Happy Holidays!

It feels like its been FOREVER since I last posted, but according to blogger it was only 10 days. Yet 10 days in the blogosphere does feel like forever, especially since I have not been posting with any sort of regularity.

I'm taking some inspiration from DrdrA and will attempt a year in review, christmas lettery type thingy.

The year started off pretty stressful with Monkey starting daycare on-campus. Our campus daycare has a very good repuation, easily in top 5 daycares of our province, but monkeys first daycare was at the other Universities daycare and its the BEST. It is the Royals Royce of the daycares for Western Canada. On top of having go from that to a Mercedes Benz / Beamer type daycare it was also a pilot project. Instead of separating kids under 18 months, 1-3 years and 3-6 years, they have them grouped 18 months - 6 years. The pros of this are obvious in that sibling can stay together, less pressure for potty training, greater ability for youngers ones to be exposed to slighty higher skill sets. This last one is really great if you have an advanced kid, they can easily move up in their play / learning abilities. The other benefit is that for kids over 3, its a better adult to kid ratio. In traditional 3-6 groupings the ratio is 1:8, whereas now its 1:6. The con is that the younger ones can get lost in the shuffle as they would traditionally be in a smaller setting with a 1;4 ratio.

I have to say that the transition was hard for a number of reasons. Monkey was used to his original place and loved the kids. He had friends and had a hard time adjusting to the new center, but this would've happened regardless in that he would be moving into a new place when he turned 3. I had a hard time adjusting to all new kids, parents, care givers. Completely different system ie I had to bring in Monkeys food and diapers and take back the dirty laundry (Old daycare provided cloth diapers, all food AND did the laundry (except toilet training laundry -- Royals Royce I tell ya!)). Then the caregivers themselves were trying to figure out how this new grouping was going to work. How to work with each other as they had not worked together previously. Plus they had to figure out all the kids personalities and the parents. There were no systems in place, it really was trial by fire.
Eventually it worked out and monkeys is happy. Although the other place was awesome and had perks like being close to home. Having monkey with me on campus gives me flexibility in terms of after work life and gets me to work sooner.

Lab life is OK. I started the year with a committee meeting and a project idea. The project has hope, but between microscopes not working, Ab's fucking up and TAing my progress has not been as fast as I would like. Our awesome Lab Manager thinks I'm doing OK but I was really hoping to have more solid data by now. Being at the preliminary stage is really really frustrating. However, I am happy to report that lab life is OK because I am not moving fast enough. Not because of lab politics or crazy PI's. My PI is pretty freaking awesome. I LOVE her. My labmates are all pretty cool too. I enjoy going to work. If I didn't have to make an awesome crab bisque* and stuffed mushroom caps for Christmas Eve dinner, I totes would've been there today.

On the personal side things are at a steady state too. Which I am happy about. Mr.SM is back to being around and we've readjusted to living with each other. We both get stressed with the sheer volume of work we have between monkey, our careers and the house, such that we sometimes forget to be affectionate or appreciative of one another. We're working on it. Carpooling is helping with that. He's down in the office working on some analysis and I'm sitting in front of the Christmas tree, enjoying our house. We were up until 12am putting together the firetruck, so its nice to chill before the craziness that will be my parents house tonight.

Monkey is well a monkey. You've all heard lots about him and I need to save up stuff for his birthday post. He is very excited about Santa Claus and Reindeer this year which is fun to watch. And I let him help with the Christmas Tree decorations. Y'all are probably not aware of my anal retentive, must have perfectly decorated with gorgeous ornaments such that my tree looks like something out of a Marth Stewart Magazine tendencies. My husband and friends, however are. They were shocked that I let monkey help. Let me tell you it was HARD. I may or may not have re-arranged things after he slept. I will never tell.

The last semester has been go go go go, with the wedding, TAing and then Christmas preparations. The 30 minutes its taken me to type this, while drinking my chai, has probably been the first time I have been able to sit and just "aahhh" for the last month. I'm not going to bother saying I going to try and post more often as that would indicate that I don't try right now. I do think about, I just don't have time to get to a computer and sit. I'm thinking I should just start twittering. What do you think dear reader? would you follow me?

Merry Christmas, Happy New Year and Season's Greetings!