Happy New Year!

So it had been a while since I last posted something!  I've been busy just enjoying the season.  The big event around here, of course, is Christmas.  David and I were talking and this is the first Christmas that we're not in NY.  Even when we lived in FL we still came up to NY for Christmas every year.  Also, for me, it was the first Christmas that I wasn't opening presents in my house on Hickory St.  Ever.  And, strangely, it didn't make me sad.  We had a WONDERFUL Christmas in our new house in Ohio.  We were thankful to be together and we had the most relaxing Christmas Day in recent memory.  Since we have no other family here in Ohio, we spent the entire day in our PJs and we just opened presents, played, napped, munched, played, watched a movie...it was so nice!   We'd had a prime rib dinner the night before, so on Christmas I made a super easy prime rib soup--it was awesome to not have to *really* cook!  Even though we missed our families terribly, we were happy to just spend the day at home and not have to run here there and everywhere. 

Santa was wonderful to Anderson--he got many things on his list.  But what he loved the most was an inexpensive army set.  Santa *almost* didn't deliver that toy because he wasn't sure if we needed another toy under the tree.  But it was a good thing he did because that army set was THE gift!  He and David have spent hours setting up their army bases and preparing for battle.  The battle, itself, is over in about 30 seconds when Anderson's army destroys David's army and captures all of the guys, guns, and equipment.  Then they spend another half hour or so setting it back up again. 

The day after Christmas we headed East.  My mom's family is from Niagara Falls and all of her siblings and their kids try to get back there for a few days each Christmas.  This year all of her brothers and sisters and most of my cousins were there.  David and I got to go to the casino--a perk of having Grandma with us to babysit--and we didn't even lose that much money!  We each had $40 to gamble with, and I lost $20 and he lost $10.  So...not a bad night.  I would've rather we won, but at least we didn't lose it all.  It was a lot of fun.  Some of my cousins went too, and it was nice to spend time with them. 

The next day we all bundled up and walked around the Falls.  The last time we took Anderson to the Falls in the winter he was about 2 years old.  He was all bundled up in his snowsuit and blanket in his stroller, and you could pretty much only see his eyes.  We'd been walking around the park for about 15 minutes and we hear his little voice bellow from underneath all of his layers, "ALL DONE!"  I thought he meant he was all done with his cup or something, so I asked him, "all done with what?"  His reply--"all done with the water!"  He'd had enough!  This year it was just as cold out, but he was much more interested in watching the waterfalls and looking around.  After our brisk walk we had a family bowling party at a local alley.  Again, lots of family, food, and fun!  It was a good time!

Here is a picture from 2006 (top)

and one from our trip this year (2010--bottom). 

After that we headed to Whitney Point.  We stayed with my dad and had a great time visiting family and friends.  It was nice to be "home" again, but it felt odd to not have MY house as home base.  We did drive by our "old" house and it looked pretty much the same.  We spent a lot of time with our friends the Morgans.  They have 2 girls that are about the same age as Anderson.  Emma is/was in his class for K and 1st grade, and her sister Ava is a year younger.  They are great friends.  It was very nice to spend time with them and see that the kiddos picked up right where they left off.  We also hooked up their Skype, so hopefully we'll be able to Skype with them soon. 

All too soon our trip came to and end.  We left WP on Friday and headed home.  First, though, we stopped at the MOST in Syracuse to meet up with some other friends who were out of town.  The little boy, Lane, is Anderson's buddy and they had SUCH a good time playing at the museum.  They hugged and hugged when we first got there...it was very cute.  Then they were off and running, playing Star Wars and chasing each other...good thing it's a hands on museum where running and climbing was encouraged! 

After we started home David noticed that his truck was acting up.  I was following him in my car (there's a lot of reasons why we took 2 cars home--in short, my car needed fixing, we were hauling boxes and packing material from our move to give to a friend who may be moving, we had tons of presents to deliver, and we picked up our 1/4 of a cow that we get every year...we needed the space) but I didn't notice anything was wrong.  He finally called me when we were between Syracuse and Rochester and told me that something was up.  We couldn't do much about it then, and since it wasn't REALLY acting up we just decided to press on with our planned stop in Rochester so we could go to Wegmans (the BEST grocery store on the PLANET, btw).  I shopped while David tried to find a service place that was still open at 6:30pm on New Year's Eve.  Guess what--he didn't find anything.  Again, we decided to just hit the road and hope for the best.  We stopped for dinner around 9pm in Erie, PA.  So far so good.  When we made it to Cleveland I breathed a sigh of relief--we were ALMOST there.  Then, just as we passed by the Indians stadium I started running over some metal pieces in the road...metal pieces that were coming off of David's truck.  So he pulls over.  This is where the highway is 5 or so lanes, so it's not the best place to break down because it's very busy.  He decides to get off the highway and try and get home on some city streets.  At some point he gets back ON the highway, and that's when I noticed what looked like burnt embers falling off of the bottom of his truck.  It looked like someone had tossed a lighted cigarette out the window, but since we were the only ones around I knew that this was bad news.  So we get back off the highway and pulled over--and David's truck was RED hot underneath and smoking.  If we had driven any further we probably would've had a fire on our hands.  We knew that this was as far as we could go.  Litereally we were 3 exits from home.  So, he called a tow truck (an hour wait, they estimated) and moved all of our stuff over to my car.  I headed home and he waited with the truck.  It took the tow truck guy only about 20 minutes to tow the truck to the dealership and give David a ride back home.  It turns out that some bearings went bad and caused the tire to tilt, rub on the brakes, and that friction burned out his brakes, rotors, pads AND he needed a new axle.  The bill for this--$1600.  NOT exactly something we'd planned on the week after Christmas.  But, we dealt with it.  We also didn't plan on spending New Year's Eve on the side of the road with a smoking truck in a sketchy Cleveland neighborhood, but it ended up being fine.  Anderson slept through the whole thing.  He woke up at one point and asked what was going on and I told him that Daddy's truck overheated and almost caught on fire and he said "cool" and went back to sleep.

About 5 minutes after I got the call today from the dealership telling me it would be $1600 to fix the truck, there was a knock at my front door.  Since we don't know anyone yet I knew this could not be a good thing.  Sure enough, it was the City of Westlake telling me that we can't park our camper in our driveway.  We just bought a new camper the week before Christmas, and with the holiday and being out of town, and now not having a vehicle to tow it, we just hadn't gotten around to moving it.  He was a nice enough guy, but he handed me my bright orange notice--we have 72 hours to find a new spot to park our camper.  Luckily, our truck will be able to to tomorrow, so we'll be able to move it. 

So 2010 ended nicely, but 2011 started off a little rocky for us--broken down truck on the side of the road,  very expensive to have it fixed, reprimanded by the City of Westlake...all in 3 days!  Instead of looking at this as a projection of how the year is going to go, I am just thinking of it as we've already gotten some of the not-so-good stuff out of the way early!

Hope you all had a great holiday season!!!