Two years ago today, about this time early in the morning, I was making phone calls to my parents and Becky’s parents to let them know they had a new granddaughter. What a blessing Addie has been to us in these past two years. Happy Birthday, young lady… can’t wait to celebrate many more with you.

This morning Laura and Addie and a few of their friends participated in a little fashion show for a Christian women’s group. They got to pick out dresses to borrow from a local store and then strut their stuff. I’m not sure how much Laura slept last night, she was so excited. Becky managed to get a few pictures of the girls and their friends. Enjoy! (You can click on the pics to see the bigger version on Flickr.)

Weekends are going to look a little bit different now that we’re having church on Saturday night. Something to get used to. This weekend was actually pretty great; a phone call from my sister saying “hey, we’re bored, can we come visit this afternoon?” changed our direction pretty quickly. So the folks and Rebecca came down in time for church on Saturday night and then hung around on Sunday until late afternoon. It was great to see them and hang out.

Saturday night went well down at Imago Christi – certainly better than the first week. Sermon was tighter, music was more together, adding Dave Paris on the guitar with the worship team was a big plus. Picking a song for the meditation after the sermon continues to be a challenge – it’s just hard to know what the right song will be until I hear the message. Saturday night I wanted to use the song “Jesus, Name above all Names”, but the 70’s style of the original song was turning me off to it. So for the last five minutes of the sermon I worked out a new tune in my head, and then sang it. It actually sounded pretty good. I should go write it down while I still remember it.

Watched a bunch of football yesterday and was surprised and disappointed to see the Colts lose to the Chargers; not so surprised or disappointed to see the Cowboys lose. I’m gonna have to cheer for the Packers from here on out. There has to be somebody who can beat the Patriots.

Well, that’s your weekend update from Iowa. It’s now Monday morning and there’s work to be done.

A birthday that is always easy to remember, coming as it does the day after New Year’s. Aaron turns 25 today. A full quarter-century. Feeling old yet, bro? I have a feeling 2008 will be a memorable year for ya. Happy birthday!

What a great Christmas, and now how good to be home. We spent several days at my parents’ place in Wisconsin, though for the first day or so they weren’t there… they had to go to Chicago to pick up my sister, who flew in from Panama, and my brother, who flew in from DC. They made it within about 30 miles of home before the snow storm got so intense that they couldn’t manage to get any further. So they got a room, stayed the night, and waited for the snow plows. By noon the next day they made it home. It was sure good to see everyone.

Christmas was a marvelous time. It’s always such fun with small children, and Laura and Addie just loved opening their presents and playing with their new toys. The carnage comes when we bring them all home and add them to the existing pile of toys. I think it’s time for a garage sale or a large donation to Goodwill.

We did manage to get at least one decent family picture taken, so here we wish you a belated Merry Christmas! (For family and friends: I’ll get a bunch more uploaded to Flickr sometime this week.)

Today is my last work day for the year. Thanks to a day of vacation tomorrow and a generous holiday schedule from my employer, I will be able to enjoy the better part of two weeks away from the office. Not that it’ll be slow during that time… we leave Saturday to visit my family in Wisconsin. It will be so good to have everyone back together… Rebecca gets back from Panama on Saturday. Oh, and I’m also very ready to be allowed to dig into the massive pile of cookies that Becky has been making over the past couple of weeks. I think her goal this year was to make so many cookies that she could take them up to my family’s place and still have cookies left at the end of the visit. I’ll bet she achieved it.

Lots of other blogs do Top 10 lists at the end of the year, proclaiming their best new albums or movies or books or the like. I don’t think I’ll be doing that here. First of all, I doubt I’ve bought 10 CDs all year. And I haven’t watched too many movies, either. I may do a book roundup, though – I’m probably gonna be over 80 books for the year, maybe I can do a retrospective.

After reading the above two paragraphs, I’m amazed that content like this keeps anyone coming back to this blog. Thanks for reading, and Merry Christmas.

