Here it is, Thursday night. We arrived in Cancun on Tuesday afternoon. We took advantage of Brian’s zillions of Holiday Inn rewards points and stayed at a Holiday Inn near the airport Monday night, left the car there (free parking for the week! yay!) and took a shuttle to the airport. Adam strutted through the airport with his sunglasses on, ready to hit the beach and everyone commented how cute he looked! He was an awesome traveler on the plane and before we knew it we were at the hotel! Adam was hysterical because we didn’t even have all the luggage in the room yet and he was stripped down and looking for his swimsuit! We hit the beach and pool for a couple hours, then out for dinner and a trip to WalMart to stock up on the essentials….water, Corona, limes, milk, & snacks!

Yesterday and today were spent on the beach in the morning, lunch in our lounge chairs, in to the room for a nap for Adam (Brian and I hung out on the patio surfing the web and I even laid by the pool for a while today!), then back to the pool for a while before it was supper time!

Tonight we were given a complimentary dinner at the beach side restaurant of the hotel. It was a beautiful setting and delicious food! The dinner was complimentary thanks to my sucking up to the hotel on Facebook!  🙂

We are having a wonderful time and enjoying the gorgeous beach! I tried to upload a couple pics but the internet in the room is a little spotty. I will definitely post more when we are back home.

Hope everyone has a good week and to our family and friends at home: Hope the snow and flooding aren’t wreaking too much havoc…..

A couple weeks ago, I reached a huge milestone. I finally reached the point where I have lost 50 pounds! I am so proud of myself. I feel like I have taken it off in a slow and healthy way….by exercising and eating less. It’s that simple. No gimmicks or fad diets, just good ‘ol burning off more calories than taking in!

When that much weight is lost, it means new clothes are needed! This past week, I cleaned out my closet. I got rid of all the clothes that are way too big and also the ones I just don’t wear anymore. My rough estimate was I parted with 70 shirts, 30 pairs of shorts, and about 15 pairs of pants. Crazy. I brought 8 garbage bags of stuff to Goodwill. My empty side of the closet was looking very sad….

Adam went to Grandma & Fred’s yesterday, so I took advantage of my day off from work with no kiddo and hit the mall! I spent 7 hours there!! I tried on about a zillion things, but only came home with a half zillion.  😉

As I walked through the mall I kept smiling and shaking my head. I can’t believe I have dropped so many sizes and I can now buy clothes in ‘regular’ sizes! This is amazing to me. It has been SO LONG since this has been the case.

I am hoping to take off a few more pounds, so I tried to not go too crazy in the stores.

After my 7 hour shopping spree, I was crazy hungry! Brian came from work and we met at Wildfire for supper. Super delish. We love the steaks there and we managed to save a little room for their fabulous apple & raspberry sizzler thing for dessert.  It was kinda strange to have a dinner date without our favorite 3 year old, but also very nice!

Thanks Dora & Fred for offering to hang out with Adam! I’m sure he’s having a blast! Thank you American Express card for not going into shock due to overuse today!!

I’m off to bed soon. Working with the moms & babies all weekend! Have a good one!

The whole family has been battling illness over the last couple weeks. Brian got hit first. Usually, when he gets a ‘cold’ it literally lasts for a day and a half. We always joke that his immune system is made of steel! He got his cold right before he left for Iowa. He said he was continually popping the Sudafed while he was gone. That’s just crazy for him! Over last weekend, he was still coughing a bit too.

Then I got hit with the sore throat. Luckily, I was in the middle of a stretch of days off from work, so it wasn’t a huge deal. I could barely talk, but when I would talk, I sounded like a dude. Not attractive.

