So here we are, another year gone by. I can’t believe it’s New Years Eve 2013 already. I feel like I only just finished writing up about 2012. Damn. I hope the first six months of 2014 go by just as quickly as all of 2013, hehe.
While 2013 has brought me the blessing of my pregnancy, I can’t say that it’s been the best year ever. The first half of it continued the horribleness of 2012, culminating with the death of my grandfather from cancer. The second half picked up and it ended quite nicely. I hope this means that 2014 is going to be just as awesome as 2010 and 2011 were. I’m ready for less crying and more joy. Thanks to everyone who read this blog all year. I hope I was able to entertain and keep you interested. Happy New Year! See ya in 2014!
January – I rang in 2013 with Jay and Clif at our old apartment. We had plans to be “out” for New Years, but the boys got bored and wanted to go back home and watch movies. It was still a fun night. In January, I started the 642 Things To Write About Challenge that I aimed to do every week. 2013 was the year of Pinterest for me; I tried making fun new things including Taco Muffins (yum) and Taco Raviolis (not so yum). My old faithful couch bit the bullet (much to Jay’s delight), so we invested in some new furniture for our dining area and living room. I still miss that old Papasan chair, though…
February – February was a busy month. I celebrated my 29th birthday, had an odd string of lost and found, and visited family in California! We spent a week in California, splitting our time between San Diego and Los Angeles County. That trip was a lot of fun and after a very stressful 2012 and January 2013 (I worked non-freaking-stop in January and started to lose my mind a bit), it was just the thing we needed to regroup. Back in February, Jay and I saw the movie Zero Dark Thirty, and I wrote this big, researched blog post about it, comparing real life to movie life. I know this has nothing to do with my year itself, but while writing that post, I realized that research writing really is my favorite kind of writing. I love to learn and then re-tell. In 2014, I want to do more posts like that, if for no one else’s interest but my own, lol. Moving on…
March – My good mood from February wasn’t long-lasted. March 2013 marked the one year anniversary of the last time things were “normal” in my family difficult month and I was sad for a lot of it. Although we didn’t get very good news at all in mid-March, we still vowed to keep fighting in whatever way we could. We did do a lot of things together to keep up the spirits, including an awesome day trip to a vineyard, which was a ton of fun. At the end of March, Jay turned 28 and we celebrated with another fun night out together.
April – April was the month of the 5K. Jay ran his very first 5K at the beginning of April. We did the Color Mania 5K, a variation of the popular “color runs” that took the racing world by storm last year. The second weekend in April, Jay and Jack held their annual marathon charity podcast, working with Autism Speaks and participating in a 5K event that they were holding locally. That was also a ton of fun. I love every year when everyone comes to Raleigh for the marathon podcast. It’s one of my favorite weekends of the year. On April 29, we had our second wedding anniversary. I can’t believe it’s been almost three years now.
May – Oh, May. I did a lot of arts & crafts in May, my favorites being the different sets of coasters that I made, including ones as a gift for my MIL for Mother’s Day with pictures from our Disney trip in 2012, ones for my sisters made out of book pages (Harry Potter & The Fellowship of the Ring), and ones made using beer caps from the Autism Speaks weekend. My sisters & I also combined forces to make handwritten tea towels for my mom for Mother’s Day. My SIL graduated from college in the beginning of May and I went home for Mother’s Day, which was an incredibly eye-opening and emotional visit for me. Arrested Development came back! But the bad news in May outweighed everything else. On May 23, we learned that the cancer spread even further. I still remember the exact spot in the exact aisle that I was standing in in Target when my mom told me and how devastated I felt hearing it.
June – 15 months of pain and fighting ended in June, when my beloved Grandpa lost his battle with cancer on June 12. Jay and I drove up to visit him overnight on June 6. We weren’t even supposed to go that weekend. Originally, we were going to drop everything and drive up there over Memorial Day weekend, but my mom told us to wait because they were going to do a procedure the Tuesday after Memorial Day and he needed to get his white blood cell count under control before that. If we hadn’t changed our plans, I wouldn’t have been there for the final few days. It was a rough week. A very, rough week. But in the end, we were all together for one last meal as a family. I will always have faith in God’s plan because of the gift he gave me of being able to be with my family during our last moments together as a full family. Not all of June was bad. DOMA & Proposition 8 were overturned. We saw Jason Bonham’s The Led Zeppelin Experience and Heart in Raleigh at the end of June.
July – We did a lot of really fun things in July, starting with a brewery tour and a trip back home to Long Island in the first week of July. We originally had a family vacation planned for that week, but it was canceled after my grandpa’s death, so instead, we hung around LI with each other locally. My grandma took us all to a casino and out to dinner on the water. It was a lovely way for us to start to heal, but healing takes a long time. Also in July, the world discovered that J.K. Rowling had a new novel out under a pseudonym. We finished the month with our annual trip to San Diego Comic-Con and had an adventure for our 6th dating anniversary. [SDCC: Tues/Wed, Thurs, Fri, Sat & Sun.] After a horrible first half of the year, July was a really great month.
August – In August, my parents and sisters came to Raleigh for a visit. The following weekend, I went to Naples, NY for a reunion with some of my best girl friends. Oh yeah and we somehow without intending to found a house to buy in August. Biggest surprise of the year.
September – Our last month in our faithful old apartment. I loved that apartment. We closed on our new home mid-September and moved out at the end of the month. It was pretty emotional for me to say goodbye. In our final days there, I got crafty again (I still haven’t posted all of the stuff I made during that time period…)
October – Jay’s first 10K! We headed back home to New York at the start of October to run in the Rock ‘n’ Roll Brooklyn 10K with my dad, sisters, and some of our podcasting friends. It was a great weekend. My mom sent us back home with a full carload of stuff of mine from childhood. Woo, was it a lot to go through! Oh yeah, and on October 7, I found out I was pregnant with our first child.
November – On November 2, Jay married two of his friends/co-workers from Apple! It was a gorgeous day in Raleigh and he did a wonderful job. I was so proud. We put a lot of hard work into the new house during October and November and it really started to look like the home we wanted it to. In the middle of the month, we went to the PNC Arena to see Justin Timberlake’s awesome tour, The 20/20 Experience. Ah-mazing. I paid a long overdue ode to Zoe. We stayed in Raleigh for Thanksgiving this year.
December – Ah, December. A nice end to a rough start of the year. Filled with Christmas parties (I started that post but never finished it! I may go back and post-date it when I finish it) and BABY!!! On December 8, we shared with the world that we are expecting Baby G in June 2014 and followed it up with some more info the following week. On December 12, I acknowledged the six month anniversary of Grandpa’s passing. This was one of my favorite 642 Things to Write About topics. I got crafty with another Harry Potter-themed craft. On December 21, we learned that Baby G is going to be a boy!!!! And of course, we celebrated Christmas in Raleigh before heading to New York for New Years.
