Annual Alcorn Christmas Letter

Dearest Family & Friends, December 2008

Greetings one and all this frigid (in Winnipeg anyway) but fabulous Christmas season! What a year it has been, full of learning, laughing, loving and every day getting closer to really living life the way it’s meant to be. Can’t really ask for much more, can we? We hope the year has brought you many blessings as well, and we hope to hear about them soon : )

We’ll start with Sean this year, who has entered his 6th year with Archway (recently changed it’s name to Skybridge) and is finding himself much happier at work this year since his promotion. He has loved facing the challenges his new position has brought him, even on the frustrating days he has been thankful for the opportunities he has been given. He has always earned the respect of the managers he’s worked with but he is now garnering even more attention in this position and several different managers have expressed interest in wooing him to their department. Some upper managers at the Christmas party couldn’t stop telling me how much they really appreciated working with Sean, it was very nice for us to both hear, and it has more than made up for the years we weren’t sure why God was keeping him there.

This December has marked 18 months at Golder Associates for me and I am still enjoying it just as much. In spring we realized things were actually getting much busier, which is good for the growth of our small branch yet made life quite hectic for me. Being busy made the days fly, and even with the little bit of stress it caused I still have been very happy, and blessed to have my job. I love our Golder ‘family’, still small but yet growing, and thankfully this fall it grew to include another admin position to help me with the workload. We hoped it would also free me up to take on additional accounting duties that are still being taken care of by our sister branch in Saskatoon (we’re still so small we are technically a division in their branch), but so far it’s just been so busy it’s taken the two of us to keep up with what we already have. As soon as she was hired we considered looking into hiring another admin person! Oh, and did I mention, my new admin assistant is my good friend Crystal? I recommended her to my boss, and recommended Golder to her, and it all worked out : ) It’s been really great and I look forward to all that 2009 holds for our office, including moving into a newer, bigger office in February.

As for other happenings in our life this year, it has been an eventful one. As you may remember I mentioned last year how much Sean and I learned about God’s perfect timing, our jobs have really taught us God is looking after us. Of course, we are human, and being subject to and victim of the baggage this world sometimes gives us, we sometimes just don’t learn the lesson completely that we can and need to trust God. Last November (2007) I finally felt the need to talk to my doctor about the possibility of infertility. We have shared with some of you during this year that we have been trying for a baby nearly 3 years as of the end of this year, and so 2008 has been a journey of discovering if parenting is part of God’s plan for us. There is too many details to stuff into this holiday letter, so feel free to ask us about it if you haven’t heard our story yet, but the short version is there are no concrete answers, from the doctors or from God as to when and if we might have children biologically. It’s been a struggle having to face the possibility the only future I imagined, might not be. And it’s been hard to trust that God could have something planned for us much better for me than giving birth to my children. Even though He’s proved himself time and again. He’s been working on us though, and as usual, by year’s end I think we’ve finally got it. Actually it was just this morning at Southland, when I heard the Bible verse Matthew 7:11 “If you then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to you?”

Other big news for us this year was the selling of our house and purchase of a new house. We’d been tossing around the idea for almost a year and in Spring when we heard the prices of houses were still climbing to crazy prices we figured we wouldn’t be able to afford a bigger house if we waited much longer. We finished up some renovations we wanted done and put the house up for sale mid June, got an offer before our open house, fell in love with a house, had our offer accepted, all by June 25th. We were very blessed having sold and bought so fast, getting more than our asking price and paying less than we budgeted. We love our home tremendously, it really feels like it was meant to be our home and it’s opened up so many doors for our future.
Family, as always has been a priority this year, making time to connect as much as possible. My sisters and I started the year planning a surprise 40th Anniversary celebration for my parents that would take place in August. It was a lot of work but it paid off, they were surprised and it was a great time together. Just a few short weeks before the celebration happened on the August long weekend, Jodi gave birth to the first boy in our family. Landon Kade was born 4 weeks early on July 24th, but he was a really healthy little boy with very few complications, and he’s already trying to make up for starting small. It’s really great to have a baby around again, and my dad is over the moon there is finally a boy to watch sports with and buy jersey’s for.

In some ways it seems like a lot has changed this year, yet so much has stayed the same. For those of you who see me in person you may have noticed I’ve taken my health seriously this year by deciding to eat better and start seriously exercising, and so far I have lots 25 lbs (I do have to share credit with my sister Tami and God : ). Sean and I hit our 5th year of marriage this year, and every challenge thrown at us continues to bring us closer together. It is such a blessing to have each other, to have someone to share life with who shares your perspective, and who can personify God’s love. There are always friends to connect/reconnect with, which we’ve done a lot of this year, I think Facebook is a wonderful invention : ) Of course, so are blogs, if you want to find out what’s going on with us before December 2009, feel free to visit me at loriinhishands.blogspot.com.

As always, we wish you all a meaningful holiday season, full of warm memories, a reflective look at the year past, and a hopeful look towards 2009.

Love
Lori & Sean

For the Christmas-holics

Who could ask for more, Christmas lights AND carols!

December ought to come with a pause button

I can't believe it's almost Christmas! Wasn't it just Dec. 1st, heck, wasn't it just mid-November?!? I know, the busyness makes time fly, and I'm very much looking forward to the gatherings, and I just keep trying to remind myself to enjoy the moments and ignore the chaos that can occur. Not needing to be in malls has really helped that. As usual, in our families, the only actual gifts we have to buy are for kids and the 3 people in Sean's family, plus a few good friends here and there. Only 4 more gifts to buy, and one has asked for a gift card, so we're in pretty good shape. I love focusing on being together rather than gifts, not just because it means avoiding malls, but that plays a part as well, because we're not wasting time on chaos that really doesn't have much to do with Christ's birthday at all.
As much as I'm trying to soak up the season, it seems I have absolutely no time to just savor the moments as they are flying by these days. I forgot to take photos of my big baking day in Steinbach, the munchkins were around and so there were many moments I didn't get to capture. Then I forgot to bring it to Celebrations for our friend Ernie's birthday celebration (that his lovely wife Kristie planned), Corner Gassed was hilarious, and he was up there participating a couple of times, many kodak moments. Then I went to Calgary for a day of Golder training, didn't take photos of their new, beautiful office (has an amazing view of downtown with the mountains in the background) and I didn't take photos of my reunion with my babysitter Lori Klassen there either. It's been almost 22 years since we saw each other in Edmonton, and even though we've chatted on Facebook it was really great to meet her in person again. Yet no photos to remember it by!
I did take my annual photo of my sister Jodi's family though, so lots of great photos from that session. Those kidlings are such characters : ) That makes me feel slightly better.
But yeah, I know I've been mentioning lots of things (ornaments, craftrooms, family) that I should be posting photos of, and I won't make any promises, but here's hoping I can get them up by January : )