Then Adam started coughing. He kept coughing more and more. Sunday night was the WORST! He (and I) was awake for over 2 hours during the night coughing. I felt awful for him. I had tried all the tricks I knew: honey, Vick’s rub on the feet, night time cough syrup, ibuprofen, sit in the bathroom with the hot shower going, elevate his head, humidifier…no luck. He finally was able to fall asleep for a couple hours, but then got up when Brian got up to get ready for work. He continued to cough during the morning so I decided to bring him to the pediatrician. I feel like he has been sick so much more this winter. He has had the pukes a couple times and this was his 3rd or 4th cough. He also had the ‘barky’ cough, so I figured it was probably croup, but I wasn’t sure since his cough ALWAYS sounds like that!

The doctor said it’s probably croup, but since his cough is always like that, she said it could also be that he has narrower air passages and will eventually outgrow it. She prescribed him some steroids. In the meantime, my cold was moving more into the congestion stage and my throat didn’t hurt anymore. Lots of coughing and sneezing going on for me.

I got an absent day from work on Tuesday and stayed home with Adam. His cough was getting better (at least less barky….thank you, steroids!) but then he spiked a fever in the 102 range. That meant no daycare for him Wednesday either! I was still feeling congested and yucky, so I called in sick for today. Adam turned the corner today! No fever. Coughing only a little bit. We put together his valentines because his Valentine’s Day party is tomorrow at daycare! He’s excited to see his friends and I’m excited to go back to work tomorrow to see mine! I’m feeling a ton better too. Not 100% but well enough to head back to work. I only have one shift left for the week, then I’m off again until Wednesday! Slackerville, I know.

That’s all for tonight. Better think about heading to bed. Hope everyone is well!!

So the holidays have come and gone and I see I haven’t written in a while!

Christmas was nice. We spent Christmas Eve at Dora & Fred’s and Christmas Day at my parents’. We had a very nice couple days with lots of family and tasty food! Santa brought Adam a bike! He was so excited and couldn’t believe Santa had actually come! I was able to capture a great photo of him seeing his bike under the tree:

January, for some reason, has been a bit of a blur. I can hardly believe tomorrow is February! I’m so glad though, cuz January is my least favorite month. Brian had a trip to Arizona for work a couple weeks ago, and this morning he left for Iowa for the week. His travel schedule has been nothing like it was last fall, so this is completely manageable!

It’s snowing today, so I got out the snow blower and lugged the thing up and down the driveway a bunch of times. I was able to do a pretty decent job! I’m glad Brian gave me a crash course last night!

We have decided to go to Mexico again!! I couldn’t let a March go by without going! We’re heading back to Beachscape Villas in Cancun and cannot wait! We’re bringing Adam with us and he is beyond excited! When I told him we were going to Mexico, he said, “Well, I better get my swimming suit!!” and he ran upstairs to his room to find it. He can’t wait to fly on a plane again and play in the pool, sand, and ocean. It should be a wonderful week!

In an effort to look better in a swim suit, I have revamped my diet/exercise efforts. I just got done running 2.5 miles on the treadmill! That’s the furthest I’ve ever gone! Only 7 more weeks until our trip, so I have a lot of work to do!

I have a few days of work ahead of me, so I should go get organized for that. The mornings can be crazy when I’m by myself getting Adam to daycare and myself to work on time. Have a great week!

Here’s what we’re looking forward to in a few weeks:

As kids, my parents took my brother and I to see Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat a couple times and we really liked it. As we got older, we took our spouses to see it too. It’s one of our favorites! We love the music and it’s just an all around great show! Earlier this fall, my parents decided our Christmas gift would be to take the whole Tracy side of the family to see Joseph at the Ordway in St. Paul. We found a weekend that would fit all our schedules since my brother and his family would have to drive up from Omaha. We chose Saturday, December 11. None of us figured it would be such an adventure!

I got a bad cold last week and stayed home from work on Thursday and Friday. I was so exhausted on Thursday and didn’t even have the energy to get out of bed to take cold medicine. I was feeling a little better on Friday, but still didn’t figure it would be a good idea to be around brand new babies with the amount of germs I had on me! It turned out to be a good thing I was home. The weather was expected to turn treacherous by Friday night, so my mom, brother, and I decided my parents, brother & his family would all stay at our house Friday and Saturday nights since it’s a lot closer to St. Paul than my parents’ house. Seth made it to our house late Friday night.

