A Little Home Incident

This morning at about 2 am during one of my frequent middle of the night bathroom trips (thanks, little baby!), Luci seemed interested in drinking out of the sink. That's the norm for Oliver (our oldest cat) but Luci sticks to still water for the most part. In the effort of her medical condition, I turned on the faucet to a drip to "encourage" her drinking and headed back to bed.

While slowly waking this morning, I heard a drip and assumed it was the bathroom sink. After getting up and looking in there, there was no drip. Slightly confused but still half asleep so didn't think much of it. Then, I leaned down into the sink to wash my face and saw water behind the sink (we have a "raised" sink and the faucet sits behind it completely separate from the sink). There was water pooled all over the sink vanity! Apparently, the drip was so little, it either didn't drip from the faucet and ran back along the faucet towards the base of it or the slight opening of the faucet valve caused a leak from the head of the faucet (yet to be determined). So, I grabbed some towels and started mopping up the water on the vanity then checked underneath the vanity to see if any made it down there. There was some small puddling, so I started cleaning (Mike was also up at this point to help me in the clean up effort).

While on the floor cleaning the puddles a horrible thought occurred to me, "was that dripping sound I heard the water continuing downstairs?" I voiced this to Mike who immediately went down to check. Yup! That was the source of the dripping! I ran down to check out the damage. The water took the path of least resistance and was dripping through one of the recessed can lights onto the kitchen floor. We grabbed more towels and started cleaning that. I then went down to the basement and, sure enough, the water had made it all the way down there to puddle! Ugh! That's what 5 hours of very slowly dripping water can do! Big puddles on 3 levels.

The good news is that on our initial observation, very little damage was done. The paint behind our sink will need to be touched up a bit since some came off when we were toweling off the area (one of the down sides we've found of low-VOC paint is that it doesn't seem to be as "strong" as the high chemical stuff..it doesn't stand up to painters tape well nor water). We also may need to touch up a bit of paint on the ceiling around the light canister in the kitchen but won't know for sure until everything gets a chance to dry out. The hardwood floors in the kitchen didn't look warped and, well, our basement is used to seeing water anyway so no harm there. Whew! How "lucky" are we?!?!

Of course, I left for work and Mike will be doing more clean up so hopefully we won't find any more bad news.

Fighting the Obesity Epidemic

I read this article on boston.com today. Massachusetts may soon be following NY's lead and require chain restaurants to post nutritional info on their menus.

I think it's great and I look forward to the legislation (hopefully) passing! As one that has lost weight(and maintained that loss) by carefully tracking and managing calories (along with other nutritional information), having that data readily available on restaurant menus would make my life a lot easier. I'm hoping it would make some waist lines smaller as well and increase the demand for healthier fare at more restaurants. Chains have definitely made progress on providing better foods, but there's still a long way to go!

Poor Little Luci!

Our poor little baby Lucienne, our youngest cat, has just had another trip to the vet for a urinary tract infection. For any of you ladies that have ever had the unfortunate occurrence of one of these, you know how uncomfortable they are. We recently had her on antibiotics for a UTI (note, Luci does not like have fluid shot down her throat). Last week, she was having litter box trouble yet again, so it was back to the vet.

While there, she donated a "sample" for them, got an x-ray that showed no obstruction, received a cortisone shot and came home with another dose of antibiotics. The culture came back negative for UTI! The explanation? The poor dear has what's called Feline Lower Urinary Tract Disease. What this means is that she will sometimes get inflammations that will have the same symptoms of a UTI but is not an infection.

To prevent flare ups, we're supposed to "encourage" her to drink water....IE there's not much we can do. For those of you that don't have cats, making them do anything outside of their will is near impossible. For those of you that do have cats, you know exactly what I mean. We will try to "encourage" her by leaving more drinking spots around the house and giving her "treats" (wet food) more often. For the most part, though, this just means that we'll need to keep an eye on her litter box habits and take her to the vet for a cortisone shot if we see any of her symptoms. Hopefully, these flare ups will be few and far between. I hate to see her so uncomfortable!

Happy New Year!!

Hurray for 2009! I hope everyone had an enjoyable and safe holiday.

While NYE is normally one of my favorite holidays, this one wasn't exactly memorable. We had planned to have some good friends over for a small gathering and a fun game night, but a nasty cold I got screwed up those plans. So, instead, Mike and I made our favorite "special" dinner, pizza, watched a movie and then watched some of the New Years Eve specials on tv. Those specials were disappointing and boring. What happened to the good old days of excitedly watching Dick Clark and waiting for the ball to drop? I really tried to make it to midnight but gave up at 11:30. So, Mike rung in the new year with Smokey, the chinchilla, and I rang it in with some zzz's. Next NYE will likely be very different from our "norm" as well since we'll have a 6 month old in the house. Wow, that's weird to try and imagine.

New Years Day is a time of reflection for the past year and a time to look forward to the year to come. Thanks to all of our friends and family who have made the last year a spectacular and memorable one. We love you all and and feel so grateful to have you in our lives. Have a great 2009 everyone!

2 Days of Destruction

Monday morning, the front of our house looked like this:


By Tuesday afternoon, it looked like this:

Our crumbling stairway and hideous retaining wall are gone! We're really looking forward to seeing how beautiful the finished project will be but we'll likely have to wait about a month. Apparently, doing masonry work in winter takes a little longer. That's fine with me because I have a lot of faith in this company (hopefully I still do in a couple of weeks) and know that the new wall is going to be absolutely gorgeous!

