Sunday, January 16, 2011

Hello 2011!

2011.

Can you believe it? Another year!

We had a great Christmas here in NYC. Although I had to work, we made the best of it. We woke up and Matt made us eggs and bacon! Then we opened our stocking gifts, and he drove me to work! Holidays are awesome in the city, you can drive with no traffic! I went to work, and Matt and our neighbor Katina picked me up, and we headed near Union Square to eat some delicious Tapas! After dinner we headed home, Matt and I opened gifts, then Katina came over for some homemade brownies afterwards! My favorite gift from Matt was my new barefoot running shoes, among a bunch of other fun things! Matt's favorite gift from me was a blazer. It was a great Christmas, though we missed our families!

We made a pseudo last minute decision to head home to Chicago over New Years to celebrate Christmas with my family. We missed Matt's family but were glad to at least have seen his parents over Thanksgiving.

We arrived Thursday night and left Sunday evening, for a family filled, holiday filled weekend, where I also had the opportunity to see some friends, too! Not to mention that Sunday was our 2nd Anniversary! Happy Anniversary to us! Time sure does fly. We didn't do anything special other than get some delicious dessert from Wildfire! We are going to go on an anniversary trip in February though... =)



'Christmas' was fun! My family tried to reenact Christmas day. It was great. We opened gifts and I got lots of great things! =) Matt also enjoyed his loot, especially his nerf guns! We also went to see the Hart's new house! It's HUGE and they're really making it look great! It was so nice to see them. We miss having them live so close. Our cousins came up for "cousin family Christmas" and we celebrated New Years and yet another Christmas with them!



(my aunt MADE the girls an Alice and a Cinderella dress! Boy did they LOVE them.)


I also had the chance to hang out with some friends who I miss dearly! I even got to see my friend John who has been serving in the Peace Corps for around a year and a half now. He's been in Tonga, and I follow his blog quite closely! He was home for a little while and he brought a present! He gave me a bag of kava root, and a cup made of a coconut! He told me kava was mixed with water and filtered and people in Tonga have a ritual and sit around and drink it with others often. He told me a few things; it'll make you sleepy, your mouth will tingle, it'll look like mud, and it tastes bad. Awesome. haha. I brought it back to NYC expecting all of my neighbors to join in and try it with me. Only one was brave enough...Sameer. We drank it and our mouth did get numb! It did look like mud and it didn't taste tooo bad. =) Thanks John for the experience!




Nothing else is new. Matt and I are just working away! Clinic is going well, but I still find it hard to get used to working...especially in midtown, NYC. haha.

I hope all is well with you and yours and that you enjoy this post. Maybe one of my new years resolutions should be to blog more? We'll see. =)

The coolest advent calendar EVER.

Well, I dropped the ball again.... here we are in the middle of January! My how time flies!

At the end of November, we received a package from the Harts that turned out to be quite the surprise! Since we wouldn't be home for Christmas this year, they came up with the creative and fun idea that they would send a homemade advent calendar....which I will NEVER forget!



Here are some highlights! We got a bunch of homemade crafts and things including snowflakes, a string of ribbon we ended up using to hang up our Christmas cards on, and poems and drawings written by Zoe. We also got some snacks, like dark chocolate covered almonds, crackers, and hot cocoa! We also got some piano books and things too. Such a thoughtful gift that Matt and I looked forward to opening everyday from Dec 1 - Dec 25.






Thank you guys for such a thoughtful and great gift. It was really great to have being away from everyone for the holidays!!! I'm hoping to blog about the rest of the holidays soon......