Happy New Year!

Hi 2013!

It's nice to meet you. I hope you treat me and everyone I care about well. I know things can't always be perfect, but the I'm looking forward to what you may bring. Let's make this year a good one!

Love,
~Stacy

With this new year, I'm ready to get back to work. After 11 days off in a row, I'm ready to get back to work and back into a routine. I know that with school starting up in 2 1/2 weeks, I'm going to be crazy busy until the end of the month, so I'm glad that I got a nice break for a bit.

For my first day of 2013, I really didn't do much and I'm ok with that. Being that many of my friends are coming down with colds and now I'm not feeling 100%, I figured it would be good just to take it easy.

With the new year comes "New Year Resolutions". For this year, I would like to start working on improving our home. This includes just keeping up with the house chores. Even though I've been happy with the house the ways it is, there are things that still need to get done. Painting, trim work, cleaning and organizing the garage just to name a few thing. In this past I have fought with Sam because I haven't been in the mood to do much around the house and I want to try and change that.

Additionally, I would like to start budgeting our money better. I think I'm pretty good with money. However, in December we had over $1,000 in unexpected bills and I want to make sure we have an emergency fund ready just in case that happens again. Since moving into our home I have just paid the bills as they have came in, but I have given little attention to how the bills have affected our bank accounts. Currently we have a "his", "hers", and "ours" bank accounts, so its been hard to figure out a balance between who pays what bill with what money. So I think making a budget would be good for me (us).

Finally, I would like to enjoy life more. I often worry about every detail, and I realize that things often work out fine no matter how much I worry. Last year, I worried about all different things throughout my honeymoon and I could have even had a better time if I just relaxed a little more. So, come March when we go on our next trip, I hope I can relax and go with the flow a little more.

Here's to a new year and new goals! Here's to good friends and great family, and all the memories that this year will bring! Here's to 2013!

Shamrock Check In

Come tomorrow Shamrock has been part of our lives for 2 months. Maybe it's just me, but it seems like a lot longer. I think it has to do with all the scares he has given us, the multiple vet trips, and gobs of money he have spent on him so far. However, so far we feel everything we done has been worth it, because he is an awesome cat.

 

As a write this post, he is hanging out with me keeping me company on this "snowy" day.

Being that we live in Chicago, this is kind of sad when this is the most snow we have seen since last winter. I'm not a huge fan of snow, but the snow makes the leafless trees look less sad. 

Since starting this post, Shamrock has decided that hiding under the blanket would more fun then just sitting nicely next to me. I shouldn't be surprised because in the last few days, sleeping under blankets seems to be his new favorite thing. Here is what I came home to the other day-

How cute is this guy!

In other cat news- I did take Shamrock to see the neurologist on Monday morning. The vet is about hour and half away, but I was impressed on how caring and knowledgeable the vet was. She said he was the first cat she's been able to cuddle with in months, and he his exam was great. She recommended we just keep him on the anti-seizure meds, and to go to our local vet to do some blood work in 2 weeks.

However, within 30 minutes of getting home, Shamrock had another seizure. This seizure didn't last as long as some of the others (that was his fourth seizure since that first ER trip), but it did wipe him out. It took him about a day to get enough energy to start eating and drinking, and then another day to start acting like himself again. We are hoping that the long car trip is what caused the attack, and the meds will continue to help him live a normal life.

Being pet parents we want to make sure we do as much as we can to help our pet. However, some of the testing the vet is recommending is thousands of dollars and that's not really an option for us at this point. So I'm just hoping that we have found the problem and we can continue to manage it with medication. I'll be sure to keep you posted on how Shamrock is doing, and any good thoughts/ prayers our way would be appreciated.

The Gift of Memories!

I know that this season is more about giving than getting gifts. However, I think it's important to be thankful for the gifts you do receive. This years I was blessed with a lot of wonderful things that I received for Christmas.

 

The husband got me this beautiful necklace. I wanted a new nice necklaces because my old "Open Heart" chain broke and now is missing completely. I'm pretty good at losing jewelry, but I'm going to do my best not the lose this one.

However, Christmas is about giving and I tried to give some gifts that were more sentimental than just another "thing". One of the hardest people to get gifts for is my grandma. She never needs anything, so I wanted to give her something you can't just buy at any store. I wanted to give her the gift of memories.

Growing up my grandma often had a video camera attached to her hand. She love taping us and we loved watching the tapes. However, VHSs are starting to become very dated technology and soon we may be unable to watch these memories anymore. So I thought it would be a good idea to convert the VHS tapes to DVDs and give them as gifts.

I brought a VHS to DVD converter at Best Buy. What I like about this converter system is that you can just do a straight conversion, or you can edit the DVD and put multiple videos on one disk. It just depends on how long the home movie is and how much of the home movie you want to edit away. Being that it takes time to record the video off the VHS, it take more time to edit and add titles to the video, then even more time burn the disk- this process wasn't quick but I think it was worth it.

