Hello one and All!

Lee has been doing suck a great job keeping you all up to date on the Ace's hockey season I haven't got a chance to check in with you all. I hope everyone is prepared for the big day with santa....and that this holiday season finds you well.

Bret is up on the slope right now and gets back on Thursday...just in time for us to do some last minute shopping for Lee. As is our family tradition, we have picked out a lovely rock and stick for him this year! Every year this is what we promise him and we wrap up both for under the tree. Lee will be off from the 22nd until the 8th of January, and Bret will be home until the 3rd so it works out great! I of course will be working, but I do have the 25th off so no complaints.

We have probably about 6-10 inches of snow right now and the day time highs have dropped back into the high 20's so it's pretty nice hear. We are down to about 6 hours of light each day with an hour of dusk on each end. Dec. 21st, Winter Solstice is a huge celebration up here, because it officially marks the shortest day of the year and then we just keep gaining daylight right through June.

Work is going well, we have been crazy busy this month, on Tuesday we had 40 babies and our capacity is only 36 so they set up 3 babies in a patient room on the mother/baby unit. It's been quite busy! I start my Green Belt training in Febuary which I'm really excited about. It's training through our Operational Excellence department at the hospital. It was originally used by the Toyota company and General Electric as a way of gathering information and graphing/analysing and coming up with proposals to make business practices more efficient and to affect positive change within an organization. It is called the Six Sigma program. It's kind of hard to explain, but it's something I'm quite passionate about and I have been allotting 10 percent of my work time at Providence to facilitating meetings within the company. After my Green Belt training, in which I will work on a 3-6 month project I will be eligable to apply to do this work fulltime within the hospital. I have worked quite a bit with the director of Operational Excellence and she has invited me to apply for a fulltime position in April, when my green belt course work is complete. This would be a HUGE career move for me and I'm really looking forward to it....so keep your fingers crossed for me.

We'll try to get our christmas gifts in the mail on Monday for our family members, so be on the look out for those. We are also eagerly awaiting the arrival of our new neice or nephew this month as my sister-in-law and brother are expecting at the end of December.....so lots of warm and safe wishes to Elton, Patricia and Eric......and new baby :)

We don't have any new pics but will try to post some before xmas!

Have a great holiday and be safe!
all our love
Bret, Jan, and Lee