Merry Chirstmas to All!!!!

We wanted to wish everyone a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year! We hope everyone has a great Christmas and a fantastic 2010!!!!!!!

A Magical Year!

Well, today marks our 1 year anniversary! Wow.. time just flies.. it feels like yesterday that we were sending out wedding invitations... Sheila and I had some plans for our 1 year, but with all the traveling we have done in the last month with family and weddings, we decided to take it easy and stay local. We decided to go do one of the things we enjoy the most, shopping at IKEA. So we strolled around the mega-store looking at all the fun stuff. Made a few purchases, a pink hippo for little sophie and some fabric to re-cover our ottoman. Then we went out for dinner, we went to La Fontana in downtown Nyack. This is the other place we had considered doing our reception at because of their tasty food and beautiful hudson river view. Sheila with a delicious and I mean DEL-I-CIOUS!!!!! pasta dish and myself with a double stack of pork chops, which i was unable to finish... it was a fun, romantic candle lit dinner. Sheila handed me a gift bag, with a white mug that had "#1 hubby" written in sharpie marker all over it... filled with 4 Reese's BigCup. What I didn't notice and Sheila had to point out to me a few minutes later where the little white pieces of paper taped to the bottom of each peanut butter cup. So I opened the first one and find a pair of airplane seat numbers, then a flight number, time and date, and on the last one I discovered we are going to Tampa!! Later that evening we had plans to go to the movies as we were on a classic "dinner and a movie" date.. however it was getting late so we decided to go from the 42 foot screen at the theatres to the 42 inch tv in our living room. And we watched "Confessions of a Shopaholic" and called it a night.

A new pair of Soccer Cleats!

Being Argentine Independence Day... I treated myself to a classic Argentine gift.... soccer cleats... well i bought them almost two weeks ago, but forgot them upstate at the McCaffrey's house. I'm just posting them on Independence Day! 9 de Julio!!!!

So my reason for posting this post in particular is not only to let you know about our life but also to see how long my cleats last... As of lately, i've been doing pretty good (now that i've stopped playing soccer everyday and switched to a more "older" person schedule of 3 times a week), my cleats have gone from a 6 month life span to TWO YEARS!!!! So when my cleats finally bust open again like my last pair I can go back and see how long they lasted!

For those of you soccer enthusiasts... they are diadora cleats.. made out of fine kangaroo leather. And that's about all i know about them... I found them at Dick's Sporting Goods.. 60% off.. from $99.99 to $39.99... can't get a much better deal that that!

Spiegels visit the Grames in NYC!

After the Spiegel's(a.k.a Justin, Crystal and Sophie) visited with Justin's and Crystal's family in upstate NY, they made their trip back down to Tampa, FL; but first stopped to see the McGrames' here in NYC for the 4th of July weekend.

They arrived Thursday evening and we went out for some real NY pizza...then walked around downtown Nyack and enjoyed the nice sunny weather...we went home to play with Sophie before it was her bedtime...

Friday we went into the city and met up with our friends Billy and Stacey who were on holiday in NYC for the 4th, had some lunch with them in Greenwich Village and then chauffered Sophie around the city while she napped. We enjoyed some shopping at Whole Foods and then jumped on the Staten Island ferry for a free tour of the NYC. We walked around Battery Park and bartered for some Dolce&Gabana purses for Sheila and Crystal.. The ladies did very well... 2 purses for $15 each. Not too shabby... especially when they started out at $45 each.

On Saturday we were so tired from walking around New York City the previous day that we pretty much hung around the apartment and relaxed. We took a mid-day nap and then the ladies went out to shop for some nice jewelry pieces for their jewelry making hobby. Justin and David babysat Sophie and played some video games... We meant to go swimming but the weather had other plans for us... so we just watched some TV, some fireworks and enjoyed some time together.

Later that night, or early next morning I should say came time for them to head out... 3 a.m. came around they pulled out to make their long voyage from NYC to Tampa. They arrived safely by 9:30pm... that's only 19 hours later... and I heard Justin drove practically the entire way. Amazing. We had a blast with them and we were REALLY REALLY sad to see the 3 of them go.