I gave 4 videos/ DVDs to my grandma and 4 DVDs to my sister, so I think the money I spent on the converter and the disks was worth it. I hope to finish doing the rest of the home videos at some point, and I was told by Sam's parents that I'm going to get the honor of converting their home movies too. Exciting stuff, but I think it's going to worth having the memories saved in a more user friendly format.

This time of the year is about making memories and sharing memories with the people that you love. And because I love my readers- here is one of my favorite clips from the home movies. It's of me eating ice cream.

I can only image how nice a sticky I was. Yummy!

Christmas Recap!

I hope everyone had a good Christmas (assuming you celebrate Christmas) yesterday. The last few days have been very busy, but it was worth the effort.

On Christmas Eve, we had Sam's family over. This was a true test of our hosting skills because we had a total of 15 of us eating dinner, sharing gifts, and just spending some family time together. Also being that he has a big Italian family, we had enough food left over to feed my whole family the next day.

Christmas morning my dad's side of the family came in from Michigan. This is the first time they have made the trip this way for the holidays, but it was great to see everyone and show them our house.

We started by opening gifts. This year I try to give some more personal and customized gifts, because after awhile you really don't need or want as much. I'll go into more details about the gifts I was most excited to give in another post, but I hope my grandma and sister both liked them.

After gifts, we sat down for lunch before everyone had to hit the road and go home.

Once everyone left, Sam and I got a little time to relax before we headed to his parent house for our final Christmas party.
 
All in all the holidays have been really nice. It was nice that a lot our of family got the chance to see our house now that we are fully moved in. Also, being that we hosted Christmas, we still have enough left overs to last us until 2013. I call that an extra unexpected gift for us! Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas Eve Eve!

I know I haven't posted everything since my birthday, but things got a little crazy the last week and half. So far my 27th year hasn't been as good as I was hoping. The cat has given us another two scares since that first ER trip. He is now on anti-seizure medication, and has a specialist appointment tomorrow at a vet over an hour away. Since the last scare, Shamrock seems to be doing better but I'm still going to take him to the specialist just to be safe.

Also, last week I ended passing out onto my bedroom floor. That really freaked out the husband because he's the one who found me on my floor. I got a really ugly bruise on my arm and my neck was hurting for about three days afterwards. However, I'm feeling better and I'm just excited I get a week off of work.

Being that this is the first year we have a house, we are hosting Christmas Eve for Sam's family, and then my family is coming over on Christmas morning. We still have cleaning to do and I have to still have to wrap all of my Christmas gifts, so that's what we'll be doing today.

Even though the last week and half has been stressful and crazy, I'm excited to see family and show them our new home. I hope everyone has a safe and happy holidays!

My 27th Years on this Earth

So it's my birthday, and I'm excited for my 27th year on this earth. For some reason I have always put expectations on different years throughout my life. For example- I always believed that Junior year of high school was going to be the best year of high school (it wasn't- Senior year was the best. However, junior year wasn't bad, just not the best.) And, for some reason I have this crazy expectation the 27 is going to be an awesome year in my life.

Looking at my life, I think things a really good right now. I have a great husband, great family, great friends, a nice home, and a steady job. There not much more a girl could ask for. So I think this year to going to be all about joy & excitement. Here is a list of things I'm excited for-

Weddings! (I have 4 weddings that I know of so far that I'll be attending.)

 
Baby! (Not me- but one of my really good friends Mike & Ashley are having their first child)

Cruise! (We have a group of 9 of us going.)

And we'll see what other exciting things this year will bring!

Happy Birthday to me! Here is to another year older and hopefully another year wiser!

Shamrock's ER Trip

So Mr. Shamrock gave us a huge scare last night. It was about 10:30pm last night and I heard him screaming. I ran downstairs to find him laying flat on his stomach not moving, just screaming. I have never seen a cat look like this so, Sam and I did what any good pet parents would do, and we rushed him to the Emergency Vet.

 (Source)

By the time we got there he had stop screaming but was almost lifeless when we brought him in. The staff rushed him in the back to start working on him right away. I had to fill out some paperwork, and wait about 15 minutes before the vet came out and saw us.

This really didn't look good for Mr. Shamrock. The vet told us Shamrock had a type of "stroke" that cuts off the blood to his back legs (the real name is saddle thrombus -if you want learn more about it click here). When they brought us in the room to see him, they had him on oxygen and sedated. He looked so sad just laying there helpless.

The vet told us with something like this it just comes on very quick, without warning, and is the prognosis wasn't good. He gave us about a 50/50 shot of him living through the night. Let me tell you even though we only have had this cat for 40 days, this news broke our hearts. After some tears, we left him in the hands of the vet and went home to wait for the call no one wants to get.

Well- that call never came. Around 1:30am we called and we got some news that he was doing better. He was awake and alert. This news calmed us enough that we were able to go to sleep. By 7:00am when we pick him up he was up, walking, and ready to go home to claim his couch.

 

  
Other then the blue arm bandage, you would never had know he was on his death bed not 8 hours earlier. I feel so lucky that he pulled through, but I'm worried that we'll have to go through this again. So we hope to take him to a vet tomorrow to see what we can do to help prevent this from happening again (if that is possible).