Best Part of Christmas

This Little Guy!!!

Can I tell you how much I adore this kid!!! He is seriously the funniest AND cutest person I know. He calls me and Dave, Brendadave, one word. He fake laughs all the time, it is hilarious and contagious.  

He likes to pretend he's a kitty....eating from his bowl.  

He loved Christmas this year. He ran up to the tree asking which presents were his and even asked if he could open one using his manners, please. So cute! He was such a great little helper when it was time to open gifts, passing out all the gifts to each family member.

 Uncle Dave helped him open up his big present from Grandma and Grandpa.

 He loves to dance and says "shake your booty". We danced all over the house, shaking our booties!

And he's definitely a little daredevil, using Grandma's furniture as a jungle gym. Climbing off the top of the couch to the floor. He got so excited he did it he would yell "I did it!" then run around the room giving everyone high fives, climb back up to the top of the couch, climb back down the sit and do it all over again and again and again. Hilarious!!

Did I mention I love him!! ;)

Christmas

Merry Christmas!!

I hope everyone has a very blessed, safe and happy holiday! We feel very grateful for everything we have been given and are so lucky to be able to spend the holiday with both our families.

Auntie Brenda

It's official.... I'm going to be an Auntie again!!!!

Jordan and Steph are expecting baby #2, due June 2012.

We found out Thanksgiving weekend, the day after we got back from vacation and of course are thrilled for the family. Jordan, Steph, Carter and my parents all came over later in the week for dinner to talk about our trip. Steph asked Carter if he wanted a baby sister or brother, he said he wants a baby sister. Then I asked him what mommy was having and he said a boy, lol! So he wants a sister but is getting a brother :) Carter's going to be a great big brother! 

It looks like 2012 is becoming the year for babies! Steph's sister Mollie is due with #4 in about 9 weeks and we have quite a few friends expecting as well. Hoping it rubs off and sticks!

Christmas Spirit

This is what happens when you take a vacation right before Christmas at my office...

You get your desk gift wrapped!! This is not my desk but my co-worker Tera's. And it was not my idea this time around. This is the 2nd time Tera has gotten her desk Christmas gift wrapped. The first time was the last time I worked at my present company a few years ago, Gretchen and I got the idea from The Office when we were in love with that show. Below is the first wrap job. This time around it was my boss's idea to gift wrap her desk, again!!!!  God I love my boss!

Merry Christmas!!

Hunger Games

Honestly, this is a book I probably would have never picked up on my own from the title, the look of the cover and the description. I was given The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins from a co-worker of mine who had picked it up and highly recommended it. I really had no interest in it and the book probably sat in my nightstand for 2 months or so.

Right before we left on vacation I started to read a few chapters so I brought it with to read on the beach. It is an adult science finction book about a 16-year old named Katniss Everdeen, who lives in a post-apocalyptic world in the country of Panem where North America once existed. This is where a government working in a central city called the Capitol holds power. The Hunger Games are an annual televised event where the Capitol chooses one boy and one girl aged 12 to 18 from each of 12 districts for a massive televised battle in which only one person can survive. See that doesn't even sounds interesting to me........but I coundn't put it down and ended up getting hooked!

And I of course finished it right before we went zip lining. So the entire time we are in the jeep on the bumpy mud road there, all I could think about was that anytime we are going to tip over and be stuck out in the middle of nowhere. Stranded in jungle. It was going to be just like in The Hunger Games and I would need to learn how to survive by eating plants (they have banana trees, coffee beans and cocoa), fight off wild animals (basically they just have livestock, donkeys, cows and rooster...really vicious!), and any person that tried to kidnap or kill me or whatever. Non of that happened. But this is now much I got into the book, by imagining something like it happening to me in the Dominican. LOL.

Punta Cana Part 3

My favorite part.

One of God's most beautiful masterpieces. The beaches. Ahhhhh I love it. I think I could seriously sit there on the beach looking at the view the rest of my life.

Just look at all those different shade of blue.

Breathtaking.

