Happy 2010!

It's January 9th and I'm updating this so my resolution is semi-successful. 2009 was a very busy and great year for us. The year was happy and sad, fun and stressful. It included career changes, career growth, saying goodbye to our first house and hello to our new house. We brought a new baby into our family just days after losing my grandfather and we had a lot of family visitors travel to come see us. I can only pray that 2010 is a great year for us, but I'll be ok if it's a little less eventful! :-)

Well, in this installment of the Nashville P's I'll be talking about the holidays. In a semi-spontaneous fashion we decided to make the trek to NY to spend it with my family. Potentially the last time all the Bilak's will be together on Christmas for quite a long time - but definitely the last time all of us will be in the house that was our home for 20 years. The ride up was long but pretty uneventful. The boys did wonderfully for the whole trip... granted we drove through the night, but we left at 5pm so they were still up for a while. While there, we just stayed at my mom's house and let the boys get to know their family. It was so great to see William running around that house, greeting everyone and getting to know his Grandpa and uncles, whom he rarely sees. This was a first for Caleb to meet them too and I'm pretty sure he likes them - hee hee! We arrived Christmas Eve morning and were pretty exhausted. Baba and Auntie Debbie hung out with the boys while AJ and I caught up on some sleep. Then it was off to church. William did pretty well. For those of you that attended our wedding, you'll remember that our church is pretty small and there's no nursery area so I was nervous. As I expected, he provided entertainment for the surrounding church-goers, by smiling, waving, and saying adorable things. Caleb was perfect and quite content being held by AJ, Debbie, and myself. After that it was home for our phenomenal Christmas Eve meal. It included all the family plus Jeffrey's girlfriend, and our dear family friends Bernie and Cathy. We had the usual dishes - fish, salad, kutya, pyrohi, and my mom's super yummy homemade rolls. We all felt fat and happy after that meal for sure! After cleanup it was time for our tradition of "procrastinators or whatever other excuse you have this year's" time for gift wrapping. Debbie, mom, and I sat around the table wrapping all our gifts as we do every year at the last minute. I hope that tradition ends this year though, since I'm always so tired I can barely stand to wrap anything. Then comes Christmas morning! It was wonderful to spend Christmas morning with my boys (AJ included in that.) They are my life and to see the look on their faces when they opened the gifts was amazing. Since we were with my family and did all of our traditions for most everything, I wanted to incorporate one of AJ's family traditions for Christmas morning. Instead of openening our gifts all at once, we did each gift one at a time. It was nice and you'll see from the amount of gifts in the photos that it did take quite a while! Again, all my family was there too and it was great to be able to spend a Christmas at home again. I loved being with them! The rest of our stay was very low key, but entertaining. William played with all, I mean ALL, of his toys and the adults played games at night. "Things" was the big hit game this year. I highly recommend it, as we laughed our tails off playing it... especially the first night.

Then it came time to leave. We had great plans to stay the night in Cincinnati in a great hotel downtown, until we were about an hour away and it started snowing snowballs out of the sky. It was a nice little winter storm that Buffalo was getting and our 3 hour drive out of NY turned into an almost 6 hour drive just to get out of NY state! The furthest we made it was to Columbus, OH where we stayed the night. The following morning we were back on the road with much better driving conditions. Although we saw a ton of accidents that day, we were luckily not involved in any of them.

We finally arrived home to a frozen tundra of a house. 'Somebody' thought it a great idea to turn our heat off completely in the dead of winter while we were away so it was a whopping 44 degrees in here. Gizmo was a bit frozen (but ok) and our poor boys had blue lips and shivered for quite some time before finally warming up in time for bed. Our house thawed out and since AJ had a few more days off from work and school we just hung out and relaxed most days. On New Year's Eve, we had our friends Heath and Samantha come over for game night. We had a blast and it was a fun way to ring in the new decade!

Monday came and it was back to business as usual, me home with the boys - seemingly busy all day, but not getting much work accomplished and AJ back to work and school. Caleb had his 6 month doctors checkup on Tuesday of this week. He remains a big boy at 18 lbs 8 oz and 27 1/4 in. tall. He's in the 70 and 75th percentiles for his height/weight. The doctor says he's looking good and appears social and interactive. Although, he didn't get to see the Caleb that I know. He was pretty reserved and unsure of the doctor, but maybe because he remembered that the shots would be coming soon. And they did... 4 of them! My poor baby was so sad and even William appeared concerned when Caleb let out his cries. I assured them both that all was well and we went on our merry way.

The next few weeks has a bit of business in store for us. I'm planning on running the 1/2 marathon here in April and I'm working real hard to carve out training time. It's VERY difficult with two little kids, but I've been able to run on a treadmill at the gym where they have a sitting service (a God send!)(Did I mention that before?) So my challenge is to really get on a good schedule where I can get myself ready for this feat. AJ continues on with school, which has a lot of work for him this month, and Caleb has his follow up eye appointment at the end of this month. I will also be planning Caleb's Baptism over the next few weeks and will keep you posted on the details as I have them. William doesn't have much going on, which is probably a first. Just being a super adorable, wonderful (limit testing - hee hee) little man. OH, actually he'll be doing some serious potty training soon so that's a big step to mention. And finally, the end of this month is my Golden birthday. Yes, on January 30th I'll be..... uh... I can't say it... but you can figure it out. I should not be bothered by it, but I can't help but dread it. This officially means my youth is gone! Even at 29 I could still say I'm in my 20s and at least seem young. 30 just sounds so grown up and I don't feel like I'm old enough. I'm working on changing my attitude on that, but it's a work in progress. I really have no choice though 'cause ready or not, here it comes!

Below is the slideshow from Christmas. I didn't really weed out any similar pictures so you could really get the feel of our time up in NY. Also, I am including a video of Caleb. You HAVE to watch it! It's hilarious... at least to me and AJ. I think you'll enjoy it too! Happy New Year! (ok, so actually the video is not loading, but I'll keep trying so keep checking. Hopefully I can get it up soon.)