We woke up Saturday morning (the day of Joseph) to several inches of snow and crazy wind. Brian, my dad, and brother went out to clear the driveway so we could start making our way downtown. It was still snowing so hard! As they would clear an area, it would get snowed on again. It was clearly an uphill battle.

The show started at 2, so we decided to leave at 11 and hopefully would be able to get to the Ordway and get some lunch. Good decision. It took 2 hours to drive there (normally it would take us 40-45 minutes)! The roads were horrible! Visibility was terrible. We had to stop every few miles to clean off the windshield wipers. We were traveling in 2 vehicles. We saw car after car in the ditch or stuck on exit ramps. Brian is an awesome driver in that kind of weather. I was white knuckled the whole way there.

It was 1 by the time we got to the parking ramp. We ventured through the skyways and found the theater. We were ready for some lunch. The guys headed out into the snow to find a nearby Jimmy John’s but learned it had just closed! There was a pub nearby that whipped us up some club sandwiches and the boys delivered them to us. We munch on them in the lobby of theater, then went to find our seats. We were seated at 2 only to hear an announcement that the show would be delayed until 2:30 as the cast hadn’t all arrived yet!

I went out and took a picture of the snowstorm from the lobby:

So it was finally show time and then they announced the performance would take place without a full cast. I’m not sure how many cast members were absent, but Joseph is supposed to be 1 of 12 brothers, and he was only 1 of 10 for the first half, and 1 of 9 for the second half as one of the ‘brothers’ played another role in the second half. Regardless, it was still a phenomenal performance! I found myself tearing up a few times. I’m not sure if that was due to the nostalgia of the show, or all we had gone through to get there, or just my love of the show in general. It was probably a combination.

After the show, we were all dreading the drive home. We pulled out of the parking ramp and saw this:

Pretty park, but notice all the snow in the streets. The streets of downtown St. Paul were just awful. We came across many stuck cars and were just hoping we’d be able to get out of the area. Luckily, we escaped! Once we got on the freeway, it was a completely different experience! We could see a pretty good distance in front of us, and the roads were actually quite passable. We saw many cars that were stuck in snow banks. It looked like a lot of them had tried to exit, but turned off too early into a snow bank instead of the exit ramp! Duh! We made it home in a quick hour and 15 minutes! The hardest part was getting my brother’s caravan into the driveway! He got a little stuck….But Brian got out the snow blower and cleared the driveway again and they were able to dig out the van and get it into the driveway! Whew!

Then it was time for our family dinner and Christmas celebration. We had put a ham in the oven before we left, so it was ready to enjoy when we got home. Dinner was yummy, then it was time to open presents. Here are the kiddos in front of the tree:

We were all exhausted after our adventurous day and were in bed by 10. We woke up Sunday morning and all hit the Pancake House!! My family had never been there before but had heard about it from many of my Facebook posts! 😉 We all enjoyed our meals. Then it was time to say goodbye to my brother and his family so they could hit the road back to Omaha.He said the roads were still icy and it was slow going, but they were able to make it home.

Despite the awful weather, it was a really nice visit with my family. We can already look back and laugh.  🙂 Thanks, Mom & Dad for the tickets to Joseph and thanks Seth & Emilie for making such a crazy journey! Love you all!  🙂

Today, I took Adam to the pediatrician for his 3 year well visit. He did great! He ended up receiving 2 shots, but he was so tough and didn’t even cry! He’s 37 inches tall and weighs 31 pounds.

After the doctor, we headed off to see Santa! When we were walking into the mall, Adam and I were discussing what we should get Brian for Christmas:

Me: Adam, what do you think we should get Daddy for Christmas?

Adam: I think….we should get Daddy a car.