If the outside of the resort in Punta Cana wasn't so poor and scary to me (and I spoke fluent Spanish), I could totally move down there and wake up to this every day.

Doesn't everyone take these shots, the beach with your perfect pedicured toes?!

Do you love Dave wearing socks on the beach? Oh wait, those aren't socks, sweet tan Dave! LOL!

We spent the majority of our time lounging around the beach. Then once we got too hot and didn't want to be covered by salt water, we would make our way up to the pools. We mostly hung around one pool in particular as we made friends with two of the bartenders that worked there every day, Roberto and Rafael. Dave tried recruited both of them the first two days we were there for baseball, he offer to have us adopt them if they came to play for his team.....turned out Roberto was 33 years old and Rafael 21, LOL!!!! In Dave's defense they did look young ;)

Our Hut! We loved these thing!

We did venture off the resort grounds one day by going Zip lining!!  It was a group trip with about 15 other people in these big tour jeeps. The trip there was about 50 minutes, half of which the road was paved and the other half was pure mud up to the mountains. They don't have much for infrastructure, some paves roads, the most not. No real speed limits. A lot of speed bumps. And they love to honk their horns, we were told they honk so much because they are so excited to be driving a vehicle!  

Once we made our way up the mountains we were dropped off with another bus group to the main building. They gave us instructions and showed us the correct way to go down the zip line, put us all in our equipment and took us to a practice cable to show us how everything worked, then it was up to the first platform to start.

I was completely scared and nervous from the time we left the resort. The ride up didn't help since the unpaved mud road was so extremely bumpy I thought numerous times our vehicle would tip over. The first three cable I went across I held my breath the entire way!

But the views were pretty amazing once I stopped to finally enjoy them.

There were 12 cables to zip line across, you went one at a time across each one. Some were connected platform to platform, but some you had to climb down hike to the next and climb up....it was absolutely exhausting! I think I was sore for 3 days afterwards from pulling myself up to the cable and hanging there until on of the workers hooked and unhooked me, it was quite an upper body workout.

The zip lines were all different lengths, heights and speeds. A couple of them even went across a river that had an amazing view. Definitely an experience!!! 

The only downfall from the trip was coming home. A long story short - our transportation never showed up at the resort, had to pay for a taxi, our first flight was delayed 5 hours, missed 1st connecting flight, was never rebooked to another flight when we were suppose to be, got rebooked on a flight that left Miami in 30 minutes which involved up running our asses off to get to the gate just in time for last call, 2nd flight gets delays once on the plane, almost miss 3rd flight home, and our luggage got lost. Whew, that was a mouth full!

Sun setting on the beach

Such a fun and amazing trip!!  Overall it was a great experience, aside from the trip home.

Back to Reality

The week before we left for vacation I meet with Dr. F to discuss if there was any additional testing we can do now that I have had One. Two. Three. miscarriages.  He seemed pretty confident that we will get pregnant.  All my previous cycles since being at the RE's office have all looked great. They're regular. My progesterone is wonderful each time. And both IUI's were successful. He is positive there is nothing wrong with either of us and that there was just a defect in the embryos each time, such as a missing or extra chromosome that naturally took care of it self. But just to be sure and to be able to say it's "definitely not this", he ordered me a number of labs to get taken.

I went that Thursday first thing in the morning in hopes there would be no one there and I could get in and out in no time. Let's just say, I hate my stupid veins!! Why oh why do they have to be so small AND on top of that I need to get blood drawn practically every single week it feels like. The techs first attempt was a failure, even with the small little butterfly needle. So another tech stuck me in the other arm and missed again! Although she stayed with it and processed to move the needle around until finally, contact! Since Dr. F ordered 6 different tests for me they needed 7 small vials of blood, that with my poor planning of not eating or drinking anything for breakfast beforehand ended up having me almost pass out! I started to get light headed but thought if I just think of something else or focus on anything else I could get through it. Then my vision started to get fuzzy and even my hearing got muffled….luckily I told the techs and they had me take deep deep breaths, put my head down by my knees and had me drink orange juice…I fought through it and thankfully didn’t pass out!!

