Season's Greetings!

Sam the holiday elf

Happy holidays to all our avid blog readers (our 2 subscribers know who they are) and first time visitors. Sorry for the non-traditional holiday letter. I enjoyed creating our past holiday letters but printing and mailing from overseas presented complications.

I hope you all weathered this tumultuous year. 2008 certainly had some big events- global markets crashing, a new US president (so happy to be done with campaign ads), and our move to Australia. OK so, so it wasn't a major enough event to warrant a news report on CNN but it was our big story of the year.

Hopefully we reached out to all of you but in case we missed you here is the brief recap: we had an opportunity through Michael's work to move to Sydney and we jumped on it. We've been here since September and so far we're loving the experience. The kids have handling the move like champions. Every once in a while Nate will say that he wants to return to Seattle (usually for very interesting reasons like he misses the supermarket). For those who may be wondering-Sam our 5 year old black lab is here with us. He probably had the hardest move of anyone (definitely the most expensive) and after a month of quarantine is out and eager to mark every tree in every park in Sydney.

We've started to explore some of Sydney neighborhoods and even took a couple of vacations. Check back on the blog every once and while for stories of our adventures. Of course the frequency of blog postings may slow if I am able to find a full time job :)

Hopefully 2009 will bring economic stability or maybe even a rebound??? (we can hope at least). Enjoy your holidays and best wishes for a healthy and happy New Year. Please stay in touch and think about a vacation down under.

fondly,

Mimi, Michael, Reese and Nate