Me: A car?!?! Doesn’t Daddy already have a car?

Adam: Well, yes. But I think he needs another one.

Great. Kiddo is an expensive gift giver!

So we made it into the mall and found Santa. Adam took off his coat and marched up to sit on Santa’s lap. They had quite the conversation while I snapped some pictures. Adam asked Santa for a bike and also told him he likes trains. I walked up by them and told Adam to tell Santa how he was such a good boy at the doctor and didn’t even cry when he got his 2 shots. Santa was impressed. Then I asked Adam if he told Santa everything he wanted for Christmas before we left. Adam looks up at Santa and says:

“I pooped on the potty before we left the house!”

Santa was a little taken aback and surprised to be told this information, but then he told Adam that was a great job and gave him a high five!

So Thanksgiving was great!! Brian made it home from Iowa through the snow and ice storm Wednesday night. I worked during the day Thanksgiving then we had a wonderful meal at Dora and Fred’s. We also had a birthday cake for Adam. Everyone there was so generous by giving him gifts and wearing dinosaur party hats! Adam had such a nice birthday!

I worked the rest of the weekend as well. On Sunday afternoon we figured it would be a great time to get our Christmas tree. We went to Home Depot where we have had great luck in previous years. We were pretty bummed when we walked in because there were hardly any trees left, and the ones that were left were small and not very nice looking. Then….there it was. Straight out of a scene from Christmas Vacation (sort of)….our tree. It was tall, full, and looked fabulous. Brian and I took turns looking it over and couldn’t believe this gorgeous tree was still available!

We got it home and into the stand and marveled at our awesome find!

I started putting on lights. It was crazy. I just kept grabbing string after string after string and loading them onto the tree. Soon, I started blowing fuses. I am now a professional light string fuse changer! My electrical engineer hubby advised me on how to make that stop happening and I continued piling on the lights. I finally reached the top and couldn’t believe it! I lost count how many are on there, but it’s gotta be about 2000!

I spent an entire evening working on the tree. Between the lights and the ornaments, it was quite a project. But I love it! Here is the finished tree:

Some other Ongoings:

Brian has been home since Thanksgiving! He is here until next Sunday when he’ll have to be gone for a week, but that should be the end of his long stints away from home!! We are all ecstatic!! It has been so nice having him back home! Plus, his company shuts down between Christmas and New Year’s! AND he is able to take off 2 more weeks in January as comp time since he has been working his tail off for so many months! He is so excited to hang out with us and do some ice fishing! We will be so excited to have him around! YAY!!

I took Adam to the dentist for the first time and he did really well!! I got my teeth cleaned first while he watched and saw how it works. He told me I was doing a really great job!  🙂 Then it was his turn. He laid in the chair and opened his mouth and did everything the hygienist and dentist asked him. Whew! Here he is ready for his turn:

Our final ongoing involves the poor truck. Brian is an avid ice fisherman and every year he makes me giggle because he gets SO excited to start ice fishing! During the warmer months he stores his portable ice house and all his gear on a shelf above the truck in the garage. Last night, I was in the family room and I could hear him rummaging around in the garage getting some of his equipment ready. I heard a huge CRASH! I didn’t hear Brian swearing or saying anything, so I ran to the garage to be sure he was OK. I couldn’t see him, but he responded that he was fine and just on the other side of the truck. Here is what I saw:

The windshield is shattered, but that’s really the only damage. We needed a new windshield anyway……

Well, that’s about it for now. Brian just got home from fishing and we’re excited to hit the Pancake House in the morning! We haven’t been there in a LONG time! G’night!

Tomorrow is November 25. Thanksgiving. I am thankful for so much. I have a wonderful husband and son as well as a great extended family. We are all happy and healthy and I feel so lucky to be surrounded with so many loving people.

