Our "Happy Holidays" Letter....

So this year.... like most.... we were a little late on getting our Christmas letter (and ALL of our other important announcements) out and we were also on a VERY tight budget so we didn't get to send out as many as in years past but I'm grateful for the magic of the internet and the ability to share our blessing this past year here on this site. 

Here is what we sent out!!!

Our family Christmas card

Riann's birth announcement

My graduation announcements

~::~

And our letter itself...

Well first off we want to say Happy Holidays!!! We hope you all had a great time this season and were blessed the whole year with good memories. Second we wanted to apologize for the lateness of this letter but, as you can see, we are a little late announcing a few other things here and we couldn’t off set the mood of the whole letter by sending this out on time!!!

Here are a few of our highlights for 2008:

Cheris graduated from BYU-Idaho! It really all happened in December of 2007 but she didn’t walk until April of this year so we kind of count that as 2008. She graduated with her BS in Communication with an emphasis in Organizational Communication and a minor in Human Resource Management and Recreational Leadership. It’s really not as complicated as it sounds but Cheris just likes that it’s so long. It kind of reminds her of how long it took her to get it.

We had a baby!! Riann Amie Vreeken. She was born on March 10. She is amazing and blesses our lives each and every day. We don’t know what we’ll do with ourselves on our next one is it isn’t as easy going as her. She’s got amazing blue eyes and makes you smile every time you look at her no matter how mad you are. She’s a beautiful baby and right now, from the standard comments, looks nothing like Cheris but is a mini female version of Paul. Cheris hopes that will change someday and can’t wait until people start to say the opposite.

We started a business!!! We are now fully operational. Paul was blessed to have the opportunity to come and work from home shortly after Riann was born. He’s been working hard on getting everything off the ground. Our name is My Eternal Media. We specialize in photo restoration and image editing. However most of our work so far has been in transferring home videos to DVD. So far most of our work has been for family and friends so it’s been fun to watch home videos of those we love grow up over the years. Paul had also done some large jobs making posters for the company his father and brother work for. If you need any work done or want to know more about what we do please visit our website at www.myeternalmedia.com or you can email us with questions at myeternalmedia@gmail.com. We have plenty of samples of past jobs and hope to work with you soon on your family history, photos and movies.

We bought ANOTHER car!!!! Luckily we decided to sell two so that helped out a little bit with space. We finally hit our highest count for owned automobiles at one time topping out at 4. We would have been at 5 but the new owners picked up one of the cars before we bought the 5th one. We are being true Idaho hillbillies aren’t we?! Our newest addition is a ’81 Volkswagen Rabbit. We were gifted a ’79 rabbit about a year ago and Paul feel in love. Mind you the gifted Rabbit doesn’t drive and hasn’t gone anywhere in quite a few years expect from our neighbors drive way to our garage. As soon as it was ours Paul’s curiosity was peaked and after doing plenty of research he found that, done right, we could be getting near 50 miles to the gallon. He’s been working hard getting it up to par and so far as we can tell we are near 40 MPG, it’s a little hard to tell because we have to warm it up for about 10 minutes each morning in our current weather.

Other than that we are avid bloggers and try to update our family blog at least once a week, although that’s been a little hard the last few months with our actively growing little one and the holiday season in full swing. Hopefully we’ll get better at updating more soon. If you would like to follow our adventures in 2009 please check it out!!! Our link is www.paulandcherisvreeken.blogspot.com. We’d love to have you stop by and check it out!!!

Thank you so much for your love and support this last year. We are so blessed to count all of your among our friends and hope that you find many reasons this next year to thank the Lord for all you’ve been given. We have certainly been blessed and can’t wait to see what more is in store!!!

Love you all and hope you had a great holiday season!!!

Always,

Paul, Cheris, and Riann Vreeken

If you didn't get one PLEASE don't feel bad. We were only able to send them out to family to keep the costs down. We wanted to make sure everyone knew what was going on with us and if you haven't been keeping up with the blog... here's a quick overview. 

Enjoy!!!!