Life Update - July Edition

Life Update bullet style!

Shana: 

• The night of July 12th, little one decided she was either extremely bored or extremely hungry because she ate a shoelace in the middle of the night. How do we know? She decided she must of been full after devouring 35" because we found 6" nicely chomped off by her bed and the rest was no where to be found. The other tell tell sign of her eating it was when she vomited 8" early Friday morning. To this day remaining 27" is still inside of her.
• If remaining shoelace doesn't appear by Friday, we have to schedule a sonogram with the vet as she may have a partial blockage. She will be given an additional 4 days to produce said shoelace or else she gets a belly shaving. I keep reminding her that!
• Last night, she played like she did before she ingested the shoelace. We are taking this as a positive sign that maybe said shoelace has vacated her small intestine and has now taken up residence in her large intestine just waiting for eviction.

Travel:

• I decided to take a little vacay to visit my family in Georgia this weekend. I will be doing laundry and packing like a madwoman tonight as I fly out tomorrow afternoon.
• Leaving hubby behind to look after our little one and assist with removal of shoelace if needed.
• I am hoping little one won't miss me too much or be mad at me when I return a week later. We shall see.
• Also looking forward to heading to Acadia National Park in Maine for a week in August.

Knitting:

• Still knitting away on those little socks I talked about a few weeks ago, here.
• Need to bind off the toe on Sock #1 so I can use the needles to finish Sock #2.
• Mission tonight before going to bed is finishing off Sock #1.
• Need to finish this pair before I leave Georgia next week as the recipient lives there and I can save the postage from having to mail them.
• Already have my next sock yarn balled up and ready to go.

Scrapbooking:

• I've completed a few more pages since my last layout update, here, which is one of four parts. I've done three more for my backpack album and one from adopting our little fur ball.
• I haven't completed any pages for the past week and a half as my thoughts and time have been consumed with little one and the shoelace ingestion.
• Looking forward to going to an actual scrapbooking store with my sister during my visit in GA. The price she has to pay by me assisting her with her craft room purging/organization. Of course I didn't have to twist her arm and after seeing pictures of the room situation, I think my price will have to go up.

Reading:

• Still plugging away on my reading goals for the year and have now finished 21 books of 40.
• I shared all the books I've read so far this year here.
• Loving that Goodreads is emailing me "Goodreads Deals" for purchasing books in genres I elected to receive deals for and so far have purchased several through these emails at $2.99, $1.99, $0.99 or free.
• For some reason the first five or six books I purchased, I got for free. Amazon must of been having a promotion that day. 

Exercise:

• Started running more consistently lately. Gotten myself up to running 2.5 miles without stopping. Starting over sucks.
• Need to start incorporating weight workouts again and even HIIT workouts.
• Started a Midori Notebook to keep track of all this. My thinking is that by finding a crafty way to record all of this will keep me motivated as I am physically writing all of my accomplishments down in this notebook.
• I've been hitting at least 10,000 steps a day almost every day this month.

Nutrition:

• Need to start meal planning again.
• Bought two new cookbooks to assist with my planning - "Oh She Glows Cookbook: 100 Vegan Recipes to Glow from the Inside Out" and "Deliciously Ella: 100+ Easy, Healthy and Delicious Plant Based, Gluten Free Recipes". I have quickly looked through them and they look promising.

That's it! Now tell me what you've been up to!

Life Update

So much has happened in my life since my last post on Thursday, March 17th. Where do I begin?

My husband received some of the worst news ever in the very early morning hours on Saturday, March 19th. His father had unexpectedly passed away. It rocked our world. We were in utter disbelief. Life for the next two days became a whirlwind of plans to head to Greece.

The one week my husband was gone, was one of the longest weeks of my life. I unfortunately couldn't travel with him for medical reasons, so being apart during this time was so difficult. It didn't help that we were now in two different countries and several times zones away, made it even more hard for me as all I wanted to do was be with him to support and comfort him.

Less than two and half weeks after he came back from Greece on Tuesday, April 12th, I heard from my mother that my father had been rushed to the hospital after collapsing in the yard. I couldn't believe it. So close to my father-in-laws passing, I didn't want to think I could lose my own father.

It turned out my father had developed blood clots in both legs and in both lungs. I had never been so worried. I ended up getting on a plane that Saturday and surprised him in the hospital. The look of surprise and him holding my hand while I sat next to him, made the trip worth it to me.

Fortunately, after him being in the ICU for almost 5 days, and down graded from critical care for a day and a half, the day after I arrived we were able to take him home. As of today, he has had his medical follow-up appointments and is doing really well.

The rest of April was all about getting life back to normal.

On Saturday, May 7th Manny and I expanded our family. We decided to adopt our kitty Shana!

The idea of getting a cat had be milling in our minds since last Fall. We just hadn't really pursued it until May. We ended up heading out to North Shore Animal League to see if we would find our new family member and after looking at all the kitties, we decided that Shana belonged in our lives.

As of tomorrow, it will have been three weeks since we adopted her and let me tell you, she brings so much life, love and joy to us.

She is truly like a puppy. She needs to be played with in the morning and the evening. She will bring you her toys to play with her. She follows us around the house and always wants to be in the same room as us. When she lies down next to you, she always has to be touching you. Many times when you go up to her, she will give you her paw to hold.

And boy does she like to stretch!!!

So that pretty much brings you all up to date. I am still scrapbooking. I haven't touched my knitting needles since December though. With this long holiday weekend, I am planning on changing that. I have a pair of socks that desperately need to be finished. We are heading to a family BBQ in CT on Sunday, so I will take advantage of the car ride to getting some knitting done.