The Coke Can Fiasco

I have a tendency recently to forget about stuff... maybe i should start taking my ginko biloba pills already.... anyway, to give you a little background story... around Christmas time when we were visiting some friends in Florida, they put a drink in the freezer to cool it off for me... and Billy said, "I put this in here for you, so do forget about it!" Well the night went on and soon it was time to leave... halfway back to Justin and Crystal's house we get a phone call from Billy sarcastically asking if we forgot something... none of us thought we left anything there until he mentioned the Soda in the freezer... "ooops" I said. So Billy, being the nice guy he is, didn't make a big deal about it and cleaned it up. Now I just hear the occassional teasing every now and then.

Months later.... almost 6 months later to the day... we were up in Rochester for Sarah's Wedding (Sheila's longtime childhood friend) and also visiting Sheila's family and Justin/Crystal and Sophie who flew up for some quality family time... So it was getting pretty hot out and no cold drinks... so before I started getting ready for Sarah's wedding I put a Coke in the Freezer and figured I would have a nice cold drink to take with me right before I went to the wedding. So after an hour of sitting around and 10 min. of getting ready for the wedding.. I rushed out... Didn't even think about the Coke... never crossed my mind until that night when we pulled into the driveway and Justin came out to meet us and with a big smile asked: "did you forget something?"

Then a little red flashing Coke sign went off in my head... "oops!" (& to quote a classic tv character: "Did I do thaaaat?") So they left it for me to clean up and I decided to take pictures and blog about it....

Everyday is a Rainy Day in NY!

Well if you live in the northeast, you know that we've been plagued by a monsoon for the last month... with very little sunshine and enough rain to drive Noah to the brink of madness... o.k. maybe not that bad... but we've gotten a lot of rain. At work we play soccer every Monday, Wednesday and Friday during lunch for about 1 hour and 1/2. sometimes 2 when the weather is nice.. They encourage us to get out of the office and those excel spreadsheet.... well our field has basically been drenched to the point where it no longer wants to soak up water...So for the last few weeks its been rather... muddy. So after this last weekends rain showers, we knew we were in for a nice drizzly, mud splashing, slip n' slide type game, and wouldn't you know my cleat pretty much decided it had seen enough water as well and decided to jump ship... fortunately we have showers here at work just for this reason...

So that's my little story for the day... soon we will be heading upstate to rochester where one of Sheila's best friends is getting married and older sister Crystal and baby Sophie are visiting the family so we will be spending some time with the before they come visit us on the 4th of July as they make their way back to Tampa, FL.

The Fireplace Project

One of the many things we enjoy is collecting items people will be throwing out and fixing them up, making them ours.... One man's trash is another man's treasure right... so Sheila's work was throwing out this feax fireplace they used in an display... so we snagged it, painted it a nice gray color(it used to be this ugly out-dated birchy wood color).

Picked up some candle holders and next thing you know we have a nice cozy feeling to our apartment... Sorry, i forgot to take some before pictures... but I promise one day I'll take some pictures or give you a guided video tour of our apt. since its been almost a year now that we've lived there..

A New Hobby for the McGrames'

Sheila is a very creative woman and like her dad she likes to keep herself busy with projects... so why not mix her love of jewelry and projects together. Our friend Rachel and Myself had to be the models for the new jewelry line... So if you see some scruff in there, its not a hairy woman!

Sheila has started to create jewelry for herself and friends. David has helped out a bit as well, creating a bracelet and earrings... But Sheila has done most of the work in the design and creativity of the items... One friend liked her creations so much she offered to have Sheila's jewelry displayed/sold at a beauty salon where she works.