Christmas shopping is complete. The Christmas program is over. We’ve received a bunch of Christmas cards already. We still haven’t gotten any sent. Apologies in advance to organized friends like Stephanie and the Hollands. It’s not that we don’t appreciate you thinking of us and sending us the pictures. We do, really. We’re just not organized enough to get our own sent out this year. When I was growing up it was the family joke that we would send out a New Year’s letter, because our Christmas letter always went out really late. I think this Hubbs household might have to do the same thing.

Tasks for this week: baking cookies. Well, that’s mostly Becky. She has baked so many cookies this last week already. Toll House cookies. Chocolate Espresso cookies. O’Henry bars. Chocolate chip cookie dough balls. I know the Chex Mix is coming up yet this week. She has a schedule for every day divided up into morning, afternoon, and evening, with baking tasks laid out appropriately so that she can finish before we head to Wisconsin on Saturday. I am impressed, as usual, with her organizational determination.

Other tasks for this week: Wrapping presents. Just because they’re all bought doesn’t mean they’re ready for Christmas. We’ll load up the coffee table downstairs with all the wrapping implements and then turn something on the TV. I’m thinking it’ll be more Heroes. I never watched Heroes when it started last year on TV, and once I got behind, I knew it was no use trying to start in the middle. So I got Season 1 and we’ve been saving it until we had time. Now with the writer’s strike and no new shows to watch, it’s the perfect time. We watched five episodes over the weekend. Totally hooked. If not Heroes, it’ll be time to break out the Muppet Christmas Carol. It is pretty much a yearly tradition – who can fail to love Kermit as Bob Crachit and Michael Caine as Mr. Scrooge? So much fun.

I’m taking Friday off work to get a head start on the holidays. Then we pack and head off to see the family. Lots to do between now and then, though. After all, it’s only one more week ’til Christmas.

Got a long-awaited phone call from my youngest brother Andrew last weekend with some fantastic news: he and Heather are officially engaged to be married. I was hoping to post a picture with this, so I went to Facebook, and, well, it didn’t disappoint. (You have to be Andrew’s friend on Facebook to see the album.)

A few observable facts:

• They seem so young! And yet, assuming a summer 2008 wedding, Andrew will be older than I was when Becky and I got married.
• Becky and I were never this adorably cute.
• It’s been almost 10 years since the last Hubbs kid got married. Hope it’s not another 10 years before the next one!

I had a hard time deciding which pictures to post here – they’re all so darn cute. But here is just a taste. (Click the pics to enlarge.)

Twenty years ago today my little sister Rebecca joined the world. She has the distinction of being the youngest, cutest, and most spoiled ( ) of all the Hubbs kids. She’s in Panama right now, so I don’t know how soon she’ll see this, but anyway: Happy Birthday, sis. Hope you have a great day. Looking forward to seeing you again at Christmas.

And, because I can, here’s one of my favorite photos of Reba in recent memory. Love ya, sis!

First off, sorry to any of you who tried to leave comments yesterday. Something with the way the upgraded theme interacts with the spam catcher is leaving something to be desired. I’m working on it, but in the mean time if it disallows a comment of yours, send me an email to let me know, would you? Thanks.

Otherwise, it’s Wednesday. I am looking forward to a couple packages coming later in the week, though. Tomorrow, DHL should be bringing the new shoes I ordered last night. I’ve had my old Converse Chuck Taylor lo-tops for a year now, and have worn them out pretty good. It was time for a new pair. This time I’m living on the wild side – instead of replacing my black ones with another black pair, I’m getting green. That should be fun. I don’t think I’ve ever had a package delivered via DHL before, and I will say now that I’m very impressed with their package tracking on their website – it seems to be more granular and updated more frequently than UPS’s tracking info ever is.

Earlier in the week I got a gift card from work as an “alternative reward”. Cool. Even better is that with that gift card I’m getting a set of Shure E2c headphones. I know several folks that swear by them, and I’ve been thinking about the purchase for a while now. They were on “clearance” at Target last week for $89, but I got ‘em off Amazon for $60.

This weekend on Saturday we’re headed to Des Moines overnight – we just needed to get out of town for a day or two. All my business travel has finally added up to enough Hilton rewards points to get us a free hotel room on Saturday night, and I don’t have to lead music on Sunday, so we’re off to visit the zoo, an orchard, and whatever else we find interesting in the big city. Can’t wait.