And To Think He Made This All Happen

Day 1 of The Most Amazing Boy's life 
and the nurse gave him a fauxhawk.   

The Boy is almost one.

!???!?!?!?!!?!?!?!?

Yes, that is right.  He will be one year old on February 1st as of 12:26 am.  (January 31st was a looooonnggg day).  I can't believe an entire year has gone by.  When I think back to all that has taken place in the year and 9 months leading up to now, I am amazed I'm still alive and well.

• I got pregnant.  
• For 4 months I could only drink lemonade and Gatorade.  
• We moved out of our lovely apartment after it was water damaged and not going to be fixed.
• We moved into a new apartment in our neighborhood that had no hot water the first week of living there.  Mr. Jarcy would heat water on the stove for his pregnant wife to bathe.  
• I began a new hobby of passing out while 5 months pregnant.  
• I began drinking obscene amounts of Gatorade to keep my dangerously low blood pressure elevated and gained obscene amounts of weight as a result.  
• We had a baby.  A beautiful, wonderful, most amazing little bundle of baby ever.  For 5 days we lived in a hospital and learned about baby.  
• Mr. Jarcy got laid off of his full-time job the same week amazing baby was born.
• We battled drunken landladies (who beat each other upstairs and locked one another out routinely) over frivolous things like heat, clean air quality and hot water.  Good times were not had.
• We learned the definition of colic--sleepless days AND nights, screaming for days AND nights (the baby and me) and a dairy free diet (anything to soothe the beast who had taken over my precious baby).  
• We decided to move to L.A. in search of work and a new life.  This meant leaving ALL of our family, a vast majority of beloved friends and the only life we had ever known in the state of Illinois.    
• We began packing and purging our possessions for the second time less than a year's time.
• We placed some possessions in storage only to have most of them destroyed in a fire-proofing project gone wrong.  Everything was covered in water and fire-proofing material and we had to fight for compensation.
• I began to really lose my mind. 
• We had to put our cat to sleep.  It was fast and painless for her but fast and painful for us.
• We signed a lease on an apartment in L.A.-- 2500 miles away from home-- that we had never seen.  
• We moved out of our Chicago apartment early, put all belongings in storage (a different storage facility) and lived with family and friends for a month to escape the drunken landladies and their crazy reality.  We lived out of suitcases.   
• We flew to Philadelphia for a friends wedding.  Most fun we'd had in a loooooonnnnggg time!  
• 3 days later we moved to L.A.  
• We began the process of setting up a new home and decorating the joint in mostly baby accessories. 
• I began to regain my mind.  

BIG HEAVY SIGH...

I am so thankful we are here at this point now.  We never could have gotten here if not for the love and support of our friends and family either.  I am soooo grateful for the help we've gotten...and needed!  My god, it was like Mr. Jarcy and I were the newborns plenty of times I'm sure! If I had to do it all over again, I wouldn't change a thing...except for living in the apartment with the drunken landladies.  That part would be omitted for sure because it sucked hard core!  But the rest--as tough as it was--I would do again, colic and all.