These days, a great job can be hard to come by. I am so thankful to have a job I absolutely love and that I work with such a great group of ladies. I am so lucky to be a part of new families every time I go to work. I am also thankful for Brian’s job. I know I talk about how much he is gone, but in the big picture, he has a job he also loves, is challenged by, and he makes a great living. And I know the long absences are almost done!!

Then there’s Adam. I can’t even put into words how thankful I am for that little boy. Sure, he has his days when I just can’t deal with him anymore, but overall he such a fantastic child. He makes me laugh every day and I am amazed at how smart he is. He is such a sweetheart. My favorite is when he gives me the biggest hug he can by wrapping his arms and legs around me and squeezing me so tight that he shakes. Then he tops it off with, “I sure love you!”

And speaking of Adam, Thanksgiving is also his 3rd birthday! I can’t believe how fast time has flown by. He’s doing really great with potty training now. He’s pretty much all trained during the day and just wears a pull up for nap and bedtime. He is so proud of himself!!

I am working all weekend. I work a day shift on Thanksgiving, then I’ll join the huge family gathering at Dora & Fred’s. They are cooking up a delicious feast!! We’re bringing over a dinosaur birthday cake and party hats to have a little birthday celebration as well. It’s shaping up to be a busy, but fun weekend!

Oh, and to top it off, Brian got home tonight and will be here until December 3rd! That’s 9 days for him at home! I am also thankful for that!!

From our family to yours: Have a happy Thanksgiving!! Travel safely and stay warm!!

We’re home from Mexico. We had a fantastic time!

Wednesday and Thursday the weather involved scattered showers. And were they ever! It would be sunny, then some clouds would move in, it would rain for 5 minutes, then the sun would reappear! We would just huddle under the palapa on the beach during the brief showers, then continue on basking in the sun!

The weather on Friday and Saturday was better. It was super windy on Friday, but still sunny. Brian treated me to a beach side massage on Saturday and I, in turn, treated him to one as well. It was fabulous! So relaxing to hear the ocean waves while getting a great massage.

On our first day in Cancun, we went to WalMart to get a cooler, limes, and Corona so we were able to bring our own drinks to the beach. We also bought some milk and cereal so we would have breakfast on the balcony each morning. Gorgeous!

We would venture out in the evenings to find places to eat supper and we never had a bad meal. It was such a great trip and we can’t wait to go back!

I’ll post some of my favorite pics. You can also click on the link on the right that says “See our photos” and go to the album “Cancun November, 2010” to see more. We stayed at the same hotel as when we visited Cancun in March 2009, so that album will also have more pics of our hotel

Here is our ocean front view off our balcony:

Gorgeous beach:

Sand like powdered sugar:

Here’s Brian and I enjoying beach life:

Our last dinner of vacation at Calypso’s:

Breakfast in the airport at Margaritaville:

We got home Sunday night and Brian returned to Iowa early Monday morning. He’ll be home for Thanksgiving. Back to reality!

The last several weeks and months have involved Brian being in Iowa a ton for work. He is getting tired and so am I. How did we decide to recharge?! By heading to Cancun!

At the moment we are sitting on the balcony of our hotel room, enjoying the warm Caribbean breezes, Corona, and each other’s company. It is fabulous!

We had a 6 AM flight this morning and we were on the beach by 11:30. We decided to live it up and spring for the first class seats on the plane. What a treat! I have never been in first class before. We were served a delicious breakfast and had wonderful service the whole flight here. We are staying at the same hotel we stayed at in March ’09. It’s small, quiet, not all-inclusive and it has the best beach around! We have a fantastic 1 bedroom ocean front room! Our plans for the next few days include sitting on our chairs on the beach, sipping tropical drinks, solving the world’s problems, and just hanging out together.

Adam is spending time with both sets of grandparents while we are gone. He’s excited to hang out with them and they are excited to have him! We think the next time we come down here, we will bring Adam with. He is old enough now where he would enjoy playing in the calm, shallow waters and building sand castles on the beach.

I see my Corona needs to be refilled…..Hasta luego!