So here are some pictures of her creations so far... nothings for sale yet... but you can submit a request if you want...Sheila does it more out of enjoyment than to try and sell them... but if you have an idea or a picture, email us at mcgrames@gmail.com and i'll submit an order for you! =0)

Our New Toy

Well a few months ago a co-worker in a different dept. went home to Europe for Christmas and ended up with a new job, not returning to the U.S. (His research grant expired in May, so he had to look for a new job anyway), he recently came back to the U.S. for the long weekend to pack up, get rid/sell his belongings and take what he could back to Europe with him. One thing we always discussed besides soccer was video games, and so he said he had a PS3 he was planning on getting rid whenever he came to pack his stuff up, so naturally, being the geeky-techy gamer I am, i showed interest. I brought it up with Sheila and she told me to sell some stuff on eBay and we might be able to buy it from him... scraped up a bunch of old items i no longer used and made some quick money... One day, I see my office door slightly open and a PS3 box starts sliding through the door... i started laughing, we caught up a bit... and found out he just wanted $100 for it, since he had purchased it for his son who decided he wanted to keep the Xbox360 they had purchased as well, He was looking to just get rid of the console. The PS3 doubles as a Blu-Ray player, so at $100 that is way cheaper than any Blu-Ray player on the market so i gladly relieved him of his PS3 and now its our new toy/Blu-Ray player.. Fun times....

Memorial Day "Camping" weekend.

Well we decided to go camping on Memorial Day weekend, our friend Rachel was born on May 25th and she is a big outdoorsy type person but by the time we got our act together and went to reserve a camp site, they were all booked... the only thing left was a cabin, in POOR condition. Literally said that on the website when we went to book the camp site. Here is Tina and her husband Joe and birthday girl Rachel, who happened to have a cold and fever that weekend. Nice way to spend your birthday, but it was a nice time. Despite still being a little cold and most of the entertainment being closed since the state park had just opened that weekend, no canoes, kayaks, innertubes or row boats available. I can't seem to find the majority of the pictures(which there weren't too many) but once I do, i'll add a bunch to the bottom..

Easter Egg Hunt

Well going back to a childhood tradition for most of us, we decided to have an Easter Egg hunt with a few of our friends. So on our wednesday night "LOST NIGHT" where Josh Dyke, Rachel DeMaggio and us get together, eat dinner and watch ABC's LOST. So before we ate dinner and watched LOST, Sheila went outside our apartment and hid 44 easter eggs(of which we only found 42, so some lucky squirrel is gonna have some chocolate and peanut butter candy for the spring. So here are some of our pictures...

Here is Josh who incurred a 10 second penalty for going outside while Sheila was hiding the eggs...

Riding in Style...

One of our weekends we decided to get away, and head up to Sheila's home in Livonia,NY(up by Rochester). Sheila was part of one of her friend Sara's bridal Shower, and David got some time with the four wheelers and the backhoe. It was a fun weekend overall, playing games with the family, riding around on the wheelers and workin' in the field, pulling scrap metal, junk and cleaning out the property... We cleared a pathway at one end of the field, where we were cleaning all the scrap metal and made a tiny, tiny jump... maybe in the future Mr. McCaffrey will create a big jump that we can use. So above is the video of me riding through the path... One of the our favorite video games on the Nintendo Wii is Raving Rabbids, has a bunch of different mini games but our favorite is the dancing mini-game so here is Ashley, Andy and Sheila playing the game in the basement, late at night after everyone went to bed. That was fun short weekend upstate with the McCaffrey's.( it doesn't seem to work, so check back later this week and I'll have it fixed.)

Extreme Porch Makeover Edition

We use to have a small empty porch, that we were hardly ever able to enjoy last summer when we first moved in, so this weekend we kicked it into high gear and decided to make it a little more inviting. This is our porch before... Then we decided to take a trip to one of our favorite stores... IKEA! and along with the visit comes new furniture and a start at decorations for our new "mood" porch. Unfortunately due to our condo regulations, no gas or charcoal grills of any kind...Only electric... yuck!

So piece by piece we started putting the furniture set together... Came together pretty quickly, a couple few issues with those pesky IKEA screws but all in all we are happy.... So now feel free to look down and view our new porch... a little crammed...but we like being close to our friends!

This is our night set up... a little more space, a little more conversation room.

