Playing Catchup

It's about time that I post again. We've been having so much happen in such a short amount of time. I know it's not a good reason to disappear but the time has just slipped past me so easily. I've been able to "sneak" away from it all to update everyone.

Christmas Time: We had a very nice Christmas. We spent the morning just the 3 of us enjoying our traditional pancake and eggs breakfast. Then, we opened our presents. Shyla certainly made out the best out of all of us! Jake made out with a whole garage cabinet storage system with an area for him to do his work out there and organize his tools. I received a Canon SLR camera that I've been wanting for a while. I need to play around with it a little more before I'm a "pro". It also came with 2 seperate lenses, some filters, carrying case, flash, and a few other goodies.

Shyla is in LOVE with the dollies she got for Christmas. She plays with them all the time. For a few days after Christmas, when we'd get her in the morning or after naps, the first thing out of her mouth was "where baby?"

After breakfast and presents, we went to work cleaning up the house and getting dinner started before my parents came over for the day/evening. We had 2 turkeys so I figured it would be yummy to cook one for Christmas. It was so yummy! There was so much leftover turkey, my parents took home a plate of it, we had a plate of it plus a whole leg, and I made some turkey soup with all the meat that came off after I put the remains in the slow cooker over night. Mmmmm.

New Years: We were going to just stay home but then we decided it was better to get out and do something. We went to our friends place and had dinner, watched a movie, and at midnight we went outside and made some noise with poppers and other mini noise popper fire cracker thingys.

Computer update (as short a version as I can write): Around the time of all the festivities happening, our computer's hard drive crashed BIG time. Luckily it was still under warranty, so HP sent us a new hard drive and we THOUGHT we'd be able to replace the hard drive and get our important information off the old hard drive. Well, we've had several people spend many, many, many hours working on it trying to get our information and it turns out... that ALL our information is on 1 particular area of our hard drive and that's the only area we CANNOT ACCESS!

Through it all HP has been NO HELP whatsoever. They sub out to India so just understanding what someone is saying has proven hard. No one that works there can tell us how to get our information, how to do anything, or even how much they charge for a new hard drive, or what day we have to return the old drive. They've really left us out in the cold.

Needless to say, we lost all our information from the past year, backup disks don't hold our information, external hard drives won't work either. We lost journals I've been keeping, ALL our pictures for the year, and important files we need for work/tax purposes. It's been really tough. I know it could be worse, and I'm thankful that it's not, but Jake put it well when he said we had a "housesfire" on our computer. I'm amazed at how much we rely on computers nowadays. One wrong thing happens and in one quick second EVERYTHING is GONE!'

At this point in time, we having to dig through files and rebuild spreadsheets and pay sheets and get stuff together for taxes.

On a brighter note, Shyla will be 2 in 1 week and I'm just not sure where the time went. It really does feel like yesterday when we had her. I remember all too clearly when Shyla was just a few weeks old wondering how I was going to make it through the nights/days with a newborn that I have no experience taking care of. And now look... I've figured it out for 2 years now. I'm so proud of me :)