Citizenship! Plus Christmas New Years...

For the past five and a half years since Landi and I have been married we have been working on his citizenship. It's a long and very expensive process. We first had to change Landi's status from "student" to "permenant resident". In order to do that we had to fill out a million and a half forms plus a very big check about five months before we graduated from BYU-Idaho in April 2009 (wow it feels like just yesterday that we graduated but it's coming on 4 years). When we finally got the approval for him to be a permenant resident it was only for two years. So when his two years was coming up we had to fill out more applications and send in another huge check to change it from two years to ten years. Which was approved. We than found out that after three years of Landi being a permenant resident he could apply for citizenship and didn't have to wait for the ten year one to be up in order to do so. So as the time came closer we started to fill out the applications and save the money to apply for it. As of December 19 Landi has been an American Citizen. Hooray!!

When Landi and I got married we decided that we were going to spend Christmas with my family and New Years with his because New Years is a bigger deal in Albania so it made the decision easier. But we weren't sure if we wanted to go this year or not becuase airline tickets were so high. The decision to go was a no brainer when five days before Landi's citizenship ceremony came I got a phone call at 4:30 in the morning saying Opa had died. We had to find a way to go to Seattle and attend the funeral and stay for Christmas. The fact that Opa had died became a shock simply because Opa had been a part of my life for as long as I could remember and there are certain people who you feel like will never die until it actually happens (if that makes sense). It seemed like he could live forever. So we were able to go to Seattle to attend the funeral and were able to stay for a week so we could stay for Christmas (thanks to whoever it was that was able to get us the tickets so we could spend this time with family). The funeral was beautiful. I had been fine until I saw Opa in the casket and than I lost it. I like this picture my dad took. My Aunt Diana was able to come from Guam to attend the funeral as well. So it was cool to be able to have my mom and her brothers and sisters all together. It was also nice to spend time with Aunt Diana as well. Besides the funeral we were able to spend time in downtown Seattle, play bingo, go to Les Miserables and play some games. It was pretty fun. When we got home we got to have Landi's family over for New Years. Landi's brother and his wife and their baby had to leave early but it was still fun to host a party and to have them over. We hope to do it again.