I can’t believe its December 29th. Merry Christmas everyone! I hope you all had a great Christmas! I sure did. I’m off from my full time job until the 3rd and I’ve been taking full advantage of my time off… and that of course means my days have been spent in my pj’s cuddled on the couch with Vespa and Leo… obviously.

I’ve got a ton of posts to throw on here, as well as a couple of weeks in my 10 week workout challenge to update you all on (I’ve been a bad blogger, and haven’t posted a week 6 or week 7 recap yet, but don’t worry, it’s coming!). But for now I’m taking full advantage of my time off and am taking a much needed break from all things social media. So, this will be my last post of 2011!! Geez, I kinda feel like I should leave you all with something so much more then just this. Well, since pictures make a post a 1000 times better, I’ll leave you with some pictures from the last few weeks. This has, in a nut shell, been my wonderful life. Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, Happy Hanukkah, and Happy Kwanzaa (and anything else I forgot!) to everyone and I’ll see you in the new year!!!

A Christmas photo shoot of my adorable niece, Julia Grace! (more pics of her to come!)

Leo and Vespa in their Santa hats

I baked a bunch of sugar cookies for Christmas, and spent something like 5 hours decorating them with royal icing. I’m a freak, I know! But they came out super cute!!!

Christmas Eve at my parents house, where we decorated the table with home made tissue paper poinsettias…

laid out said sugar cookies + a glass of milk + a letter for Santa with my nephew…

And then, after showing him that the tree was bare, and that Santa was on his way, threw all of the presents under the tree after he went to bed. My sister and little bro helped me capture this beautiful picture of my parents tree by running back and forth in front of my camera and popping my flash + shinning a flashlight along the bottom of the tree to illuminate the presents! This was shot at: f/22, 15sec, iso100 on my 35mm lens.

Happy Holidays everyone! Here’s to an amazing 2012

Sunday evening, after the bulk of the rain and wind of Hurricane Irene passed through CT, Greg and I got in the car and decided we’d try to check on the family’s beach house down in East Haven. We heard Cosey Beach Ave. was hit pretty hard, and that there was a lot of damage out there, but we never expected to find what we did…

The road was closed and the National Guard was walking up and down the street, checking out the wreckage (a.k.a. the houses that lined the coast). As we made our way through the side streets in knee high water, we could only get as close as the opposite side of Carolina Creek, but didn’t dare wade across, for fear of getting yelled at by the big men in army pants and guns strapped to their thighs… so we hung back a bit, and I used my zoom lens to grab some pics. At first glance, it looked to be mostly cosmetic damage to the house we have come to love and cherish for the last few years.

You see, Cosey Beach is more then just a house to us. It’s a place of so many great memories that we Cucinelli’s have created over the years. It’s a place we get together and have way too much delicious food to eat just because it’s Saturday. It’s a place we get together to laugh, to share in life’s good times. It’s a place to enjoy each others company, to create beautiful sewing projects, to spend time with new family members (like my beautiful niece Julia… check her out here!) and old (I’m not sayin’ who’s “old” I’m just sayin’) …

But when Greg’s oldest Brother, Chris, snuck into the house Sunday evening, he captured a few pics (before getting kicked out by the Guard) that told the true story of what happened when Irene reared her ugly head upon Cosey Beach Ave. This morning, they all trekked down to asses the damage to the house. It’s pretty bad, but the good news is that the street was rightfully evacuated before the storm hit, no one was home when the worst of it blew through, and no one, not a single soul living on Cosey Beach Ave, was hurt. That’s some serious good blessing, right there!

These next three are interiors of the neighbors houses… which are, as you can see, in considerably worse shape then ours.

Again, at least no one was hurt. Everyone on Cosey Beach ave was evacuated Saturday, and though the cleanup and rebuilding will take a long time, we can at least feel good about the fact that a few nick nacks and furniture were the only things lost to this crazy storm…