Merry Christmas!

We hope all of you and your loved ones had a wonderful Christmas. Enjoy the rest of the holidays!!!

Holiday Cheer

I love getting Christmas cards. I know it's kind of silly and even a bit wasteful, but I love it. Here are some of the great cards we got this year. One of the best parts about Christmas cards is that you can recycle them the following year by making name tags out of them for your gifts! Love that!

Here's our Christmas card this year...it wasn't difficult to pick out pictures this time around!!

Chloe Chadwick 2002-2009

Yesterday, my cat Chloe had to be put down. Well, she was kind of my cat. I originally got her for my dad and gave her to him as a father's day present in 2002. The present was really for me though because I wanted a cat. He wasn't as excited about her as I had hoped for though. Still, she was his cat. A year later, for Christmas, my dad presented me with an animal carrier with a bow on it. I was so excited, I thought I was getting a puppy. Inside I found poor Chloe. He re-gifted her and gave her back to me. So then she became my cat and we all lived in harmony under one roof for a few years.

Christmas 2003...that's Chloe making a run for it from the kitty carrier

The next year I met James, we fell in love (blah, blah blah) and eventually moved in together and got Summit. Chloe stayed behind with my parents and was once again Dad's cat.

Chloe Chadwick, 2002-2009

Recently Chloe has not been eating well. Then our vet discovered cancerous tumors in her digestive tract. After getting a second opinion at another doctor's office, my dad had to make the very difficult decision to put her down. There wasn't anything they could do for her and she was getting very sick. I'm sure it was a really hard decision and even though he won't admit it, my dad loved that cat. Thank you Chloe for being a good cat, even though you weren't really a nice cat. You will be missed.

Keeping Busy

With all the wedding recaps there hasn't been a chance to post about much else. I'm glad I took the time to write all those posts, but I'm sure glad they're done! There are a few more details to mention, but that can come later, when I get my second wedding recap wind.

In any case, the past few weeks have been busy! I know some of these updates are long overdue, but here they are anyway.

First, Thanksgiving. My dad and I continued our tradition of running the Manchester Road Race. There were over 14,000 people in the race. It's always a fun race and this year the weather was beautiful, plus running a 5 mile race makes Thanksgiving dessert taste even better! After the race we all went to the Pulaski's for dinner.

The Saturday after Thanksgiving, our friends Ryan and Kelly hosted "Friendsgiving". Every year for the past three years, we have gotten a large group of old friends together for Thanksgiving dinner to celebrate our lasting friendship and to honor the memory of our close friend, Jason Lantieri, who was tragically killed in Iraq in October 2007. It a special day and hopefully a tradition that will last for many years.

Shortly after Thanksgiving, James and I took up a big project. We currently live in a two-family house owned by my parents. The downstairs tenants recently moved out and we decided to remodel the apartment and make the move from the top floor to the first floor. The first floor apartment is bigger and will give us access to the basement. We like the idea of more space and a basement, but remodeling the apartment has turned out to be a ton of work. The existing wallpaper hadn't been changed in 30 years, everything needed a fresh coat of paint, the wood floors needed to be refinished and the old tenants were seriously just dirty (you should have seen the shower)! We've been cleaning, scrapping, painting, wallpapering and refinishing for the past three weeks straight. An end is in sight but it's unlikely we'll be moved before Christmas.

Other happenings include birthdays, holiday parties, goodbye parties and babies. We celebrated (from afar) our nephew Andrew's 2nd birthday, James' mom's birthday and my dad's birthday this month. We only have pictures from the impromptu birthday dinner we had at our house for my dad, but Happy birthday everyone!!!

The only candle I had in the house was a "5", so that's what dad got, even though he's 60-something...

Also, one of my colleagues, Emily, just had a baby girl, Josie. We got to meet Josie for the first time at a two-for-one goodbye party for two other colleagues, John and Rachael. John and his wife Wendy will be moving to the Bay Area and Racheal and her husband Uli will be moving to Germany next month. It will be sad to see them go and with Emily out on maternity leave our office will be desolate this winter!

