Three weeks ago my wife and I welcome our first born to this great world. This was without a doubt the most exciting moment of our lives thus far. We were both so excited to become parents and couldn’t wait to begin this new adventure. While we had no clue what to expect, we knew God was ultimately in control. There’s a tremendous amount of comfort in that. If you are a follower of Christ, then you understand what I mean. God has truly blessed our family with an amazing baby girl and I can’t wait to see how He uses her life to glorify Him. Needless to say, its been an exciting three weeks. But… (yes, there’s a but) excitement isn’t all we’ve experienced. What’s the one thing that comes to mind when you hear that someone is having a baby? “Well they aren’t going to get any sleep for a few months!” Well, I can now speak from experience. It’s true. But not really in the sense that you don’t get to sleep as long or as much. Let me explain…

Now that Thanksgiving Day has passed and everyone’s mind is on the upcoming Christmas holiday, its finally considered “OK” to listen to Christmas music. I’ll be honest, though… I’ve been listening to it since before Thanksgiving. Every year I battle with trying to force myself to wait till Thanksgiving and I rarely make it much past November 1st. But now Thanksgiving is past, so Christmas music is officially no longer off limits! I thought I’d take some time and share some of my favorite Christmas albums, just in case you’re looking for something to listen to this year. Most of my favorites are fairly new albums, some are even new this year, but I definitely enjoy the classics as well. I have a playlist on my iTunes that is more than 350 songs (yes, I’m serious), so its tough for me to narrow down to just a few albums I like the most, but I’m going to give it a try. At first, I was going to do a top 5 list… but I just couldn’t get down to 5… but I could get to 6, so that’s what we’re going with! For this top 6, I’m going to leave out the classics such as Aaron Neville, Bing Crosby, Nat King Cole, Johnny Mathis, Harry Conick, Jr, Frank Sinatra and even Mariah Carey and Boys II Men. Don’t get me wrong, I love all of those artists and their songs are included in my playlist, but I want to focus more on newer albums that are worthy of being included in the list of all time greatest Christmas albums, just like those classics. So without further ado, here are my picks for the Top 6 Current Christmas albums everyone should own:

The time has come for my era of being a Tacoma owner to end. I’ve always driven a Toyota Tacoma and I swore I always would. But now, as it always does, life has brought about a certain change that is changing my mind. I’m handing over the keys and I feel great about the decision. Not because I want to sell my truck, but because I love my family more than anything. I want what’s best for them, and right now that means getting rid of the truck and getting something more family friendly. Luckily, we’re sticking with Toyota. I’m sure we can all remember times when we’ve had to give up things that we swore we would always have. In fact, I’m sure we all have several things that fit into that category, but sometimes those things are left behind and we’re better off because of it. We’re glad we made the decision. That’s where I’m at, but I’ll always remember my green Double Cab Tacoma. Here’s to you, Annie.  I hope you run another 200,000 miles.

Lately I’ve been spending more time thinking about what types of foods we cook in our home and what we’re putting into our bodies. I’ve never been a person that knew much about cooking and neither has my wife. I grew up eating 3 home cooked meals a day, 7 days a week. Even though my mom loves to cook and is really good at it, I still never took the time to learn those skills myself, until now. So as I’m looking at what it really means to eat healthy, I’m not really coming up with the conclusions that you might first expect. Most of the time you hear people talking about the latest diet or healthy eating craze (i.e. Low-carb) or sometimes people just suggest to avoid certain ingredients in your food like sugar or MSG. These may be good suggestions, but I tend label food more as where it comes from than what’s in it. My thoughts are if we would focus on eating food that’s grown on the land, in natural ways, without using all the various chemicals that the big companies use to kill bugs or “preserve” the food.

I recently read an interesting article about a study done by online security big wigs, McAfee. The article points out that their findings show that Android based devices have seen a huge surge of malware viruses (44 to be exact) in the second quarter of 2011 while Apple’s iOS based devices have seen zero. Yes, zero. Thats a huge difference, and it makes me think of one thing: Android is the new PC. I get so aggravated when people complain about Apple doing things a little different than all the other companies. This article made me think of two of the biggest complaints against Apple:

• Apple takes too long to release features that other phones have had for 10 years.
• Apple tries to have too much control over what apps get to their phones.