Happy New Year 2008!

I know it's been a few days since I posted about Gracie's fever, but it turned out to be not much to tell about it. After giving her Tylenol exactly two times over the course of two days, her fever disappeared. This leads me to believe that maybe it was teething related, as she is cutting two more front teeth, but whatever caused the fever seems to have left her little body. So that's good.

Now to get caught up on some other happenings in our family. I wanted to post about getting Graice to give up the bottle and sleep in her own bed before I forget about the whole experience, but I'll save that for the next post. For the rest of this post, I want to post about our final days of the year 2007 and our New Years celebration, so as not to forget that either. So here goes.

Late last week, we weren't sure if we were going to go to Chicago or not to celebrate ringing in the new year with my brother and his family because of Gracie running a fever, but since the fever was gone by Saturday we decided to head on up to Chitown. I was surprised to find out that my father was there too, albeit pleasantly surprised, when we arrived around 2 p.m. Basically we sat around and chewed the fat, getting caught up on everyone's goings on the rest of the afternoon. The guys watched football of course, and then we headed out to Sweet Tomatoes for dinner.

On Monday, New Year's Eve,  my brother fixed us his world famous pancakes for breakfast on his brand new griddle that Santa brought him and then the girls in both families (with the exception of Gracie who stayed with her dad) headed downtown to the American Girl Doll Place for DD2 to pick out a doll for her birthday. Her 11th birthday is on the 14th of January, and I told her she could either get a doll or have a birthday party with friends, but not both because it was too expensive to do both. She chose the doll. After snagging a metered spot on the street close by, we walked to The Cheesecake Factory, foolishly thinking we'd have no problem getting a lunch table for 6 on New Year's Eve. After finding out that the wait was 40 minutes, we decided not to wait and headed out the California Pizza Kitchen in Water Tower Place. We were seated right away where our waitress took our order quickly and brought our drinks. Well, then we waited, and waited, and waited some more. After my SIL noticed that several other tables that were seated after us were getting their food, she called the waitress over to ask why our food had not come out yet. The waitress came back saying that there was some mixup with the greek pizza order, and that the children's meals would be out in 5 minutes. The part about the children's meals coming out quickly was true, but we waited and waited somemore for the pizzas. So my SIL called over the manager to tell him our situation. He went to check with the waitress, came back with her and informed that our pizza order was put in 12 minutes ago, and would be right out. Well, for our order to be put in 12 minutes ago, when we'd been sitting waiting for over 45 minutes, something just wasn't right. In the end, our waitress was not happy with us, we weren't happy with her, and we got our pizzas free along with a single dessert free. I paid for the kids' meals, and left a 10% tip, which my SIL thought was too much. She was prepared to leave without paying a tip because she felt like the waitress had lied to us by telling us there was a mixup with our order, when in reality she had just put the order in. Although I wasn't happy with the waitress either, I felt a little bit sorry for her because her section of the restaurant was very busy. At any rate we got  the AGP at around 2. My SIL ran back to put more money in the meter, and the girls and I looked around the store searching for just the right doll for DD2. If you've never been the the AGP, then this doesn't sound like such a big deal, but if you have, you'll know that there are many dolls to choose from, and for a 10 year old girl surrounded by all these choices, it's tough. In the end she wisely chose, Nelly, Samatha's friend. I say wisely because Nelly's hair is fairly short at chin length, and will stay relatively untangled. DD2 has Kaya at home, and her hair is very long causing all sort of issues with trying to keep it untangled and nice looking to the point of Kaya needing to go to the AGP hospital for a new head! DD2 also picked out a couple of outfits for Nelly using her Christmas money from Grandma to pay for them. My two nieces each got an outfit, and DD1 at 14, opted not to get anything from the store. We headed back to the suburbs at about 4, and the weather turned nasty causing us to not get back until almost 5:30. This was significant because we needed to get to a fovorite local restaurant by 6 before they closed for the holiday. The restaurant was right down the street, so that posed no problem, with the exception that it was snowing profusely causingour minivan to have trouble getting up the hill in my brother's cul-de-sac. Of course my brother didn't have any problems because he has an SUV. Anyway, we had our New Year's Eve dinner which was delicious, and was graciously paid for by my father (Thank you Dad, if you're reading this!) and headed back to my brother's for a fun evening of Scattegories and Catch Phrase. At about 11:30 p.m. we turned on the tv to watch the ball drop in Times Square at midnight, and shortly afterwards headed to bed.

Yesterday, New Year's Day, after breakfast we headed home in bad weather. There was about 6 inches of snow on the ground where we were, and the wind was blowing snow most of the way home. DH drove while the girls slept and I listened to music on my mp3. Even though we had bad weather, with the expert driving on DH we made it home safely.

The weather here in the midwest has turned bitterly cold, and this morning it was 1 degree at our house! However, I bundled up to drive into work and experienced no difficulties. And so the new year begins!