Choate Christmas Greetings

Merry Christmas 2010!
Dear Family and Friends,
Merry Christmas! What an exciting and blessed year. We hope you are happy and well.
Here are ten things we learned in 2010:
1. There is no end to the amount of sand Joseph will consume. We brought him to the beach to let him see the ocean; he must have seen an endless buffet.
2. No matter how much Native American Ben thinks he has in him, he can still get sunburned.
3. Seeing Sea Turtles is best done from 600 feet in the air strapped to a parasail.
4. Benjamin’s obsession with trains is not about to end soon.
5. Chance spends approximately 95% of his time thinking about food and the other 5% thinking about how to con you into giving him yours.
6. If getting a book published was easy, everyone would do it.
7. No matter where we live (even Heather’s parent’s basement), Colorado always feels like home.
8. Sometimes it’s better to laugh when Chance decides to “decorate” his brother’s faces in diaper cream.
9. In every change, the Lord is there.
10. Expecting a baby girl (she’s due this April) is very different from expecting a boy (one word: pink)

We love you and hope you have a blessed Christmas!

Love,
The Choates

Expecting Baby #4

Ben and I happily found out we are expecting our fourth child. According to the online due date calculator I'm 9 weeks pregnant and the baby is due March 30, 2011. I'm excited to have a Spring baby.

Little Benjamin tells everyone it's a "baby sister" but Ben thinks its another boy, so I guess we'll see who's more spiritually in-tune. I really have no idea and would be grateful for either one. If its another boy, we have already decided to name him Cody. If its a girl, well, we haven't even really allowed ourselves to think about that.

I'm feeling pretty sick most of the time, but its not too different from any of my other pregnancies and I think I've learned to handle handle it better.

Although it came as somewhat of a surprise, this pregnancy has really been a blessing in my life right now. I've been very consumed in my desires and frustrations of trying to get published and this has helped give me something much greater to focus my attention on. It's like the Lord knows that there is something much more important that I'm here to do in this life and wanted me to know it too.

We are in the process of trying to buy our own home out east of Colorado Springs with about 40 acres of our own land. It may be too difficult right now to qualify for a loan because Ben just started with a new company, and so if the time isn't right now, we will look for a home to rent until then. I'm really hoping to get out our own asap and out of my parents basement!

All in all, I feel very blessed and humbled because I know that it is truly the Lord who is directing my life right now. Here comes baby #4!

Maui '10

Our trip to Maui for two weeks was incredible. So many fun memories from hiking to waterfalls, to Joseph eating fist-fulls of sand on the beach. What fun!

Hawaii among other things

The cord to my camera is missing (Chance most likely) so I haven't been able to post any new pics.

Brief summary of what we're up to:

1) Ben got a job in the Springs and we'll move there in about a month
2) We leave for Hawaii in 2 days (I'll make sure to get pics up somehow!)
3) I submitted query letters to 15 of the world's top literary agents and am freaking out every day as I wait to hear back from them about my novel.

I've put so much into that book and have great hopes for it. This is like the Superbowl or Opening Night of a show for me, I've done all I can do and now I just have to hope it was good enough. What I can't stand is that it's out of my hands, I just pray that that goal and dream is realized for me. Logically, I know that if this book doesn't get published, I can still publish others, but emotionally, I want this so bad!