2014 Year in Review

It’s been a while since I published anything so figured what better way to start off 2015 than to recap our year in 2014.  For the most part, 2014 was a great year for us.  I did have some health scares in March, November & December that have tested me in many ways.  I am physically much better now and I know the mental part will follow in time.  But for now I am SO ready to see what 2015 has in store for us.

January:

-      We closed on our new house.  I call it our forever house because not only do I love it, but I am NEVER moving again.

-      The Hudson Valley (and most of the country) had record breaking freezing temperatures.  Per weather.com, the core of the cold came Monday, Jan. 6 (the day we closed) and Tuesday, Jan. 7 (the day the movers came with our things).

February:

-      “Snowpocalypse 2014” was in full effect this month.  We received over 30 inches of snow here in the Hudson Valley that month. The 2013-2014 winter was the 7^th snowiest season in 120 years.

-      Our son and I attended the Valentine’s Day dance held at his school (on one of the few days it didn’t snow).

 

March:

-      I had surgery to remove the left half of my thyroid.  Thankfully all tests came back normal and I am doing just fine now :)

-      Hubby and I celebrated our birthdays!

-      The snow and cold continued…..

April:

-      The start of a new t-ball season

-      Our son turned 6!!!

 

 

May:

-      Our son attended his first Take Our Daughters & Sons to Work day at my job

-      Our son had his kindergarten artwork displayed in a district-wide art show at the town library.

-      Completed my second Spartan Sprint and beat my previous year’s time!

 

 

June:

-      Myself, our son, my sister and my nephew participated as extras in a movie being shot by my friend locally (check out Mother of the Week here)

-      Our son graduated from Kindergaren (yay!) and started summer camp

-      We welcomed the birth of our friends twin boys

-      The end of t-ball season

-      We held a housewarming party to welcome our family & friends to our new house 

 

July:

-      Spent 4^th of July at home watching fireworks in our neighborhood

-      Spent a week with my family on our annual family vacation.  This year’s destination was a resort in West Virginia

-      Attended BBQ’s and birthday parties for family/friends

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August:

-      Weekend trip to Virginia to celebrate our nephew’s birthday

-      Spent the day in NYC with just our son and I having a “Mommy & Son” day complete with a trip to the Avengers Station & Museum of Natural History

-      Held our annual clam bake BBQ party with our friends

-      Attended 1^st grade orientation at our son’s new elementary school

 

September:

-      Our son started 1^st grade in a new school       

-      Apple & pumpkin picking at Barton Orchards

-      Attended my very first US OPEN (loved it!)

-      Took our son to the Shriner Circus in Orangeburg, NY

-      My company was announced to Working Mother Magazine’s Top 100 Companies to Work for and I was named as Ogilvy & Mather’s Working Mother of the Year

 

October:

-      Received my Working Mother of the Year award from Working Mother Magazine at their annual Gala Dinner in NYC

-      Spent Halloween trick or treating with our best friends

  

November:

-      We took our son on the North Pole Express train ride in CT

-      Spent Thanksgiving with my husband’s family here in NY

-      Took our traditional black Friday trip down to Arthur Avenue in the Bronx to buy seafood for Christmas Eve

 

December:

-      Our son participated in his very first Holiday Concert at school

-      Hosted our very first Christmas Eve dinner in our new house with both of our families

-      Took our son to see Aladdin on Broadway with my family and were privileged to get a backstage tour.

 

A Long and Overdue Update

This update is WAY overdue.  I’ve had only one post since the New Year (bad blogger) and to say a lot has happened since Jan 1 would be an understatement.

Besides our normal work schedule and holidays, over the past six months we’ve celebrated our birthdays (mine and hubs); Anthony turned six!! (omg); I trained for and finished another Spartan race – beating my previous time;  Anthony came to my job for his first Take our Daughters & Sons to Work Day; Anthony was chosen to have his artwork displayed in a district wide art show;  Mother’s Day;  Father’s Day;  and on June 13th Anthony graduated from Kindergarten (omg again!)  We’ve been quite the busy family that it’s left me barely any time to catch my breath, let alone time to blog about it all.

But probably our biggest news of all is that we moved!!  You may have caught it at the end of my 2013 recap post (if you read the whole thing LOL) where I mentioned that we were packing up the old house and were closing on the new house.  We sold our townhouse on December 27^th and on January 6^th closed on a gorgeous 4 bedroom home a couple towns over.  We are beyond excited and are in love with our new space.  We truly lucked out finding our dream home. 

taken the day our offer was accepted (November 2013)

Moving was one of the most stressful experiences of my life and to do it in the middle of snowpocalypse 2013/14 made it all the more challenging.   We were scheduled to move out of our townhouse on the day a blizzard decided to descend upon New York.  Luckily I was able to get the movers to come a day early and they kept our things stored on the truck for the weekend until we closed on the new house.   It was a good thing we were able to do that because the day after the blizzard all of the moving company’s trucks were frozen solid because the diesel fuel in the trucks had frozen!!  You seriously couldn’t have made this stuff up.  It was just insanity.  Certainly not the time to be moving, but we had no choice.  We had to go.  The day we moved into the new house it was minus 5 degrees outside.  I felt so awful for the moving guys.  I bought a few boxes of coffee and some doughnuts and that helped make for happy workers (and a faster move).  Although I’m sure the cold certainly helped them work a little faster.

So as you can imagine, a lot of whatever free time I’ve had over the past 6 months has been spent focusing on the house and doing projects.  We were lucky that the house didn’t need any renovations, but of course there were cosmetic changes we wanted to do to make it our own.  Slowly each room is coming together and it’s starting to feel like home vs a rental vacation home.  More to come on the house as we finish off rooms (and more pics too!)

