Sunday, December 17, 2006

Christmas is in 6 days!

I cannot believe how fast Christmas came this year! It feels like just yesterday we were wearing shorts and spending our weekends at Great America!

This weekend we are finally all well and spent all day Saturday cleaning and straightening up the house. Today we are going to have our friends Steve and Lisa over for her birthday and to exchange gifts. And in less than a week my Mom and Randy will arrive :)

This Christmas is an exciting one - at least for me. I remember as a kid being so excited that Santa was coming. I couldn't wait to see what presents he left me under the tree. I looked forward to our big family celebrations where I could hang out with my cousins I hadn't seen since the last holiday and goof off with them (which also meant being teased a lot by our Uncle Pat). Making cookies, eating cookies, helping my mom make some yummy candy for Christmas. Decorating the tree and putting only MY ornaments on it.

As I got into my teens the magic went away. Yeah, all those things were exciting but they weren't as special as they were when I was five. Over the years the magic became less and less with each passing year. Sure, I looked forward to spending time with family, eating great food and getting new stuff...but it never really felt the same.

This year the magic is back! This is Kian's first year of understanding what Santa is all about. His eyes got wide when we bought the tree out. He has enjoyed the bit of candy I have made (completely nut free - even the chocolate!) I cannot wait to see him open pretty much all those gifts under the tree! :) This is going to be a fun Christmas for the entire family :)

Sarah's Wishlist

I have put a new link to my Wishlist on Amazon.com in the sidebar (to the right) so it can easily be found.

Saturday, December 09, 2006

EA's Christmas Party

EA’s Christmas party was last night and we all had a blast!

Kian went to the daycare onsite while we went to the party. It sounds like he had a GREAT time. I wasn’t sure how well he would do because when I take him to our class sometimes he doesn’t want to leave my side – he’s afraid. Luckily when we dropped him off there weren’t a lot of kids. He didn’t really seem to care that we left - he was too busy exploring everything.

EA goes ALL out for their parties. This campus has about 2500 employees. And all those employees can bring one guest – so you can imagine the amount of people were there. It was insane!

This year’s theme was a Vegas. We were greeted with glasses of wine and entered into rooms that barely looked like the rooms they normally are. There were amazing shrimp and calamari cocktails, sushi, egg rolls, salads, sirloin freshly cut on slices of French baguettes – honestly I can’t even tell you all of the food they had there because well – it was crazy! Jamie didn’t indulge too much as his stomach is still in recovery mode – but I sampled one of everything especially since we didn’t have dinner. We were given two drink tickets each and you could get pretty much any sort of drink you wanted. I stuck to a good ole Corona with a lime slice ;) We gave the rest of the tickets to one of Jamie’s bosses (because we saw him headed up to the bar to buy a drink – good timing on our part!)

One entire area was converted into a casino. There were roulette, blackjack and poker tables everywhere. We found a blackjack table and played there for the entire evening along with some friends of Jamie’s. It was really good to have some familiar people to hang out with :)

And what Vegas themed party would not be complete without the Rat Pack - Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, and Sammy Davis Jr. (okay, impersonators but you get the picture!) I personally was serenaded by Dean Martin – apparently I’m his one and only you hehe And Sammy made his rounds with some $25 American Express gift certificates. He came to our table and said that whoever wins the next hand gets the money. Luckily our dealer bust so ALL of us got a certificate! WOOT!

Throughout the night Jamie checked his phone about every 15 mins (mostly by my prompting LOL) to make sure we didn’t miss a call from the daycare. We were concerned about him since it was a totally foreign environment for him to be in and we dropped him off at his bedtime! So we had no idea how long we would be able to stay at the party – but since there were no calls we figured he was ok.

At about 11:45 we headed over to get Kian. He looked all cozy in his PJ bottoms with his blankie watching Cinderella - he was so happy to see us :) One of the workers asked us if we gave him a Red Bull before we brought him LOL Apparently Kian was in full force while he was there and just explored the entire time lol I think most of the kids there attend daycare there so they are used to it – with Kian he just wanted to check it all out.

So, we all had an awesome time and next year we won’t hesitate to use the EA daycare. The workers were amazing and Kian had an awesome time :) I think it was worth it to all of us :) And thankfully Jamie staying home all day yesterday and spending it in bed resting helped us in being able to go. I’m praying this weekend he will make a full recovery AND that I don’t get that nasty bug.

Wednesday, December 06, 2006

Sick Central At the Dural Household

Ever since our trip for Thanksgiving Kian has had some stomach issues and wasn’t eating much. Nothing too bad, but it had gone on for over a week. On Friday I decided that if he wasn’t better over the weekend, I was going to take him to the doctor. Well, Saturday that call came to a head Saturday morning with after Kian had his milk – he had a bad case of the stomach flu.

This last weekend we had a lot of plans of things to get done around the house which of course went out the window and piled into this coming weekend. Kian wasn’t able to keep anything down until Sunday morning – we all had a sleepless night on Saturday. Sunday all Kian wanted to do was just cuddle with me and watch “shows” so we watched whatever he wanted and he munched on saltines and sipped watered down apple juice.

The countdown began for me or Jamie to get sick. Jamie is the first casualty. He stayed home sick from work today – this is not something he does unless he’s pretty bad off. Last night when he got home he went straight to bed and has been there pretty much ever since.

I am hoping and praying that somehow I avoid this virus. The EA Christmas party is on Friday and we have already paid for Kian’s spot in the EA daycare for the evening. This is literally the only time that me and Jamie get to go out during the year and thankfully we have the EA daycare to watch him or we wouldn’t get able to do that either.

So, if you are the praying kind say a little prayer for us – that we are all healthy so we can all enjoy a wonderful evening on Friday night.