This year's Christmas letter...
2011 has been our best year yet – due largely to the arrival in August of our daughter, Reese Elizabeth.
Reese has been a miracle in our lives even before her birth. Early on our doctor stopped hearing the baby’s heartbeat and confirmed that we had lost the baby. Amazingly, the heartbeat reappeared 2 weeks later and she’s been healthy ever since! We are still shocked and incredibly grateful for this gift from God. Thankfully Reese has been healthy, happy, and overall a super-easy baby, so it hasn’t been too much of a shock to ease into parenthood.
The rest of the year mostly revolved around Reese... We quickly found that quite a lot of time can go into baby research, baby classes, baby nursery decorating, baby showers… you catch our drift.
We took an incredible trip to Turks and Caicos to celebrate the wedding of Kristie DeKoker and Corey Gibbs (whom we also were able to visit with when we met up at the Super Bowl this year!). Grace Bay was the nicest beach we’ve ever seen!
When we returned, Christine had a girls weekend with her Kappa friends in Scottsdale where they spent the entire weekend floating in a lazy river at the Westin Kierland.
Later this summer we took a “baby moon” down to Texas Hill Country to lounge by the pool, visit Sea World in San Antonio (Christine had to get her dolphin fix), and then explore the quaint town of Fredricksburg.
For work (to support all of the travel and baby purchases) Dana rotated off the Doritos team (not before the Doritos ad scored #1 out of all Super Bowl ads) but he was happy to be promoted to run brand marketing for PepsiCo’ in non-retail channels (foodservice, etc). Christine took on a new role leading Mass Media for the Marketing department, which surprisingly included filming a number of fun cooking shows (some even in Times Square).
Dana joined Christine on the Board of Partners International, an international missions ministry that we feel very strongly about (check out: www.partnersinternational.org)
We spent Thanksgiving in St. Louis with 19 extended family members and we are excited to host both sides of the family in our home to celebrate Christmas and ring in the New Year.
Wishing you and yours peace and joy this Christmas season! Christine, Dana & Reese
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