Christmas 2005

It has taken me a few days to post about Christmas, but that's only because I literally JUST washed and put away the pans I used to cook Christmas Eve dinner. It's a bit slow going to clean up. Of course, we spent our first Christmas in New England this year and our first without family around. It was both very sad and at the same time sort of nice to not have to go to any family parties or have arguments over what we were going to do for the holiday. We knew what we were going to do - pretty much hang out with ourselves!

We do have really great friends here and that made the week-end go by a with a little less homesickness. On Christmas Eve, we invited our friends, the Yoho's, over for a fun dinner. They have 3 kids and Grace had a lot of fun with their 3 year old boy. They are from Utah too and were home this year without family as well. We have really enjoyed getting to know them and have quite a bit in common with them.

On Christmas day, I made the mistake of waking Grace up early to open her presents. The bit of kid in me just couldn't force myself to wait until after church (we had to leave at 9:30am all dressed for church.) So, after all of us going to bed at midnight, I woke myself up at 7:00 and then Grace up at 7:30. (very early for us - the two of us usually wake up around 9:oo or 9:30!) She really did have fun opening the presents she had patiently waited so long to tackle and was so excited to see that Santa really did bring her the things she asked for. However, I think she would have been even more animated and more excited if she had been half awake.

This was definitely the year of the train for Grace though. She got tons of Thomas the Tank Engine pieces from many different people (including Mr. Claus himself) and also discovered a new favorite movie "The Polar Express." She's watched it about 8 times since Christmas Eve and we went out and bought the book today (couldn't believe we didn't have it already!) Anyway - our lives are now centered around the adventures of all of her train friends - even the beloved horses (who are still beloved) have taken a second seat to the trains for the time being!

Anyway, by the time we got to church, she was not in a very good mood and then by the time we got home from church, she was down right mean. We forced her to take a nap rather than play with her new toys and then woke her up again to take her to Rita's house. She was soooo mean when we did that. Luckily, though, she adores Rita's boys (age 23, 19, and 14) and they adore her too. So once she got there, she had a total blast playing with Tom, Andrew, and Coleman. We had a really nice afternoon with people who really feel like family to me. Rita has really stepped in and taken care of us this year and we are so grateful for our relationship with her, her barn, and her family. It has allowed me to survive and be happy here and consequently to be a good mom and a nice wife.

Well, we are all very lucky and very blessed to have received so much from everyone for Christmas. Our family and our friends are simply generous and amazing and made our Christmas very rich (in more ways than with the incredible presents that showed up on our porch and in our mailbox during the month.) Grace of course got very spoiled from all directions. I think about all the kids in the world who don't have a single thing that she does. I wish I could fix all that, but I guess the best thing to do is to be grateful for what you have and try to share and be as generous as possible. I think we try to do that, but we know that the scales still tip very much in our direction.

Thanks to everyone for everything that was sent our way - gifts, cards, letters, phone calls, e-mails, prayers, and thoughts. We were very happy to receive every single one.

Grace and I will be traveling to Utah from January 17th through the 31st. We will try to contact and visit as many as possible. We look forward to seeing you all again! Happy New Year (what is it - 2006??!!!!)

I'm 30???

Old enough and young enough that no one took a picture of me on my birthday! Well, actually, I've been saying I'm 30 for almost a year now. David is about 9 months older than me and as soon as he has his birthday, I forget how old I am and I say his age. It's totally true. My birthday is so close to Christmas that by the time the holidays are over, I just forget about it altogether. However, I really am 30 now and have joined the ranks of the 30-somethings. No more being associated with those 20-somethings. The 20's were great - college, new jobs, parties, crazy trips with friends, horse shows, weddings and a few babies here and there. But, I'm ready to be one of those generic people who just strives to keep a clean house, a car that runs and isn't sticky inside (although, I'm still young enough I'm not willing to hand over my pathfinder for a minivan), clean and happy kids, a good marriage and a few close friends. It's nice not to worry so much about what I wear, what people think of me, and whether I have the latest hairdo. (well, I guess I never really worried about that, did I?) Now, people just look at what Grace is doing and wearing and saying and they assume that if she's put together that I am too. So, naturally, all my focus goes to her. That doesn't necessarily come with turning 30 years old, but being 30 instead of 22 sure does help.

It's a GIRL!!!!!!!

