I took the week between Christmas and New Years off of work.  I wanted to enjoy my family and our first Christmas together, plus we had been so busy that we still had a lot of shopping to do before Christmas.  I figured having the weekend before and the Monday/Tuesday would be enough to get everything done.  I was wrong.  I was so wrong.

I would like to keep this very much upbeat.  The truth with parenting though sometimes is its not all roses and I try to keep things as honest as possible for that reason.  So, basically when Tim and I refer to our “vacation” we say “it sucked”.  That’s not entirely true, there were some very great moments…there were also a lot of really hard moments.  Obviously, I always know that things could be much worse, and I’m thankful for all the amazing wonderfulness that surrounded us in 2013…but it certainly went out with a bang!  So here’s the lowdown on our week.

Kick start the vacation with picking your kid up from daycare to find them running a fever and cranky/lethargic.  Add an upper respiratory infection.  Spend the week of your vacation sleeping on a twin mattress on the floor of your baby’s room because you’re worried about her breathing.  End up getting a few hours of sleep each night and constantly panicking because you keep hearing your baby stop breathing for up to 6 seconds at a time and then suddenly gasping in (if you’ve ever heard someone with sleep apnea, you know what I’m talking about).  Run around to doctor’s appointments where you find out your concerns were semi valid when they diagnose your baby with having asthma (not necessarily for life) and prescribe a nebulizing inhaler you have to do for 10-15 minutes every 4-6 hours while holding down your uncooperative baby as she screams and squirms looking at you as if you’re torturing her.  Deal with incompetence with the pharmacy, spending lots of time on the phone with the doctor’s office, follow up appointments, trying to entertain a baby while spending lots of time in waiting rooms or waiting in the doctor’s office.  Deal with loss of appetite in your baby and worry about that.  Power outages from ice storms that change your family Christmas plans last minute and some miscommunications on timing.  Very, very last minute Christmas shopping and driving 20 minutes to Target in an ice storm, finding a parking spot, only to realize you left your purse back at home.  Finally starting to see some improvement in your baby’s health so you and your husband decide to take the fam out to dinner and actually enjoy the last few days of “vacation” when child begins vomiting ALL OVER, after you’ve ordered your food and haven’t paid the bill.  Then the stomach flu starts.  First in your baby with the puking and painful diarrhea, then in your husband.  Spend the last 3 days of your vacation taking care of a cranky, sick baby again while your husband is out for the count.  Spend your baby’s short naps running around like a mad woman with Clorox making sure you get every single surface of your house cleaned.  Doing laundry upon laundry and soaking toys.  Then being up at 1:30 am for the day on the Monday you go back to work.

I’m sure we’ll look back on Alexandra’s first Christmas and laugh at all of this, but not yet.  Like I said, I know things could have been a lot worse.  However, when you get 2 weeks of vacation a year you feel like you really have to make the most of it…and then stuff like the above happens and it just makes you pretty angry.  That’s life though, and that’s parenting.  You can plan the best family vacation in the world and it may turn into the Griswalds and you just have to make the most of it.  So on a POSITIVE note, here are some of our best moments in 2013!

February 28-The birth of our beautiful daughter!!!  She certainly changed our lives and changed us for the better.

February-May- We experienced the wondrous first few months of parenthood!  We saw her first smile, heard her babble and communicate with us for the first time, experienced the most wonderful feeling of having a baby sleep on your chest and I enjoyed a full 12 weeks of being nothing except a mom.  Wonderful time!

June-August- We watched our little sweetie continue to grow and learn how to sit up, start eating solids and celebrate her ½ birthday.  We took her to her first baseball game, camping and to the beach and a kiddie water park.

September-December- Holy cow, so much happened during the last few months of the year!  She really started to let her personality shine through.  She started rolling, crawling and even took her first steps in December!  It has been an incredible year and I can’t wait to see what 2014 brings!

As far as running goes, the week of my vacation it definitely took a back seat to everything else going on.  I managed to get in 25 miles still, so it wasn’t horrible, but I definitely skipped a few days when things got crazy.  Thankfully though I was able to do my most important run for the week.  It was a 10 mile run at 6:45-7:15 pace.  I was nervous, I really hadn’t gone that fast for that long in a while and I did an easy run with my friend Val at 7:15 pace and it felt hard only a few days before so I wasn’t sure if I could complete it.  However, I’m happy to report that I killed it!  Maybe it was all the stress, maybe it was the fact that it was 40 degrees and sunny that day (instead of the snow, ice and cold we’ve been having)…either way, I’ll take it.  I actually ended up “adding” on another mile and still managed to average 6:58 pace for the entire run.  So that was a very positive win and I was really happy about it.

Alex, oh my goodness she has changed so much in the last few months!  I took her 10 month pictures and the results show her personality perfectly at this age.  A hilarious, active, fun loving little girl that does not sit still or follow directions.

Yeah and she’s walking!  She took her first couple steps at 9 months and one week exactly.  One month after she crawled for the first time!  Since then she has been getting more and more confident every day.  She started taking 4 steps, and then one day I picked her up from daycare and she walked at least 8 steps to me.  Now she walks a lot.  She is incredibly good at it.  She falls down frequently, but is really good at landing on her butt or putting her arms out.  The only times she’s really bonked her head are when she falls into something (like the leg of the chair).  Once she falls though she either gets herself right back into a stand without holding onto anything or she’ll just crawl.  Basically, you can’t take your eyes off of her right now for even a second.  She wants everything she shouldn’t have.  Its so much fun and exhausting at the same time.

She goes back and forth on needing to prove her independence and needing her mama.  She loves to walk but most of the time she prefers to hold my hand.  We’re going through a bit of separation anxiety at the moment.  She doesn’t want to be held by anyone except for me.  Sometimes she doesn’t even want me to set her down.   I love it that she loves me so much and I know this won’t last so I try to enjoy it in during times that I get frustrated.

She absolutely refuses to be fed with a spoon anymore so we’re feeding her pretty much whatever we eat now with a few exceptions.  It makes things messy but I can really see its helping her learn.  She’s also getting better at drinking her water from a sippy cup.  I got a little over excited and tried putting some of her milk in a sippy cup (Tim and I are sooo done with hand washing all the parts of her Dr. Brown’s bottles) but once she realized it was milk she wanted to be in my lap and have me “give” her the sippy cup just like a bottle.  So cute.  She still associates milk with cuddle time so I know that the giving her a bottle is now about so much more to her than just nutrition.

She’s a very active girl with a very strong personality.  She is not afraid to ask for what she wants and protest loudly when she doesn’t get it.  Everything she does is on her own timetable and hers alone.

Anyway, that’s what we’ve been up to.  I hope everyone has a wonderful and prosperous 2014!!!!