What's been happening?

I realize that I have been out of the blogging world for almost a month now. It is definitely not because there haven't been things to blog about, but just the opposite....we have been super busy and had a lot going on. And, everytime something interesting or exciting would happen over the past few weeks, I would think "I should blog about this". But then, time gets away from me and days and weeks go by and I just don't ever seem to find the time - or make the time - to blog!

One of the reasons that I blog is to share our lives with friends and family. Another reason is that I like to chronicle (get it?....The Weimer Chronicles) areas of our lives that I can then go back and look at months and years down the road. It is fun to look back and say, "oh yeah, I remember when that happened" or to see what Jacob was doing in the first few months of his life or how I was feeling at 22 weeks pregnant. We get so busy and my mind is filled with so many things that I often easily forget things that happened not that long ago.

So, instead of putting pressure on myself to do separate posts about all of the things that we have been doing since my last blog post on December 16th , I thought I would do one (probably long!) list to catch myself up. Here goes....

1. On Friday, December 18th - one week before Christmas - we experienced a colossal snowstorm! The snow started falling fast around 4pm on Friday. Thankfully Keith was working from home that day so I didn't need to worry about him getting home from work on the treacherous roads, like many other people experienced. By 9pm, we had 9 inches and it was still falling fast! It snowed from Friday afternoon until Sunday morning, non-stop. At the end of it all, we got 21 inches and the cities and towns around here were pretty much shut down.

Unfortunately for us, we realized on Saturday morning that we didn't have any "real" snow shovels. Keith went out that morning and started to try to make a dent in the driveway. He used a little travel snow shovel (the kind that you would keep in your car for emergencies). It was a royal pain in the butt to use that shovel, but it did the job...albeit, veeeery slowly!

Once Jacob went down for his morning nap, I ventured out to join Keith and used a garden spade. Boy, was it fun...NOT! Eventually, once we were about halfway down the driveway, I walked over to the neighbor's house (when I saw that they were finished with their driveway) and asked if we could borrow their nice big snowshovel. This helped speed up our progress, but all in all, it took us about 5 hours to clear the entire driveway (and it was still snowing!!).

Although it's hard to see, this is a picture of the driveway once it was cleared:

When Jacob woke up from his nap, we did have fun taking him outside in his first real snow. He seemed to enjoy it, although we weren't out for very long. We set him in a snowbank and also in a snow angel that Keith had made. It was fun seeing him look with awe at all the white stuff. I am excited for him to experience it when he gets older (although I not looking forward to that much snow anytime soon!! I can wait a couple of years!!)

2. I have begun to make homemade baby food for Jacob. I decided that I wasn't going to make a lot of it before the holidays since we would be traveling, but I did make a batch of sweet potatoes a few days before Christmas. Thanks to my sister Karen who is letting me borrow her containers, it was super easy. Since then I have made more sweet potatoes and some applesauce. Jacob definitely likes the consistency and flavors of the homemade stuff better than the store-bought stuff. I am excited to try to make other things in the future.

3. Just a few days before Christmas (the same day I was making the baby food and making Christmas cookies for our neighbors & families), we had a not-so-fun experience with our washing machine. Long story short, while Keith was doing some laundry on Tuesday night, the machine would get to the rinse cycle and just stop. We tried to figure out what was wrong by playing around with it a bit and Keith went on-line to Google to see if he could find any solutions. In the end, we found out that the "lid switch" on the machine had gone bad. This is the switch that makes the rinse & spin cycles work properly.

I called Sears to see if they were able to send a repairman out (yes....two days before Christmas!) and they said it would be Jan. 7th before they could get someone out here AND it would cost us over $200! Well, we were getting ready to head out of town for 10 days for the holidays and I had laundry to do! I surely wasn't going to be able to wait for the repairman to come!! So...I did some searching on the web to see if I could figure out how to fix it myself and lo and behold it really wasn't that hard.

I figured out how to take the washing machine apart

and locate the old lid switch under the top

I was able to get the part at an appliance store up the road from us (thank goodness! that is the part that was a bit stressful for a little while since I couldn't find anywhere that sold the part!). And voila.....I replaced the part and put the machine back together and now it's as good as new!

4. Of course, the most exciting part about the last month was celebrating Jacob's very 1st Christmas! You can't tell from his photo, but he very much enjoyed it!

We started opening presents on Christmas Eve day at our house, continued at my parents' house in Richmond on Christmas Day and the day after, and then traveled to Western PA to be with Keith's family for New Year's. It was a crazy, yet fun-filled 10 days of being away from home!! I have a lot of pictures and details to share, so I am hoping to do another post devoted entirely to Christmas. Stay tuned!

5. Something fun that we were able to do during the days between Christmas and our travels to PA was to visit with my sisters and their kiddos. It was nice to have all of the cousins together and even though we didn't get an entire Stank family picture this year (bummer!), we were able to get a picture of all of the Stank grandkids in one place.

It certainly wasn't an easy task and I so wish that I had taken video of this photo shoot. There were five adult women (my mom, my grandma, Katie, Karen & me) all trying to get all of these kids to smile at the same time. One person was singing, one was saying "Smile", one was saying "Look over here" and unfortunately, as you can see from this picture, we could hardly get them to all look in the same direction!

During the whole thing, we were almost peeing our pants laughing so hard at the antics it was taking to get them to smile. In the end, Jacob was sitting there with a huge grin on his face, while Sierra & Pierce were looking at us like we were all crazy!! Reid didn't know what to think! Unfortunately, we didn't get a "great" picture, but it is a memory that will be etched in my head for many years to come!!

6. Well, if all of that hasn't exhausted you yet, when we returned from our trip to PA on January 2nd, we came home to a frozen heat pump!! What that means is that there was a huge block of ice inside and around our heat pump and the blade inside was not turning. We found out that the reason it was frozen was because the defrost board had gone bad. This was causing our emergency heat to kick on and we had to use the auxillary (much more expensive electric) heat until we could get the unit fixed.

Thankfully we were able to find a local HVAC repairman that was able to come out and replace the defrost board after only a few days. The first day he came by to look at the pump and determine the problem. Then, he came back two days later to replace it. In the day between, he asked me to melt the ice that was inside the unit. Keith had already used a hair dryer on it when we first came home to try to melt some of the ice, but that was taking forever. I used buckets and buckets of hot water but was finally able to melt it all away.

Here is a picture of it in the middle of my "melting process":

Unfortunately, as we were told, the auxillary heat is quite expensive and we just received our electric bill. It was $100 more than any other month last year!! Keith attributes some of that to having our Christmas lights on, but I think it was mostly from the heating issue. Hopefully we won't have to deal with anything like that for a long, long time!

7. And, last but certainly not least, Jacob turned seven months old on January 7th! I am WAY behind on doing a separate post about all that he is doing these days, but I wanted to share this picture of him sitting up like a big boy. He is growing up so fast and is becoming such a cute little boy and I am thoroughly enjoying every day that I get to spend with him.

Wow!! After typing all of that out, I realize again how super busy we were the past month! Now, we have a ton of clean up to do from the holidays - I am slowly going through all of the wonderful gifts that we received and trying to figure out where to put everything. We are also in the (slow!) process of converting our spare bedroom into more of a playroom for Jacob and we have rearranged some things in the living room to make more space.

I would also like to do some purging of things this year, including clothes that we don't wear anymore and things that we have had for years and haven't used! It is a slow process along with the regular daily chores of cleaning, cooking, laundry and doing fun things like playing with Jacob! But, I am convinced that over time, it will all get done. Hopefully I will have more time for blogging too!