I spent the last few weeks in MD and VA, visiting family and my soon-to-be family. I had a great time throughout my vacation and was reminded again that I'm incredibly blessed with a great family and now with a new family. One of the highlights of my Christmas vacation was going up to my parents' with Lizzy. It was a good time of relaxing with my family, visiting with grandparents, and doing some shopping and wedding planning. I think my mom was happier to have Liz around than me :) After all, she had two other sons around but no daughter in the house. We went out for dessert with my brother Andrew one of the nights and the first two 
pictures are from around Naptown. We spent one of the nights in town having dinner with my friends who have two daughters who will be in our wedding as junior bridesmaids. When I went away to the academy they had a picture of me in my uniform and would pray for me everyday! It was great to see their faces light up when we asked them to be in our wedding...it's their first wedding and they were extremely excited, as I guess all girls are to be in a wedding.
After spending Christmas morning with my family we drove down to VA to spend the rest of the Christmas day with her family. After Christmas Liz and I did some registering for our wedding, which took a little longer than I was anticipating...for the most part we were in agreement on what to register for, but I drew the line at a deviled-egg platter. Now that I've put that in the blog I can see us getting a lot of deviled-egg platters from people helping out Lizzy. For some reason I just object to having a platter around for deviled-eggs when you're probably only going to use it once a year at most. It was funny because every girl that we related that to agreed that a deviled-egg platter is a must, "well, what are you going to bring deviled-eggs to parties on? They'll slide all over the place on a normal plate" was the normal response. I guess it's a major faux pas to not bring eggs to a party. I grew up in a house with two brothers so I have
a lot to learn about these things.Liz bought some shirts and sweaters for me for Christmas, one of which looked somewhat similar to one owned by Clay. Luckily, we're guys and it's not a big deal to show up somewhere dressed like another guy. Jordan will have to get one too to fit in.
This past weekend I drove down to Augusta, Georgia, and spent the night with my cousin and her family. I had a great time playing with my second cousins Maddie (a two year old girl) and Ethan, who's 5 months old and mostly good at eating and sleeping. Sunday I spent most of the day driving to Pensacola. When I arrived it was 75 degrees and sunny and it felt good to be back in my own place despite having to leave my family and friends behind. The past few days have just been spent doing some organizing and cleaning around the apartment and doing some studying on the side. I'm looking forward to starting the next phase of my training in February, which is probably the most difficult part (mostly groundschool and the part of the training where they try to weed people out, so I'd appreciate your prayers!).
Well I was going to write something deep and profound about New Year's resolutions and accomplishing goals, but it's my birthday so I'm giving myself a hall-pass until later in the week when I'll (hopefully, not promising anything) get around to doing another blog post. Happy New Year!
