Christmas Letter from the Clairs

Merry Christmas,

Is it seriously time for another Christmas letter?  I feel like I just hit print on last year’s letter and here I am again for this year’s update!  Well, in true Clair Family fashion, we have been extremely busy this year.  A majority of this busyness has come from our work situations.  Breanne is still working in Speech Therapy and loves the company that she is currently with.  She is also still working on building her Pampered Chef business.  The biggest problem is finding a place for all of the new kitchen gadgets that need to mysteriously find homes in our cabinets!  Michael is also still in his same job with State Farm and just hit his five-year anniversary.  Michael has also started in a part-time ministry position at South Side Christian Church.  He is working at the Southwest Campus of our congregation and is in charge of our Small Group and Discipleship ministry.  Finally working in a ministry position has been a goal in the making for many years now, and he could not be happier to finally be serving in this sort of capacity.  It presents a whole new set of challenges, but it is totally worth it!  He loves it so far!

We celebrated Julia’s first birthday with a delightful cupcake party in March.  She is so much fun, we can hardly stand it!  Julia makes us laugh constantly and a joy to be around.    She is talking in phrases, singing, climbing/jumping/running everywhere, and loves snuggles, giving zerbits, reading books, and dancing to music.  Her favorite shows are Shaun the Sheep and Sesame Street.  She also has a newfound love of all things reindeer.

In July, Michael and Breanne had the great opportunity to travel to Venezuela with a mission team from our church.  We went to visit and work with a missionary that our church partners with.  We did things like: teaching a parenting/marriage conference, door-to-door invitations to this conference, painting, teaching men’s and women’s Bible study groups, and any other odd jobs they found for us.  We were blessed with an amazing host family, delicious food, warm hospitality, and met some wonderful new friends.

 For Thanksgiving, we traveled with Breanne’s mom, Bonnye, to New Mexico.  That’s right… we drove… with a twenty month old… all the way to New Mexico.  For those who don’t know, that’s two thousand five hundred seventy-five miles!!!  It was crazy!  Julia however, was a trooper and she did phenomenal!  We had a wonderful time with a lot of family and friends that we haven’t seen in a while.

So I suppose by this point in the letter, you have already noticed the picture enclosed and are just waiting for us to get to that!  Well now that the cat is officially out of the bag, we will be welcoming a new member to our family next year!  We couldn’t be more excited!  We are expecting our little “Chicken Nugget” (this is what it looks like on the sonogram picture) to arrive on July 24^th.  However, if this pregnancy is anything like it was with Julia, we will expect to see him or her around the first week of August.  We will be finding out the gender some time in late March, but like last time, the name will remain a secret until he or she arrives.  We are so excited to meet this new little one!  We know that 2012 is going to be full of all kinds of craziness and we look forward to sharing more of that with you in the coming year.  We wish you and your families many blessings this new year!

Love,

Michael, Breanne, & Julia…. And our little “Nugget”