Merry Christmas from the Catmull's 2015

What a year 2015 has been!  Lot's of adventures, family fun and a new addition to the family.

Let's start with Corb and Kar:

They bought a beautiful new townhome not far from us.  Okay, like 6 miles, not that I've run there or anything.  Kar is still working at the dentist office, She trained all year and ran her first marathon in St George this past October.  She keeps busy being a wonderful mother to Chloee. 

Corb is going to school at Westminster and works part time at the Veteran's center there on campus.  He's bustin out his credit hours all while maintaining a 4.0  

Chloee turned 8, got baptized loves school and had an early Christmas present!  The newest furbaby in our family is Millie - an eight week old shorkie that seriously is the cutest little thing ever!  Chloee is going to be a great pet owner, they fell instantly in love.

Luke and Mindy:

Luke is still working at his same job, he continues to do well.  He has had the chance to travel a bit with his job this year and been to some places in the United States that he had never been to.  

Mindy is working for the Intermountain Donor Services and doing fabulous.  She seriously has the dream job.  She gets to be right in the action of actually saving lives.  Be an organ donor!  She also began a new drug just approved by the FDA for use in Cystic Fibrosis patients with a specific mutation.  So far, she is doing great on it.  Praying that it continues to work as it should and it leads her to feeling much, much better more of the time.  She is certainly a warrior!  She also ran her first marathon this year in St George.  She did amazing and beat us all!

They completed all the work to post their adoption profile and now just anxiously awaiting the sweet little one that belongs to their family to come.  If you know of anyone looking to place a baby for adoption,  here is the link to their profile page, feel free to share it.  Every day, my prayers include a plea for them to be blessed with a baby.

Preston and Montana:

Preston is still working for Coke.  He was promoted to salesman which is a nice step up, but super stressful.  His work phone never seems to stop.  Hoping once the holidays end, things will slow down a little bit for him.  He is also working for Primerica working on getting licensed as a financial advisor for life insurance as a part time side job.  He is great with trying to help people get the right policy for them.  He has some great goals ahead and is working hard.

Montana is blessed to be home with Addy.  She watches another little girl a couple days a week but Addy keeps her hopping.  She's had her share of health issues this year, but she's a tough cookie, you'd never know when she didn't feel well, and now is on the upswing.

Addy turned two and is cuter than ever.  She is working on her speech, but let's face it, at this age, anything they do or say is adorable.  At least to us.

Splenda and mCat:

Splenda has had a great year at work.  He was recently promoted and is now the Executive Director of Planning at his employer.  His additional duties certainly keep him busy and it's not unusual to find him on his laptop or at his "command center" in the office at home catching up on emails and projects.  Grateful that we are empty nesters so that he has the time to devote to his responsibilites there.  He re-did our front lawn and it looks beautiful.  Well, it did before the snow came.  He also had some additional concrete poured so that our front yard and driveway look much better. When he finds time to relax it's usually playing with the grandkids, watching sports and hanging out with the kids.

mCat has had a rough year.  The neck issues that I have been dealing with for more than two years now is hopefully resolved.  I had surgery in March to remove a bulging disc and bone spur.  That surgery was done by going in through the front of my neck.  However, there was a bone spur in the back of my neck that couldn't be accessed that way.  We were hoping that since it was small, the irritated nerves that were causing pain would calm down and everything would be okay.  By November, it was clear that it wasn't happening like that, I had another surgery two weeks ago.  This time, the surgeon went through the back of my neck and removed the bone spur.  After he finished he told Splenda that it was a good thing we had done the surgery since things were worse in there than the MRI originally showed.  Hopefully, this is it for surgeries.  The nerves are still quite irritated and I have some days where there is a lot of pain, but after time, this will all calm down.  

In March, I also had a small tear in my rotator cuff.  Sadly, both issues are caused by repetitive motions and movement.  The exact things I do for work at Wasatch Running.  Both my shoulder doc and my neck surgeon requested that I end that kind of work. So, broken hearted, I have to report that I no longer get to work my dream job.  I desperately miss my WRC family and customers, but it's pretty clear that my old body just can't do it anymore.   Surgeon also eliminated cycling and shoulder doc eliminated swimming so my Ironman training went into the crapper too.  Silly surgeon even told me to stop running.  I had decided to reconcile myself to it, but after running the St George marathon with my girls, I realized that I can never give it up.  Instead, I'll moderate how much running I do, and stick to my favorite races but maybe not more than one marathon a year.  Kudos to my surgeon for understanding me and only calling me crazy once or twice.  I now keep busy with serving at the temple, church callings and my family.  I couldn't be happier.

We went on a cruise earlier this year in February and enjoyed the Western Carribean.  We loved it so much that we booked another one for Feb 2016.  We have become a huge fan of crusiing.

So that's a wrap!  The down and dirty of 2015 for our fam.

Now wishing all our family and friends 

Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, and much love and peace for 2016.