Back to life, back to reality

We're Home! We had a great vacation and we've been home for two days now. I would start blogging about our trip, but I don't have the best internet connection at the moment and it would take a lifetime to upload pictures at this speed so that will have to wait.

Does anyone out there go through post-Christmas let down? I'm experiencing it right now. For me it's not that the excitement of Christmas is over, it usually that I just had a chance to spend time with my family and it's so hard to leave them and go far away again. I was doing ok this year because I was happy to be home after two weeks of traveling, but then I realized that Larry works all weekend and that's been depressing. He's on overnight call tonight and it feels especially lonely after spending so much time together over the past two weeks.

That said, I'm sounding pretty whiney so I'm trying to get over it by thinking of all the fun things that I have to look forward to. My friend Cat hates this time of the year in Columbus when the holidays are over and everything is gray and cold so she makes a special effort to plan fun things to look forward to. Here's what I've come up with so far: our ward chili chocolate cookoff (two separate items, chili and chocolate desserts), my wonderful friend Alicia's wedding in Colorado, Valentine's Day, our second annual snowflake cutting competition, hopefully another ultrasound that will comfirm the sex of our baby, decorating the nursery, and of course the arrival of Baby Ford.

Somewhere in the middle of all of that Larry will be taking his next step of the boards (he was supposed to take it in October and then in December, but due to some errors processing his application he'll be taking it at the beginning of February). He'll also be interviewing for fellowship positions around the country. He just received his first invitation to interview at Oregon Health Sciences in Portland and we could not be more excited! Unfortunately Larry has some really busy rotations scheduled for the next three months so we have no idea how he will be able to take any time off to interview, but I'm sure it will all work out. It looks like I need to do some planning to keep myself busy in the meantime.