Lucky The Wonder Dog

Well with Little Sophie growing up and getting all the attention, I thought I would share the love of my other little spiegel... Lucky, the jack russell terrier. It's hard to keep her still...

Normally when we've been in Florida i've been taking Lucky out for walks every day, or just about depending on our schedule... and she likes running too... so much i had to take the bike out one day since I couldn't even keep up with her...

This is lucky's favorite toy, other than her bones. She will bite onto this rope and not let go... she has a strong bite, most of the time you can even pick her up along with the rope... then she will run off with the rope and protect it at all costs... or at least until she is bored again and she brings the rope back to you to play..

And that's Lucky, Justin and Crystal's Wonder Dog...

Florida Vacation Part 2: Ben's Wedding

Ben's wedding took place on Thursday March 26th at 4pm at the First Christian Church of Kissimmee. It was a beautiful ceremony, with Sheila and I as the Matron of Honor and Best Man. Ethan was the ring bearer and did an excellent job walking down the isle with ring pillow. After a beautiful ceremony and some family pictures we headed to the reception hall in st.cloud, FL. It was a beautiful ballroom looking out over a marina and rather large lake. The happy couple went out and took a bunch of pictures by the lake with the florida sunset in the background. Meanwhile Ethan, Sheila and I... and the rest of the families... partied it up in the reception hall to some groovy tunes.

We also decorated the awesome Cadillac STS, Ben rented as their getaway car. We stitched some extra large undies and stuffed them with some pillow stuffing and strapped them to the back of the car... wrote some stuff on the car windows and filled it up with yellow and blue balloons(their colors). All in all it was a beautiful wedding on a perfect sunny day. Unfortunately sheila and I forgot to charge the battery to our camera.... but don't worry, i stole some pictures from Dad and Uncle Steve before we left....so here are some of them. Click on the picture below to be taken to a few of the pictures i uploaded.

I promise once I receive the pictures from the photographer I will post a few family ones that everyone can download for those of you who had requested a family picture.

Part 1 of our Florida Vacation

Thanks to our friends Billy and Muffin we were able to switch our flight and come down a weekend before to spend some time with them and our niece Sophia, who is a lot more alert and smiley than when we first saw... the first two days of her life... We've spent a couple days with Sophie now and are enjoying every minute of it.

We decided one night to give Justin and Crystal a break and were able to experience parent hood first hand... and we quickly decided we were not ready... we'd rather spoil our niece(Sophie) and nephew(Ethan). We stayed up till about 1am feeding her and rocking her till she fell asleep, then about 3 hours later in the middle of the night, Sheila heard Sophie crying through the monitor and told me to go check on her.... so I said yes... but never got up...(I'm too used to the snooze alarm).. 10 minutes later, sheila said "David, get up! go change Sophia's diaper". So in the middle of the night, without my glasses on or contacts in I changed my first diaper... couldn't really tell what i was doing... but it seemed to work out, and I didn't even put the diaper on backwards. Sheila prepared a bottle and fed her and rocked her to sleep again... then we both crashed the rest of the night and Crystal was kind enough to do the early morning shift(my guess, because neither one of us was waking to Sophie's crying.) This is when we usually like holding sophie, she's just in her own tiny bubble...

The next day we went to the mall to do some shopping and brought little sophie along, she really seems to enjoy car rides, especially if she has a clean diaper and full tummy... I got to sit in the back seat with her and snap some pretty funny pictures of her... she is a cutie!

This is Sophie after our shopping spree, already modeling her new hat!

My favorite relative is...

On Sophie's 2 month birthday, (which we all know is when babies come to their senses, they become more alert and start seeing and even thinking clearer, sometimes even given the rare ability to write and make very smart statements) Little adorable Sophie has made a major announcement! I'm sure by looking at the picture you can see she has declared that her Uncle David is her favorite relative. This comes as no surprise to anyone, except to maybe her Aunt Sheila who was shocked and a little perturbed by the bold, yet true declaration. Since this news, Aunt Sheila has been fighting to take over the "favorite relative" title by going on a shopping spree for little Sophie Lola... cute tops, and pants won't buy out little Sophie's pure heart! (besides I've made a few purchases just incase she plans on changing her mind.)