I hope you all have a wonderful, safe and not too hot Memorial Day weekend! The temps here have been in the high 80s, low 90s, so I'd say it feels like summer has arrived.

Popping By

I just wanted to pop by to say hello to everyone! Life has been a serious whirlwind these past couple of weeks. When things settle down over the next week or so, I want to come back and give a proper update on everything.

Quickly though, I did want to say that I CRUSHED one of my May Fitness Goals (will dedicate a future post on this one), my honey and I FINALLY moved into our new apartment this past Sunday (even though we aren't 100% done or 100% moved in) and there are some EXCITING vacation plans in our future!

So much to talk about and not enough time (at this moment)!

I promise I will be back soon! xoxo

Little Life Tidbits

Edited to add: I wrote this post this morning and as of now we have all heard of the tragedy that struck Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut. I am deeply saddened by this and my heart and prayers go out to all who have been affected by this. I can not even begin to imagine what all these families are feeling and going through, especially so close to Christmas.
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I can not believe it's been almost a complete month since I last posted! The past few weeks have been such a whirlwind. I think I will sum it all up with a few Life Tidbit bullet points.

1. 11/18/12 - I completed the Philadelphia Marathon. With a 05:00:01 finish, I became a two time marathoner! Everything from the super warm welcome us displaced NYC Marathoner's received at the start, to all the awesome crowd support this marathon offered, it was a perfect day for me. My honey ran around the course to cheer me on at three different mile marks and the most important one was at mile 25.5 when he ran out to me and told me that if I hurried I could have a Sub-5 hour marathon. From that point on, I kicked it into high gear and sprinted towards the finish line. I didn't get that Sub-5, but I am sure proud of my 5 hour finish. Not bad for being 6 years older since my first marathon. I was only 11 minutes slower.

2. Thanksgiving Weekend - My honey and I flew to Atlanta, Georgia to spend the four day weekend with my family. Lots of fun was had by all. Tons of delicious food (Peanut Butter Pie), alcohol (Home-brew) and football.  Unfortunately, I do not have any pictures to document our adventure and by the time my honey and I flew back home on that Sunday, I was going home with a soon to be bad head/chest cold courtesy of one of my nephews that left me out of it for just over 2 weeks. I can now say thanks to this illness I was forced to not run for 2 weeks and my body has fully recovered from the Philadelphia Marathon (with the exception of my 2 baby toes, but that's another story I will spare you from for now).

3. 12/01/12 - Decided that I was going to knit 6 Christmas presents! My head must of still been clogged from the cold to think I could knit that many gifts in less than 21 days, but hey I'm crazy like that. I 411'd my sister and told asked her to drop everything and help me pick out yarn colors. To my astonishment within minutes I had an emailed list of her choices. Must have been the amazing night of sleep she got because we never decide yarn colors that fast! By Wednesday (12/5, just over 2 weeks to knit 6 gifts, EEEKS) I had my yarn! 

4. 12/06/12 - Decided that I couldn't stand my piece of crap Android phone anymore (I mean really I had to turn the phone off/on to be able to make/receive a phone call), I stopped by my local Verizon store and turned to the Darkside. I am now a proud owner of the iPhone 5 (was eligible for an upgrade) and I could not be happier!

5. 12/11/12 - My running boot saga ended! Ya'll may remember me asking for some helping picking out boots that would fit my ginormous muscular calves and then subsequently had to return all 3 pairs? Well, the 4th time must have been the charm because I hit the lottery with a pair of Clarks Mascarpone Mix Boots that zipped up around my calves beautifully! I have been asked to provide the information for them because there are more lovely ladies out there than we know who have the same problem. So I got them from Zappos and you can find them here.

6. 12/12/12 - Company Christmas Party at the office! Of course I wore my new boots! Here's proof that a good time was had:

Well it doesn't really show that, but trust me we had fun! 

As a side note, by the time I got above ground on the subway ride home from the office party I checked my email, on my super duper new phone by the way, and received an email congratulating me on being selected in the lottery for the Inaugural Nike Women's Half Marathon DC in April! I entered myself, my beautiful niece Tori (will be her first half marathon race) and my honey (also his first official half marathon even though he ran more than a marathon while training with me this summer/fall) as a group into the lottery and didn't really think we'd be one of the 15,000 lucky runners! Don't be fooled by the word Women in the name of the race, they welcomed male entrants too so my honey decided to sign up also since he would be there with us anyway.

7. 12/13/12 - I am really having trouble getting into the holiday spirit this year, even despite my last minute insane Christmas gift knitting idea I had. I am hoping sending out Christmas cards will help me out with this little issue. Of course, finding the time to address them will be another issue, but at least I have them purchased.

So that brings us all up to date with my oh so exciting life these days! I am looking forward to only 1 more week of work and then I am off until after the New Year! I will be having a little staycation this year in which I hope to accomplish many great things like reading, sewing, knitting, running, figuring out some goals for 2013. I am sad I won't be able to go back to Georgia to see my family over the holiday (by the time I received the extra vacation days to take the week off, the airline prices were way to high to try to visit), but it will be wonderful to spend this time with my honey and his family

I am off to knit like a fool! I'll be back next week and we'll see what great things I am accomplishing.

In the meantime, tell me what are some of your most favorite Christmas holiday memories and/or traditions? One of my favorite traditions that I started several years ago is to watch my most favorite Christmas movie every Christmas Eve, "It's A Wonderful Life."

Anyone else out there making Christmas presents? I have been known to make my gifts in the past, whether its something knit, sewn or scrapbooked, but I don't usually start three weeks before Christmas. Madness I tell ya!