For now, I’ll leave you with some picture highlights from the last 6 months and the promise that I really will come back to blogging, even if only for short quick updates.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

Week 18 Results

Pounds Lost this Week:  -0.4 lbs
Pounds Lost to Date:  -29.4 lbs

It may not be much this week, but I’ll take it!  Any loss (or even no loss) is considered a win in my book.  I wasn’t exactly the epitome of weight watchers standards this week and followed my points only about 75% of the time.  I allowed myself freebies on Friday, Saturday AND Sunday when I normally only allow myself some freebies on one day of the week.   I did work myself out much harder than I normally do, but maybe that just helped me from having a gain. 

Sunday morning instead of sleeping in for Mother’s Day I decided to give a new workout a try.  One of my fellow preschool moms told me about an outdoor bootcamp that was being taught 5 minutes from my house.  No sign up required and for $15/class you get an hour long butt kicking workout with a gorgeous view of the Hudson River.  Figuring I needed to do something different to mix up my training I decided to give it a try.  Talk about butt kicking!  lol  My arms were so sore all day Monday.  It definitely was just what the dr. ordered but boy was I not expecting to feel that sore afterwards.  Being the glutton for punishment that I am, I’ll be going back for more this weekend ;)

I’m taking this week off from meal planning because our refrigerator died suddenly late last week.  The new one is being delivered later this week but that means we will have to do take out for a majority of the week.  Hopefully that means I’m not reporting back this time next week with a gain but I am going to try and be as good as I can be – and also go back for more butt kicking to burn off the extra calories!! 

p.s. look how pretty our new fridge is!!  I can’t wait for it to arrive and fill it back up with yummy healthy food!!!
 

Wordless Wednesday: a determined helper

The Great Purge of 2012

You may remember me mentioning a few times how I want to clean out the clutter in my house.  Well, I finally did.  My husband and I started “the great purge of 2012” nearly 5 months ago.  Slowly but surely we have been attacking each room of our house and getting rid of anything we haven’t used or need anymore.  Almost everything we purged ourselves of has been donated to a good home.  Initially I was going to sell some of it on ebay, but gave up on that idea fast.  Donation was a much better idea.  There are so many people out there that could use these things more than we could.

If you remember back to my summer goals from last year, my first goal was:

“Clean out/organize the built in shelving area in our downstairs. It has become a kind of make shift storage area that I’ve begun to cover up with Chinese screens so that I don’t have to look at it anymore. It could use a good purging. “

We started with our bedroom closet and progressed to other areas of the house.  We still have a few places left to work on (mainly A’s closet and his toys) but we've made great progress and I am feeling much better about the house.

What we got rid of:

• 12 huge bags of clothes
• 36 glasses (everything from water to martini)
• 6 glass vases
• 1 table & 4 chairs set (from our kitchen)
• 1 parpasan chair
• 1 (very) old radio
• 3 bags of A’s toys (so far)
• 8 pairs of shoes
• 1 pair of snow boots

We also put a lot of stuff into a storage unit (holiday decorations, winter clothes, baby items) since our closet space is so limited in our townhouse.  De-cluttering was a little difficult for me in the beginning since I’m one of those people who tends to keep things (come on, you know you have your skinny jeans hidden in your closet too) but once I started purging it was like opening the flood gates.  I was tossing things left and right.

Time to go shopping??  (just kidding)

anyone thirsty?  I think I have a glass around here somewhere

Kickin' it old school!!

Summer Goals Update

Considering it is officially fall now and it's currently snowing outside (yikes for October snow!) I figured I owe an update on the Summer Goals I set for myself back in June.

1. Clean out/organize the built in shelving area in our downstairs. 

Cleaning is not my favorite thing in the world.  I did look at it quite a few times (if that counts) and came to the conclusion that almost everything in there is stuff to keep (picture albums, our wedding china & crystal still in the boxes, extra paper towels, toilet paper, our recycling bins, and baby items from A that we’re saving for the next baby).  I did manage to clean out a shelf of old books and throw out a handful of other items.  So much for a big clean out.  Whoops :(

 I don’t have any before & after pictures because I forgot to take pictures before I started throwing things away - plus you really can’t see much of a difference…..

2. Finish transforming A’s room to a ‘big boy’ room. 

This was my best project of the summer.  While I really enjoyed redecorating A’s room, it made me a bit sad to take out all of his baby things.  No more changing station; no more diaper pail; no more glider; no more toddler bed.  They have been replaced with a dresser, a book area, train table and of course his big boy bed.  I just need to find a bed skirt to match the bedding and the transformation will be officially complete.

3. Utilize the pool at our complex more. 

This was an easy one.  Who wouldn’t want to go to the pool more, right?!  We used the pool more than last year and as much as we had free time for.  Between my work and our active weekend schedule it didn’t leave a ton of extra time, but we managed the best we could to fit in as much pool time as we could.  Anthony loved it and by the end of the summer was swimming by himself around the pool(with his life jacket of course).  A huge change from last year when he wouldn't go past sitting on the stairs.

4. Loose these last 10 stubborn pounds!! 

Stubborn was a good word to describe this one.  It was a lofty goal indeed.  Summer time is a difficult time to diet with all of the BBQ’s and vacations going on.  I tried my best and what I ultimately ended up with was maintenance.  So while I didn’t get rid of the weight I wanted to, I still consider it a win that I didn’t gain back anything that I had lost.

5. Take more walks 

On weekends and weeknights when I got home on time, I would take A out to play as much as possible.  He loves riding on his plasma car so I would take him around our complex on his car.  I would have liked to have gone on more walks by myself so that I could have done some speed walking, but some is better than none, right?!  Plus it’s much more fun when you have this face looking back at you.