New Post-mas!

Dear Loyal Readers;

Please forgive our lapse in communication.  It seems to have taken us about a month to recover from the Holiday season!  I think that we’ve been more lax about writing because we were lucky enough to see many of you in the past few months, but that’s still no excuse for being lazy!  But I think you’ll find that we haven’t been too lazy, as we will now describe!

We had Christmas this year in Michigan with the Giddings/Kahler/Noel family, and we were so happy not to have to drive an additional four hours just to get here.  We had an eventful three days; Christmas Eve we went to Uncle Mark’s for time with the Giddings clan, Christmas Day we headed over to Muskegon for a Kahler/Noel extravaganza, and the next day we were excited to go to Jim & Julie’s for time with the Giddings siblings and more extended family.  We are so thankful to be closer to family, and we were counting our blessings (especially when our blessings are such good cooks!).

Sarah enjoys a visit to Holly Hills

For New Years we once again made the trek down to Virginia to spend more time with the Bell/Newtons.  Even though we were there twice in a month, we still always find ourselves wishing that we had more time.  For New Years Eve, we caught up with some of Nate’s friends from school, including the newly married Jesse and Sharon, and friend Travis who was in the wedding party with Nate.  Travis rented a limo, and we got to meet Travis’s sister, her husband, and a few other new friends.  We ate dinner on the downtown mall with our newly-wedded pals, champaigned in the new year with London and Cape Verde, danced the night away, and then rode home in a rosy stupor back to the farm.  The limo turned around on the front lawn, judging by the tracks we discovered in the morning!  Happy New Year to us!  Family all arrived at Holly Hills the day after New Years, and we got to spend a relaxing day just catching up and comparing adventures.  We were also lucky enough to get to spend a leisurely dinner with Mom Bell and see a movie. 

Jesse & Sharon

Many people have been asking how the auction wrapped up, and where we are with the website.  We ended up listing 100 items in November, of varying values, sizes and themes.  Not all of the items sold, but we were surprised by a number of the items that did sell.  We ended up making about $950 for Mid-Michigan Cat Rescue, which we were really happy about especially because no one went out seeking donations for this auction, all items were recently donated or hadn’t sold in previous auctions.  The site made back around $25, which paid for its hosting for the next three months.  So!  We found that if we have an auction running each month, than the website at least pays for itself, plus some extra, which was very exciting!  This means that, at the very least, we can provide this website as a service for charities to be able to use without having to payout of our own pockets for the upkeep.

The 100 Auction Items Live in Anna's Bedroom for November

The website is not ‘released’ yet, which means that you cannot just sign up and start using it, but we are hoping that it will be ready and available very soon!  Nate is hard at work building the systems that allow users to reset their password if they forget it, and once that is complete we think we will have all the necessary elements ready to allow people that we don’t know to start using the site.  Then hopefully the baton will pass from technical Nate to marketing Justine.  Very exciting!

As an added aside, as we write this we are traveling back from Richmond IN to Lansing MI.  We came down to do some work on the house, and were expecting to pick up a dog (Kong, the brother of Kale who was a foster at our home for about a month), and on the way down got a call from a family looking to place a Papillon.  So, with some fancy footwork, we got the 5 year old Payton into PapAdopters, and are now driving home with FIVE dogs in the car.  Luckily, Payton is going straight to Cheryl’s house, and we hopefully already have a home for Kong, but who else has enough dog contacts to be able to do that in an 18 hour span?  Life is never boring.  And when the people dropped Payton off and we explained that we were trying to get the house ready to sell, they looked around and said that it looked, and I quote, “very nice.”  Now we just need to have a little carpeting put in, and it goes back on the market!

Juno sits in the middle

Hope all is well with everyone.  Love from us!

-The Baby Bells