I'm definitely a glutton for punishment. With the final bill to our contractor on the interior renovation not quite settled, we've started on the wall\stair project and are in the very beginning phases of expanded the half bath on the first floor to a full bath (ie thinking about and planning). Since our current upstairs guest bedroom is soon to become a baby's room, we figured our downstairs sleeping guests, ie grandparents, would appreciate being able to be self contained. However, we won't be starting that until we've got our pretty new front stairs and retaining wall done. I may have an addiction to home improvement, but I'm wise enough to take on one project at a time...I think.

I'm Dreaming of a Not-White Christmas

On Christmas Eve, we left the white winter land of Boston and flew down to the tropics of Dallas.  Ok, tropics might be a little bit of an exaggeration, but weather.com failed us and didn't warn us as to quite how warm it was going to be.  We brought clothes appropriate for mid 50s and it was in the mid 70s for a couple of the days we were there.  So, no white Christmas in Dallas this year!

This is the first time in 3 years we've a) made it to Dallas for Christmas Day and b) actually had the whole family there for a Christmas celebration.  The last couple of years have been crazy because of health, pregnancies and weddings so we haven't all converged in quite some time.  It was really great to have the gang all there. 

The gods of travel were on our side for this trip (for once) and we got there and back, as well as our luggage, with no problems what so ever. What a nice change of pace!  We got in Wednesday evening, my parents picked us up, took us home and Mike and I immediately went upstairs, unpacked our suitcases and wrapped all of our presents in record time.  When we got back downstairs, my brother Jamie and his wife, Sarah, had returned from driving around looking at Christmas lights.  We spent some time chatting with them then hit the hay.

Christmas morning, we all got up, ready, had breakfast, then waited for my other brother, Jody and his family to arrive, as well as my Aunt Pam and Uncle Kerryn.  I think everyone was there by noon and we sat down for a Christmas feast then gathered in the living room for present opening.  There were SO many gifts and it took some time to get through them all.

Me and Princess Leah Mini-Me (Presley)

The Whole Gang

That evening, we were so stuffed from eating treats all day, that we didn't really have dinner. Instead, we played games as a family.  The kids had just gotten Cranium Family and we had a really fun time breaking it in for them.

The next morning, Mike whipped up a huge breakfast for everyone - the works with eggs, pancakes (chocolate chip and regular), toast, sausage and bacon.  Yum!  Mike even made the kids and I special Mickey Mouse pancakes.

Chef Mike and his assistant, my dad

Me and my homey, Ryker

After breakfast, Mike, my dad, Presley, Ginger the dog and I all went for a walk to try and shed some of the Christmas treats and heavy breakfast.  It was so warm!  The dog got overheated and so did Dad and Presley...they were dressed for a little cooler weather.  

For lunch, Mom made her traditional Santa Pizza.  Jamie and Sarah took off after lunch to go have Christmas with her parents.  The rest of us hung out and rested for the remainder of the afternoon.  After a dinner of leftovers, we all watched Wall-E and then called it a night.

On Saturday morning, Mike and I went for a walk after a breakfast of Taco Cabana breakfast tacos.  For lunch, my Dad grilled us some burgers.  For desert, the kids, Mike and I ate, er made, ginger bread houses. The candy pickins' left over from my Mom's Christmas party a few weeks earlier were slim, but we used our creativity and made some pretty cool and unique houses.  Pretty soon after the houses were completed, Jody's family packed up and headed home.  So, Mike and I were the only ones left at my parents house.

Presley and Reece with our completed gingerbread houses

The four of us went out for an awesome Mexican dinner (a must do when we're in Texas) the drove around to look at Christmas lights.  Sunday morning, we went to church and then scurried off to the airport for our flight home.  

Even though the visits with the family always seem too short (and too full of food), we had a great time being with everyone for the holidays!

Mike the Shoveler

(I didn't take this picture, but this is definitely what the trees looked like in our neighborhood this weekend.)

Well, we did end up getting a good amount of snow last weekend. It basically didn't stop snowing from Friday afternoon until sometime Sunday night. Most of the accumulation was Friday night (10.5 inches) but we got at least another 5, I would guess, over the next 2 days. I helped, but Mike definitely did most of the shoveling. Needless to say, he got several good work outs over the weekend.

Saturday, after cleaning up the driveway, we ventured out to purchase the complete set of our pots and pans (that we registered for but did not receive). It was our Christmas present, or rather end of year bonus, to ourselves. Last week, the melty pan handle of our most used pan finally snapped off, so it was time.

Saturday night was my company Christmas party at Fenway Park. Even though it sounded like a cool place for an event, it was really nothing more than being at a function hall at Fenway - no lights on in the park, no tour, just the location. We got to spread the baby news to more coworkers and had a good time.

Sunday the weather was stinky again so we had to cancel our Christmas celebration with Mike's family. That's now rescheduled for New Years Day. After practically being cooped up in the house all day Saturday (can you tell I'm not much of a homebody), I decided we should venture out quickly to the mall a couple of blocks away and get the rugs I'd finally found for our bedroom. I could not believe how bad the roads were! It was a good call not to truck it to the in-laws. However, the roads didn't keep people from shopping....I was a little shocked at how many people were there. We even ran into my obstetrician. Weird. Then we went to the grocery store to stock up for the week and had a nice day\evening at home.

Monday night, Mike and I had our Christmas together and exchanged gifts. It was a nice night together. Last night we packed up and in just a little while, we'll be jumping a plane to Dallas for Christmas with my family (first time there for the day in a few years). So, I'm excited and ready to see my family!

Have a really great Christmas\Hanukkah\Kwanzaa\Festivus (or whatever you may or may not celebrate) everyone!