Well, I suppose we can understand those who like a real surprise on the day of delivery to find out the gender of their baby, but David and I are way too "type A" personality to wait that long and leave that much planning to chance! So, we figure, it's a surprise and really fun no matter when you find out who your next kid is going to be. We had our ultrasound yesterday and found out that we will be having another darling little girl. My mom said "you mean another barn rat." She's probably right. Grace and I will have her riding before she can eat solid foods. We'll have to resist stopping at the barn on the way home from the hospital in May. Of course, David (as all fathers do), was hoping for a son. He is still excited to have another "daddy's girl" and if she's anything like Grace, she will love to do the things he likes to do too. Grace loves all the sports, the outdoors, the hiking, the camping... He is going to be very out-numbered in our house though as every breathing creature here is female except for him! I told him I'd get him a male fish, but that didn't seem to help.

I am very excited that Gracie will have a little sister to be her pal. My sister, Melissa, and I have been best friends our whole lives and I hope the same will follow for Grace and.... (what's her name?) We've been debating on names. We had the boy name all picked out - very solid - to be named after my dad, but the girl names are becoming more of a struggle. Names I had once been set on aren't sounding right to me. David came up with Harriet quite a while ago and at first I thought it was just plain silly (if you were raised in the same SNL generation as we were with Mike Myers and the gang - you probably know the movie "So I Married and Axe Murderer." In the movie, Mike recites a poem about "Harr-i-et" and that is definitely going to stick!) However, the name is growing on me. I didn't even know what nickname you would use with Harriet (she MUST have a decent nick-name!), but my mom said that her Aunt Harriet was called "Hattie" which I think is actually pretty cute even though my mom doesn't like it at all. Gracie and Hattie? We'll keep thinking about it....the middle names are an equal dilemma....

Anyway, no need to go shopping for "boy stuff." I can delve into the 20 some-odd bins of girlie stuff I have in my basement and pull out all of the darling outfits I was hoping to use again. :-)

Let it Snow!

Well, we don't want to completely bore you with Boston weather, but we did get 2 feet of snow last Friday. It was pretty crazy and it has been so cold that very little of it has melted. Unfortunately Grace has been sick so we didn't go play in it much. She did ride Tinkerbell in it the next day and the two of them could barely get their hips above the snow. It has been nice though, to have white on the ground for the month of December. I can think of a lot of ugly Decembers when the Christmas lights try to reflect off of the brown ground and the grey sky.

David, of course, gets the job of snow clearing around here. He probably doesn't appreciate the snow as much as we do! Now the dog-gloo's really do look like arctic igloos. (like the dogs go in there anyway - it's so cold and the snow is so deep, they go potty as close to the house as possible and run straight back to the door to beg to be let back in)

"It is a bad bad weather day" (says Grace)

After lots of warm fall days, I'm afraid winter has finally set in. The snowstorm over Thanksgiving was cold but quick and it has been warm ever since. Today, it snowed again and I think it's going to be cold for many many weeks. (this is a view from my living room window looking across the Assabet river)

Yesterday I was just saying how I think my favorite season in New England is winter. (I'm not so sure about that today...) In my adult life, winter has been my least favorite season. Somewhere between high school and college (after I quit skiing and thinking that riding horses in any temperature was fun) I started really feeling the cold. I have terrible joints and as everyone says "no meat on my bones" and I get very cold in even the slightest chill. I also get winter-time depression. In Salt Lake, both of those things added up to hating winter because of the temperatures and the long gray inversions. Here, though, I'm at least finding a bright spot to winter.

I do still get cold and hate being cold and today - I AM VERY COLD!!! But, with all the trees in New England and the humidity and the bugs, summer is very claustrophobic for me and I dreaded going outside almost more than I do now. The sun never shone in my house through spring, summer, or fall because of the trees (sometimes, I was even turning on lights in the middle of the day during the summer), but now that the leaves are gone and the sun is low in the southern sky, I have sunny south-facing windows! I have enjoyed them every day. The sun comes across the river right into my living room and den and I remember now when we were looking at the house to buy last February, that I decided I could stand to be cooped up in the house in the winter with babies if I could sit in one of those sunny windows. Also, with winter, the bugs are gone as is the humidity.

So, winter is not all bad. I just wear so many layers that it is a chore to get dressed and undressed and do all my laundry. Also, with my new automatic garage door opener that David and his Dad installed for me, I don't have to scrape (nor do I have to go anywhere in the morning!) It doesn't compare to the days when I left my house at 6am in the dark and had to scrape my truck and warm it up before trudging off to work.

I do love Christmas and I love snow at Christmas time, so I guess I will endure the cold for the time being. I think I will want spring somewhere at the end of January though. Spring came very late last year here. In fact, we really didn't get spring. It went straight from winter to summer in the middle of May. Next year (as in 2007), David promises that he will take me somewhere tropical for a vacation in February to make the winter shorter. Hopefully, after the snowstorm passes, the sun will come out and I can sit in my window...