, I am so proud of him and how well he did! One B and all the rest were A's!!! How awesome is that!! I think he wished he did better in his Cell and Molecular Bio class but seriously!!! Even the name makes me want to cringe!! Theres no way that I would have been able to do that well! haha Also, I have some potentially good new to share about my work as well, but I want to want until it is set in stone to share so you will just have to wait to find out.. ;)
Danny and I leave to drive back down to Texas early Saturday morning. The drive down here wasn't too bad, although it felt like it was going to be dark outside forever!!! We stayed up all night Thursday into Friday and went to bed at noon Friday afternoon, got up at midnight, packed the car and were heading out of town at 1:45 am. Since we went to bed at noon we had all the blinds closed to make it seem dark so that we could sleep, but when we got up we still had about 6 hours of darkness left..it felt like the sun was never going to come up! The good thing about leaving that early was that we were able to get home around 2:30 pm so we still got there fairly early in the day. That is his plan with leaving this Saturday, and we will be getting up super early and driving through the night again. We are picking up one of our friends in Omaha, who is coming to stay an extra week with us in Texas. We didn't plan very well for the fact that we would be having a third person in the car with us on the way home and packed his car pretty full coming down to visit, so we will have all of that plus Christmas presents...it will be an interesting game of tetris..Katie maaayyy have to be tied to the roof of the car...just kidding Katie..maybe.. ;)

Phew! Ok, I believe I am all caught up now! Sorry for falling behind on this blog...and my cooking blog if any of you are followers of that as well :) More to come soon, I promise!!!

<3
Mrs. Goodding