Happy Thanksgiving

Happy Thanksgiving! Today was a long day but really gave us an opportunity to remember everything we are thankful for. I am grateful for my amazing sweet daughter and my wonderful husband. Both bring me such joy every single day. I can't even begin to imagine my life without them. I am thankful for all of my family (especially my Dad) and friends. We are very blessed and need to remember it every day. I am definitely missing my mom today. It is our first Thanksgiving without her. I hope she had a great Thanksgiving feast up in heaven.

We spent Thanksgiving over at my brother's. It was low key and just perfect. Leah and Annabelle spent time playing together and it was very sweet. We had a great meal and I am still stuffed! We came home and I put on my pj's and cuddled up on the couch with Leah while Rob got ready to fight the crowds with his brothers for Black Friday! Rob is a nut and does this every year! Last year, he left around 7:00 pm and didn't come home until 6:00 in the morning. This does not sound appealing to me at all! I plan to shop tomorrow, but at a reasonable time. There were a few deals we saw, but nothing that made me feel compelled to spend my evening waiting in long lines, luckily Rob is into doing this. I am much more content all cozy with my little lady. I hope everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving! I am looking forward to putting up our tree, shopping and family time this weekend!

Leah is not very cooperative these days with pictures

Sweet Annabelle

Leah was pooped after all of the playing

What will he bring home next....

It’s no surprise to anyone that my husband is a Gadget Geek (as I’ve mentioned on a few occasions before in my blog). He recently acquired some additional items and thought it would be a good idea for me to share them with everyone. He purchased these items on 11.11.11 which I just learned (thanks to Rob) this date was officially named “Nerd New Year.” (He started talking about binary codes and he completely lost me). Rob specifically asked me if I could blog about these two new “technologies” so he could spread the word of how cool these gadgets are. Who knows, maybe one of them will make a good Christmas gift for the man in your life.

First up – the Jawbone UP Band (http://jawbone.com/up)

This little bracelet will run you about $100. After listening to Rob talk about its capabilities, I decided it is pretty cool. (Although, I am not ready to run out and buy one for myself). The wristband is something that you use in conjunction with an iPhone app (of course) and it will track your steps, distance, calories burned, pace, intensity level, active versus inactive time, GPS routes and more. You can also program the band to vibrate on your wrist to remind you to move when you've been inactive for too long. I think the feature that got Rob “sold” is the sleep tracking function. Rob is obsessed with his sleep patterns and always complains to me that he always gets a crappy night sleep – now he can try to prove it to me. You put this bracelet in sleep mode and it will automatically track your hours slept, deep versus light sleep, awake time and overall sleep quality. Below is an overview of Rob's sleep quality from last night. He only got 4 hours of deep sleep.

This gadget also has a food journal feature. You can keep track of what you eat, but you can also take a picture of what you are eating and answer various prompts about how each meal makes you feel. Over time, it will use his responses to help discover which foods make him feel his best. Overall, Rob thinks this is really cool. You literally plug the wristband into your iPhone to download your data. Rob wanted me to mention this thing is waterproof and you can wear it in the shower and while swimming.

The other gadget Rob purchased was the "Nest." Ultimately, the "Nest" is a thermostat. What on earth is cool about a thermostat?  I have no idea where he even found/heard about this gadget, but he found this video and made me watch it. http://www.nest.com/#videotour He was convinced this is something that we needed and immediately purchased it. I have no clue what this little thing cost.

This is not your ordinary thermostat. The Nest thermostat looks like a hockey puck and can learn from your behaviors, preferences and surroundings. It is designed to learn your temperature preferences and then create a climate schedule. We have the Nest connected to our Wi-Fi at home, so we can change the temperature, adjust our schedule and check local weather from anywhere. So if we have unexpected weather changes (like we always do in Chicago) it will automatically adjust the temperature in the house. So for example, if it was 50 degrees one day, but it jumped to 85 degrees the next, it would automatically adjust so it was comfortable in the house. It can be controlled using your iPhone by using an app. It is cool because Rob can log in to nest.com when we are not home and adjust the temperate. It also allows you to track your energy usage. The guy that created the i-Pod is the Co-founder of the Nest Labs, the company that make this thermostat. I am pretty sure it does other things too, but not sure of the specifics. My head starts spinning after about 20 minutes of him talking about this thing. He mentioned something about it changing colors, but I don't know what that means. 

This thing was due to be delivered on Wednesday of last week. Rob called me on his way home from work (because he was so excited) to see if it came yet. When I got home, there was a Fed Ex note on our door indicating they left the package with the neighbor. Rob was annoyed because we don't know our neighbors and this meant he had to go march over there to get it. He did go pick it up and wasted no time installing it. At first I was a bit concerned because I saw all of these wires hanging out of the wall. Rob did come through and had the thing working in no time at all.