Emily and Josie and Uli, Rachael and Josie

Holiday parties at my office are no big deal but for James' company they go all out. Last Friday we donned fancy clothes and headed out to make small talk with the big wigs at the Robert E. Morris annual holiday party. It was fun to meet the folks James works with - now I can put a face to all those stories he brings home! He even won a $60 bottle of wine in a raffle (I was going for the I-Pod touch, that didn't work out so well).

UConn holiday party at Luigi's and John's goodbye gift

Finally, we decorated. With the impending move, we decided reluctantly not to get a real tree this year. It just doesn't make a whole lot of sense. So instead, we found a small fake one in the attic of James' parents house and "made it work". I also let James decorate our house. James loves Christmas decorations. If I let him, he's go crazy with the Christmas lights, just like Chevy Chase in National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation. After some struggle (he wanted to get the automated life-size reindeer set), we settled on a single strand of large white lights. Kris came over and helped James string them on the house. I stood below and made sure they were all straight and to my liking. =)

Summit trying to figure out why we have a fake tree this year... also, playing "Santa Paws"

Besides the house and work, we've had our hands full like everyone else trying to finish up holiday projects and shopping. Thankfully, we're almost done - we better be though, Christmas is only four days away, can you believe it?!?

Snow!

You may have heard, but this weekend the northeast was walloped by Winter Storm Albert. We have had a few dustings and even a couple of inches of snow so far this fall, but Albert dumped almost a foot of snow on us here in southern CT and much, much more in other portions of the northeast. With many, many things to get done in the house this weekend (more on that later), we didn't mind being snowed in and Summit reveled in the first real "dashing" (as in "dashing through the snow") of the year. Hope you all stayed warm and cozy this weekend as well!

Getting Hitched Part VIII: The After Party and the Day After

After saying goodbye to most of our guests as well as our parents, we headed back to the farm's cottage where the girls and I had gotten ready earlier in the day. Our bridal party and some of our other close friends were ready to carry on our wedding celebration. While there were many reasons we choose to have our wedding at Tyrone Farm, the guest cottage that came along with the property was one bonus that just sweetened the deal. The cottage had three bedrooms which included a really large master bedroom for the bride and groom. There was a full kitchen, dining/living room and a finished basement that was set up as a game room. The backyard had a beautiful patio and an in-ground pool. Though the temperatures at 11 pm in early September made for less than comfortable swimming conditions, it didn't deter some of our friends from jumping in.

photos from Tyrone Farm website

We partied until the wee hours of the morning and then finally just...crashed. It was the perfect end to the perfect day.

some crashed harder than others =)

The Morning After...

Summit was the first to wake up, as usual. Since everyone else was still asleep, including James, Summit and I decided to take a walk around the farm. We checked out some of the little nooks and crannies that we didn't have a chance to discover during some of our other walks around the farm.

We returned to the cottage to find breakfast waiting for us. After eating, we packed up all our left over wedding debris and headed back to the Chadwick Lake House for a post-wedding Labor Day picnic.

The picnic was a nice opportunity to just chill out, eat lots of good food and relax with family and friends. I don't have any pictures of the picnic (I think we were all just a little bit pictured out at that point), but it was a really enjoyable and most importantly - it was a chance for us to really just veg out and enjoy a beautiful day on the lake. After family and friends petered out, we realized we had one big task left to do - pack for our trip to South America the next morning! Oh yeah, that. Funny how when you are so focused on the wedding, the honeymoon sort of gets lost in the madness. It didn't really hit us until then that we were going on a major trip the following day. So we frantically pulled our stuff together, made sure we had the important stuff (passport, bathing suit, flight schedule) and set our alarms for 3 a. m. to start our Galapaganian Adventure...you'll just have to wait for another series of posts to hear about that one!

Phew! Done. Well for now. There's still more to be said about wedding details, crafting and of course, as mentioned the honeymoon. Stay tuned!

How did we get here?
Getting Hitched Part VII: The Reception
Getting Hitched Part VI: Just Us
Getting Hitched Part V: Bridal Par-TAY!
Getting Hitched Part IV: The Ceremony
Getting Hitched Part III: Da, Dum, Da Da...
Getting Hitched Part II: Operation "Pretty"
Getting Hitched Part I: Practice Makes Perfect