Now I know she is still young and succeptible to temptations and bribes from other relatives(Sheila, Andy, Ash...and of course grandpa and grandma.) but let it be known that I, David, was declared first on Sophie's favorite relative list and therefor will always be at the top of the list.

The Daily Sophie Music Video

> Sometimes its hard to get motivated to do work, especially on a friday afternoon with only an hour until clockout... but its very easy on Mac's to find ways to entertain yourself, so I decided to create our niece Sophie's first music video... We heard this song on new years eve this year while in Tampa, never heard of the band and we(spiegels & grames') all thought it was such a weird song but it was stuck in our heads the entire vacation...thus has become Sophie's theme song....so with the daily Sophie pictures we've been receiving from her mommy and daddy I put together a music video to sophie, sophie-lola...sophie-lolooloooolalo? ..... to Sophia.

Sophia Lola!

One of the reasons why we came to Florida for Christmas, besides braving the harsh winter was to hopefully see our new niece Sophie! Justin and Crystal Speigel were expecting their first baby anytime in early Jan 2009. We tried all Christmas long to try and get her to come out, we gave Crystal foot massages, after foot massages, massaged the belly, pushed on the belly... but Sophie just wouldn't leave her mommy...granted she wasn't due for another week and half... we worked the first week of '09 "remotely" from FL so we could hopefully see her... and she made us wait...all the way until the day before we were to leave to come out!... BUT WE WERE HAPPY SHE CAME!

On Jan 9, 2009 around 5pmish Sophie finally arrived. We got to see the proud daddy come downstairs and greet us with a HUGE smile on his face... he even brought the video camera down with some images of her so we could see her while we waited. She is adorable.(as you can see in the pics) I dont remember her weight or height, but then again.. we're just her aunt and uncle, our job is to spoil the kid and then leave for a while, come back...spoil them some more and then leave. It's Fun. Due to inclemate weather back in NY we were able to reschedule our flight and spend a couple days at the house with Sophie and the extremely happy and very sleepy mommy and daddy!

Christmas 08!

For Christmas we decided to come to Florida to see our families since one side of the family lives in Tampa and the other side lives in Orlando...and they are only about an hour away it works out great...since Mom and Dad Grames are down here(while on furlough) and little baby Sophie is due any day now... We've spent most of our days driving around, doing a little shopping, some for us... but mostly Aunt Sheila for baby Sophie...and of course at David's demands we stopped at some of our favorite fast food that we don't have in NY (Sonic & Chic-fil-a) YUM!

But lets go back about a week, when we first got here we came to TAMPA and stayed with Justin and Crystal for Christmas. We went over to Billy and Muffins(Stacey) house(& Hunter) for Christmas Eve dinner which was awesome! Billy cooked up some nice juicy fillets in the green tank while Justin and David played Nintendo Wii all night.

Once we came home it was about 10 min. till Christmas so we decided to open up all our presents then so we could sleep-in in the morning. The First present I opened up was from Sheila(which we agreed to not get each other presents this year since we bought our tv, bought furniture,....paid for a wedding) but Sheila was able, maybe even for the first time ever, to surprise me. So I opened it up and it was a Nintendo WII!!!! HOW FUN!!!! after that I dont remember much else of the night.

On Christmas day we got up and had a yummy breakfast, pancakes, fresh fruits, eggs...all home made by the ladies. It was good, opened up some stocking presents with some very cool gifts. For lunch we went to the Speigels house(Justin's Parents) about half an hour away. Had some delicious turkey and opened some more presents...

We then drove to Orlando to see David's side of the family, had a little Christmas time there, We stayed there until new years ever visiting with family and doing some shopping and celebrating David's 27th Birthday. Later in January we went to the beach! It was warm and sunny, although the water was really cold.

all in all, it was an awesome Christmas, if only Sophie would just come out and play!