I know I poke fun at Rob's inner geek, but it is all in good fun. If it weren't for him, I'd probably still be rocking a razor phone and a big ol boob tube TV.

A picture of our office at home.....who needs all this stuff!?!

Fun with Friends from Work

There is a group of us at work that all had babies right around the same time as each other - all of the kids are just a few weeks/months apart. Vaughan was born in November (2009), Ryan was born in January (2010), and Emily was born in February (2010) just 8 days before Leah. We did get the kids together once for a playdate last year and decided it was time to do it again. The kids were little last time so they didn't really get to "play" together. Now that it is a year later, we thought they would be more interactive! We met at Kids Town in Wheaton at 10:00 am to let the kids play. It was so fun! Kids Town is great for little ones their age. There is so much to do. The last time we were there, it was so crowded, but today was nice because there were not so many kids. Leah loved spending time in the "Vet's Office," the "Princess Palace" and "Kitchen." All of the rooms are themed and are super cute. I didn't feel like lugging our big camera with me today, so I ended up using my iPhone for pictures - not the greatest, but they still turned out good.

Leah enjoying time in the kitchen

Leah loving the fishies

Vaughan looking for her baby

Leah and Ryan working on some puzzles

Leah doing her laundry - wish I could get her to do this at home

Vaughan playing

Emily being silly

Sweet Ryan

Vaughan and Leah cooking in the kitchen

Climbing in the play area

After playing for a while, two of my coworkers decided to leave for lunch - so we said goodbye to our friends. Leah and Vaughan weren't quire ready so we stayed back and let the girls play for another hour or so. They had a great time. After playing we all worked up an appetite so we decided to go grab lunch too. We went to Panera and had a bite to eat before calling it a day! Leah was pooped and ended up falling asleep on the way home. We had so much fun today and can't wait to do it again!

A Little Picture Crazy

The other night, I pulled out Leah's baby photo albums and a big box of pictures that I had not yet organized. I realized I had at least 2 photo albums worth of pictures that I still needed to put in age order and add to her albums.  When I finished going through the pictures, labeling and putting them in the books, it occurred to me that I have not had any pictures printed in a long time! Posting pictures on Facebook and on my blog make it easy to forget to go back and actually get them printed out. The pictures I just organized ended with Leah's 8th month and I didn't have anything beyond that. Hmm - Leah is almost 21 months old, so that means I have 13 months of memories sitting on my hard drive. I knew it would not be an easy task, but I pulled out my computer and began going through all of my pictures. It's crazy to say, but we have about 10,000 pictures on our hard drive. After all was said and done, I ended up ordering 652 pictures from SnapFish. I know it sounds a bit absurd, but I really whittled it down. SnapFish had a great deal that you could order 300 pictures for $3.00. I ended up doing 2 orders, so I paid just over $6.00 for my prints and then of course had to pay for shipping (which ran me about $25). It is my goal to get them put away when I receive them in the mail! I really want to try and stay on top of Leah's albums so I don't fall this far behind again. Here are a few of the pictures that I came across that are some of my favorites!

After I finished ordering all of the pictures, I was feeling pretty ambitious and pulled out Leah's baby book. I cannot remember the last time I recorded any information in it! When I started flipping through the pages, it appeared that I had not made any updates since her first birthday (9 months ago). I stopped recording her in-coming teeth at 7 months, I stopped recording her immunizations in April 2010 (when she was 2 months old - yikes) and I don't have any record of her height and weight after her first birthday. Luckily, I have written things down here and there or made mention of her milestones on my blog. I went back through all of my notes and tried to get her baby book as up to date as I could. Hopefully when Leah is older, she will appreciate this book and enjoy going through it. My mom was always great at recording every single milestone I reached. She kept strands of my hair from my first haircut, my first tooth that I lost and ALL of my art projects I think I ever did. I do have a collection of Leah's projects that I hope to hold onto for a long time too! I think my blog will be a great keepsake too that we can both look back at together. I found a website online where you turn your blog into a hard cover book. I think I might try to do this once a year.

Today I continued to be in the organizing "spirit" and decided to tackle our Christmas cards. I mentioned in a previous blog posting that I was disappointed with our family photo shoot a couple weeks back. There wasn't one picture that I was excited about that we could use for our Christmas cards. So, today we took things into our own hands. We grabbed our own camera and headed over to Cantigny Park. I know we are far from professional photographers, but I am tired of spending gobs of money on pictures when I usually end up being disappointed. It was a little cool this afternoon, but we spent about an hour running around Cantigny. Leah had a blast and we were able to catch a few good shots. I was able to get my picture for our Christmas Card (which I did not post below). By the end of the day, Leah did not want any more pictures taken of her and she was sure to tell us this! We came home and I went through all of the pictures. I went online and uploaded a few pictures and got my Christmas Cards ordered! Although we didn't actually do too much this weekend, I do feel like I got a lot accomplished!