Welcome to the New Year! Wrapping up the old one first...

Well it has definitely been a minute or two since I have had a chance to update the blog.  Life has certainly not been dull around here, so I will do my best to make this as concise and interesting as possible!  I'll try to start from where we left off...

Our wedding anniversary dinner in November had the tiniest little hiccup to it.  Ex had promised to pick up Little Man for an overnight visit.  I reminded him multiple times that he needed to be at pickup by 2:00 PM at the latest, so we could make sure we made our dinner reservations.  Somehow between 10:15 PM and the next morning, his car broke down, he lost his phone, and was unable to contact me in any fashion til 3:30 PM.  To say I was livid would probably be abusing the word livid.  In true Ex fashion, he wasn't able to form an apology - but he had plenty of excuses. He insisted that we wait for him to come get Little Man, which would have put pick up time at around 6:00 PM.  Yeah, that wasn't happening.  This was the straw that broke the camel's back for me (and Hubs wisely lets me deal with Ex solo).  We'd given him so many chances over the past year and he just kept letting us down over and over again.  I said some not-so-nice things on the phone to him and told him to get his life together and contact us again when that happened.

That was November 16th and we haven't heard from him since.  No Christmas wishes, no New Years greeting - he has just vanished.  We got a check for $100 he mailed a day after the phone call, but even with that check it puts him behind in child support by 4 digits.  At this point, Hubs and I are just so exhausted with the lies and the excuses that this is almost a relief. While the occasional babysitting was nice (5 times in 8 months), it wasn't worth the amount of work we had to put in to ensure Ex saw Little Man.  I'm not sure what his plans are and whether or not he wants to continue to be in Little Man's life, but at this point if he walks away we aren't planning on chasing him down.

Whew.  So that was a heavy first topic!  Moving on to more fun things - December was jam-packed with activity!  Hubs began his 2 1/2 week vacation by driving us all 16 hours up to my grandparents in Wisconsin!  My grandfather had a pacemaker put in days before we went out, so it was wonderful to get to see him and be assured that he was doing well.  He adores the boys (us grandkids are pretty much chopped liver when the new baby is in the room) and was tickled that we spent a few days with them.  My grandmother has pretty bad Alzheimers so while she enjoyed seeing us too, she was very confused a lot of the time. We spent two days there with my mother and sister and had some great family-bonding time.

The boys are adorable.  The afghans are older than all 3 of them.

Of course, it wouldn't be Christmas without a plague of some sort - so Little Man brought some sort of snuffly/coughy/sinus thing from his kindergarten class and passed it around to everyone except Hubs.  That meant not only was everyone cranky and tired for the drive home, but I was utterly useless.  So the drive took much longer and was broken into two parts.  Little Man doesn't sleep in hotels very well, so that was a nightmare within the nightmare.  Lets just say we mostly used the hotel to stretch our legs, because no one was sleeping.

The calm before the storm.

Once we got back, it was almost Christmas!  My mother and sister came down and spent Christmas Eve here, where we did our annual beer tasting and dinner.  I was so excited because last year I had to miss out on all the fun (read; alcohol), and this year I was very ready to relax and have a great night after our hellish drive home.  My sister even cooked dinner, so it was really one of my favorite parts of Christmas. 

Now I'm craving lasagna again.

We got through 2/3 of these and then someone fell asleep feeding the baby so we called it a night.
Don't worry, we had the rest a few days later.

Christmas Day was spent with my Hubs family, which was extra awesome because they live so close to us. His mom cooked (I cannot believe I got out of cooking anything this year!) and then we just relaxed and enjoyed the holiday.  

[Well, Little Man had a bath midway through the evening, but luckily it was after dinner and presents, and it was just family around for that little disaster.  The diaper problem has since been solved, albeit very unconventionally.  Duct tape on the legs of a footie pajama put on backwards with the feet cut off.  It is the only thing working for us right now.  We have several brightly colored rolls of tape to match his pajamas, and we put the tape loosely around the ankle so it keeps him from being able to pull up the pajama leg any higher than his calf.  He still tugs at the diaper but now it can't really be released from the pajama itself, so even in the rare case that he gets it off most of the mess is contained within his pajamas.  Not an ideal solution, but a solution.]

So Christmas came and went, and we were all spoiled rotten.  Of course the boys got everything their little hearts desired, despite Mommy and Daddy only getting them one gift each.  Between grandparents, great-grandparents, and god-parents, these kids will never go naked, hungry, or be bored.  Hubs and I can't complain either - I was so touched at how much thought all our families put into our gifts.  We both said that after this year it will be hard to top the gift we found for our mothers - we made them photo blankets with a collage of the last few years of our family.  I couldn't wait to watch them open them on Christmas and was so close to spilling the beans about them early - luckily UPS made sure they didn't arrive too early and so I was spared having to keep them a secret for too long!

We spent the rest of Hubs vacation partying with friends, having our first New Years Eve as a family, and lazing around the house watching Redbox and Netflix.  Our resolution this new year is to eat more dinners at our table (instead of on the couches in front of the tv), and we've managed to do that... once!  We'll keep trying though.  I also auditioned for a local production of "The Wedding Singer" and received the role of Holly, so these next few months I plan to viciously attack the treadmill and get back on the clean-eating wagon.  One of her lines is about wearing "my skin tight bustier."  Yikes!

On that note, I leave you with Little Man's holiday photos.  I got some taken at Target too but haven't picked them up yet - whoops!  Even though he is such a happy baby, I seem to always catch him being so serious.  Most of our friends have nicknamed him "The Judge-y Baby"... and I'm thinking that might stick.  Happy New Year!

I actually took this because I was laughing at how many people do this pose because of Pinterest.
Then I fell in love with the photo.
Hypocrite.  I can't even apologize, because I like it so much.

This is my favorite Christmas photo ever. Feet.