Happy New Year!

Happy 2011!  I feel like I am just getting used to writing “2010”, so it will take a while before “2011” feels right. :)

Not surprisingly, Jon and I were in bed before midnight on New Year’s Eve…I don’t think we have stayed up since we got married.  Maybe one year.  But our sleep is too precious these days!

Looking back, 2010 was a busy year for us, filled with lots of highs and lows.  Among the great moments of 2010:

1) Henry’s birth on 8/9/10…he isn’t even 5 months old yet, and we almost can’t remember life without him! 

2) Watching Charlotte grow (mentally, socially…not really physically!), start talking, and develop an amazingly entertaining personality.

3) Buying our first house…on May 24th, we closed on our first house.  Months of renovations followed, but it was an exciting time nonetheless! We love having a warm and wonderful home in which to raise our kids.

4) Me passing the New York State Bar Exam!

5) Graduating law school, and therefore—no more studying!  It has radically improved our quality of life.

 

And some lows….

1) Bedrest, once again…and because we had a 2 year old this time, it involved me having to move back to my parents’ house with Charlotte.  The hardest part was just feeling so useless…I was a lump on the couch for 3 months.  All worth it for a healthy baby, of course, but not fun.

2) Contractions from 28 weeks until I delivered.  The reason for #1.

3) Not being able to pick Charlotte up for 3 months. See #2.

4) Charlotte having coxsackie virus the week Henry was born.  Honestly, Charlotte had only been sick once in her entire life (with an awful cold Easter week), and she came down with hand, foot & mouth as I went into the hospital to have Henry…great timing, right?  She was miserable…wouldn’t eat, fever, just a really unhappy little girl.  And because it is so contagious, we couldn’t have her around Henry.  So Jon, Henry and I moved into Jon’s mom’s house for a week, my parents kept Charlotte, and Jon and I shuffled between the two. Dealing with the post-delivery baby blues, and seeing Charlotte cry and not understand why neither of us was sleeping at the house with her, was enough to make me lose it.  She knew that I had the baby, and then all of a sudden we were leaving her…I thought for sure she thought we were abandoning her for Henry.  Irrational, perhaps, but I still get upset thinking about it!  It was certainly not the homecoming we had imagined.  

5) Studying. We did lots of it in our house.  I was studying constantly for finals and the bar, and then when I finished, Jon picked up immediately and started studying for the CFA.  Not fun.

6) The unplanned house expenses…like replacing every new window, needing a new air conditioning/heating system, environmental testing, etc.  When you buy a house, you certainly expect there to be unforeseen costs, but for a while there, I felt like we were getting socked left and right with big, expensive, must-do, projects (but it will all be worth it in the end, right?!!!).

 

So, it has definitely been an eventful year, and I would have to say that the good outweighed the bad by far! 

This afternoon Jon and I were watching videos of Charlotte from last year at this time, and we couldn’t believe how little she was.  She wasn’t talking, she barely had any hair, she was really a baby.  And now, she is a little girl…it is so cliché, but it really does go so fast.  So one of my resolutions this year is to just take more time to enjoy the ride and live in the moment when it comes to the kids…the days are sometimes long and draining, but looking back, it feels like a blink of the eye.  And I don’t want to miss a thing! :)

Here is a picture of what Jon saw when he returned to our house after the holidays…poor guy had lots of shoveling to do, but it sure looks beautiful!!!

Hope you all enjoyed the holidays.  Happy New Year!

Xoxoxo