Happy New Year!

Happy New Year!!  Welcome to 2015.

2014 was a pretty darn good year for us.  At least up until the last 2 weeks of it.  In mid-December Leah was sent home from school because she threw up.  We spent the rest of the weekend with her having a bit of a fever, and then a little over a week later we finally figured out that she had a UTI.  This was after a couple more days of throwing up, staying home from daycare, and getting a call during my Christmas party to come home.  Ugh!  We had had a pretty good run with no UTI's, and I'm not quite sure why it happened again, or why it had to be during a busy time for both of us at work and in between a record number of Christmas parties, but we got it figured out.  

We also had some big changes last month.  I changed my day off at work from Tuesday to Friday, which will actually be really nice.  We decided to take her out of daycare on Friday and instead of putting her in on Tuesday, we got a nanny.  The first couple weeks were a little rough when she came and I had to leave for work, but now Leah loves her!  She is wonderful and they have so much fun together.  It's nice to have a little variety to Leah's week.  Leah officially stopped going to daycare the first Friday in January; I adjusted my schedule in mid-December, so I had 2 Fridays off.  It was amazing!  And totally worth it to take 2 days, one right before and one right after Christmas.  I was able to finish buying presents, grocery shopping, and doing other errands to get ready for, and then cleaning up after Christmas.  It was so nice, I'll have to remember to do that more often... taking a day for myself to get things done.  Just a few hours makes a big difference!

Speaking of Christmas, it was awesome.  Last year Leah wasn't very into it and she didn't really know what was going on.  This year was so much fun!  She totally got Christmas, or started to get it.  We did our annual Santa breakfast again this year, but I couldn't convince her to sit on his lap, and I didn't want to traumatize her for the rest of her life, so we just sat next to him and talked for a while.  She told me afterwards that Santa's not scary!  But she did get a little confused about Santa coming to her house - she thought he would come during the day and hand presents to her.  She didn't realize he comes at night when everyone is asleep.  On Christmas Eve she helped me put out Christmas cookies and milk for him and we checked under the tree to see if there were any presents.  The next morning I asked if she thought Santa had come yet, and she said no, he was coming later.  I loved the surprised face she made when she saw that his cookies were eaten, and then she was even more excited when she saw all the presents!  It was so cute!!  After she opened each present, she wanted to play with the new toys, but she had more to open.  It a lot of fun.

We celebrated New Year's Eve at our neighbors' who have 2 little boys.  The kids had fun with their hats and noisemakers and we were all home and in bed by 9:30.  Thank goodness!

In all, 2014 was a great year for us.  Leah's mobility grew this year, as did her vocabulary.  We had 2 really fun vacations - to Tampa in April and Newport Beach, CA in October, and several trips back home to visit my family.  I started out the year with an awesome long weekend to Disney World with my 2 girlfriends.  We are looking forward to all the things to come in 2015!