Happy New Year! And other stuff and things.

Sorry about the ginormo-pictures last time, not sure what happened. Anyway, picking back up. After a great Christmas in PA with the inlaws Seth, William, and I packed up the car and drove off into the first snow of the year for us... and promptly returned to Dad's house 3 miles later. We'd been nervous about the slick conditions heading out, but figured we'd beat the incoming storm and be fine once on the road and out from the shadow of the mountain they live on. Unfortunately, three miles down the road we crested the top of a hill... and saw flares set up along the road around a car. Going downhill on ice, we managed to avoid the first stopped car but couldn't stop properly- and there at the bottom of the hill a truck had rolled and had a cop car sitting behind them with the lights flashing. We were going pretty slow, under 10 miles an hour but on that hill there was no way we were going to get past them safely. Especially not with oncoming traffic. We wound up spinning into the embankment on our side of the road instead. It was scary, especially with William in the car but he didn't make a peep, just sat there chillin'. We've minor cosmetic damage on the bumper, but didn't get stuck and managed to turn around and get back to Dad's house without further incident.

So January! It's flown by and William just keeps getting cuter every day. I keep thinking he's going to start walking any day now, but he teases me with almost taking a step and then deciding it's too much work and crawling towards whatever I'm using as a lure.  He gets so exited about everything it's a lot of fun. I smile and he gets this huge toothy grin. I giggle and he cracks up entirely. Being a mom is so much fun sometimes. He's doing better sleeping too and will often sleep through the night completely about 25% of the time and get up only once for a diaper change about 50% of the time. He likes exploring new foods too. Oatmeal is not his favorite unless it's flavored with cinnamon or fruit or something. Even then if we take our eyes off him he'll often spit out a bite into his hand so we can figure out what it was we gave him. It's a messy process more often than not.

The roughest part this month so far is that our furnace has conked out on us. When the maintenance guy came in earlier this year to fix our pilot light he warned us that it could go out at any time but we were really hoping to make it all the way through the winter. :( We could get it repaired but it's about 20 years old and rather inefficient. One part breaks and another one will go soon thereafter sort of thing. So we're working on getting replacement estimates and will hopefully get it done soon. In the meantime we've got a bunch of space heaters. They don't do much to warm up the main living areas of the house (our huge wall-sized window in the living room doesn't help) so William and I have mostly been playing in his nursery during the day. It's small enough that the space heater gets it nice and toasty warm and it's actually baby proof so William can run around to his heart's content without the baby octagon foiling his plot to chew on the TV wires. Still. I'll be grateful once we have a warm house again. One of the options we're looking into is a geothermal system actually. They're apparently extremely efficient and it'd remove our gas bill completely and possibly cut our electric bill too by taking over water heating. Only problem is initial installation costs tend to be higher than a regular furnace. We're still waiting on the quotes, but online research said it runs the gamut from $7K to $30K depending on environment and company. If it's closer to the $7K it could be a good choice for us. There are a lot of tax incentives and grants for putting one in as well, which can help mitigate the cost.