I thought by time we got back from vaca I would have had a message from Dr. F's office about my results, but I didn't. The nurse ended up calling me Monday though and said everything came back normal, although one was slightly elevated which was the one for a blood clotting disorder. Either way they had me come in to me with Dr. F again and talk about everything. Dr.F isn't concerned at all with that test as it was only tenths of a point over and I am already taking a low dose aspirin. The other test we can do is to have both Dave and I tested for genetic disorders which each test is much more expensive and I'm not sure if our insurance will cover. So we have to discuss if that is something we would want to do. Otherwise we are just going to try an increased dose of Clomid and another IUI....which if my math is correct and my body is back on track could very well be right around Christmas or New Year's. Let's hope Christmas brings more than just presents under the tree this year!! :-)

Dominican Thanksgiving Part 2

I don't even know where to begin with our trip (aside from my previous post).

Here are some pictures from around our resort. We didn't even get a chance to explore the entire resort, but we did most of it. It was just like any other Hard Rock, with lots of decor from music artists and celebrities everywhere. We were luckily that when we booked our vacation we received a $1,500 credit to be used at the resort. Dave got to enjoy the golf course they have on-site, it rained twice very briefly on the front nine and then once he was half way done with the 18th hole it down poured on him so he decided it was a day.

I, on the other hand, missed all the rain as I was in the spa for 4 hours!!  I could only use $300 toward the spa so I booked the Mini-Relax Package, which used the entire thing and I only went over by 5 bucks. The package included a 25 minute body scrub, an 80 minute full body massage and then a 25 minute facial. I was told be there an hour early in which I was giving a robe and let to an array of treatments beforehand. First the steam room which was extremely true to it's name as I could hardly even tell if anyone else was in there. Next I went to a hot and cold shower, it has five rows of sprayers that alternated from hot to cold. Then I was taken to the sauna and the ice room after than. Lastly I was taken to the mud room, it basically we like the steam room but not as steamy and I was giving a body scrub that looked a lot like mud and then another shower. I was taken to another room to wait in a comfy chair with a heated neck pillow. After my relax treatment I was led to another room with lounge chairs and a pool and refreshments to hang out in for however long I want. IT WAS AMAZING!!

  

The entire bottom floor is the Spa!

Me ;)

Billy Idol's motorcycle

Hanging with Madonna's car

Right out side our building

Dominican Flower

Our little friend we met walking out one of the doors to the resort.....just chill'in!

As with every resort, they has nightly entertainment. A few nights they had a Michael Jackson show that we had been told to definitely go see. They showed clips from his move This Is It and played music videos in the background while the dancers performed. The MJ impersonator really creepily looked like him, from the hair and the pale make-up on the face to all his dance moves. He had those down! It was really good. They did The Jackson 5, Thriller, We Are the World, Beat It and Smooth Criminal to just name a few.

Dominican Thanksgiving Part 1

The flight to Punta Cana was long, up at 4:00am, we traveled the entire day and didn't get there until about 10:00pm. We arrived when it was dark, so we literally got to wake up to paradise which was amazing. We had both checked the weather a few times beforehand which called 70-80 degrees but for rain every single day. While we waited for our transportation to gather all the other passengers it started down pouring, we thought it was a forecast of the rest of the vacation but thankfully after that it only rained a little our first two actual days and was still gorgeous. We stayed at the Hard Rock Resort and Casino Punta Cana. The resort was ridiculously huge!!  Luckily our suite was right in the middle so it was easy walking distances to the main resort, the majority of the pools, restaurants and the beach. There were little golf cart trains that came around every 15 minutes but it was an easy walk we didn't ever take them.     

Here are pictures of our room. The bathroom was huge with double sinks plus a vanity and a double shower. Each room has a hot tub, frig with soda, water, juices and Dominican beers, and then 4 liquor dispensers plus a new bottle of wine each day. The king size bed was like sleeping on fluffy clouds, so comfy!  Our room was on the first floor so we just had a walk out patio that faced the middle of the resort where big concerts or events take place.