Here are some pictures:
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| Here's where our new house will sit...I'm standing near the front door looking in |
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| The raised up rectangle is where the garage will sit |
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| I'm standing near the garage looking down the driveway |
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| Lil Leah |
Saturday, September 25, 2010
Foundation dug for the new house
Yesterday was such a beautiful day...high in the 80's! Of course that changed today being in the 60's...Syracuse weather - you never know what you're gonna get.
Here are some pictures:
Here are some pictures:
Thursday, September 23, 2010
The start of our new house!
As you all know we've been looking for land for the past 3 years and finally was able to close on this 5.2 acre lot back on August 9th. Since then I've been working extremely hard to get all our septic design, building permits, driveway permits, water, and all the miscellaneous stuff that is required prior to breaking ground on our new house.
Today, Leah and I drove out to meet our GC, Ron, to look at how the driveway is coming and to go over a few things. The foundation for our house and the rest of the driveway should be done before the end of the week. Here are some pictures of the process thus far:
Today, Leah and I drove out to meet our GC, Ron, to look at how the driveway is coming and to go over a few things. The foundation for our house and the rest of the driveway should be done before the end of the week. Here are some pictures of the process thus far:
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| From the entrance of our new driveway |
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| Approximately a 1/4's way up the new driveway |
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| On the unfinished portion of the driveway. That is our General Contractor (GC), Ron who is helping us oversee the whole project since I can't be out there everyday making sure the subs are doing what they are suppose to be doing with Leah and Jacob in tow. Yes, Jacob is in tow as well...he's the big basketball that I carry around 24/7. |
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| On the unfinished portion of the driveway looking towards the road |
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| On the unfinished portion of the driveway looking towards where the garage entrance will eventually be. Another shot of our GC, Ron :) |
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| Standing behind where the future house will be and looking towards the road. As you can see, we are extremely far back from the road (the road is between us and the houses across the street in the distance) |
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| I admit...not the best picture but there she is...our lil Princess Leah :) |
Monday, August 16, 2010
Our beloved Cody Bear
As most of you already know, we had to put our beloved Cody to sleep on Thursday, August 12, 2010 @ 6:20 PM.
It's been extremely difficult for us to get through the day knowing that he's not with us anymore. There's just too many memories everywhere and because we took him everywhere, there's a sprinkle of him everywhere we look or go. I'm hoping that writing about him today will help the healing process.
It all started when we decided to look at possibly getting a puppy. We looked in the paper, internet, etc. and thought the best dog for us would be a lab. We came across on ad on the internet for lab/shepherd mixes that we thought were absolutely adorable and decided to call about them. When we called, the gentleman said we only have 2 left (both females and we wanted a male), however, I'm on my way back with a litter of lab/boxer mix puppies from Warren, Ohio. We decided to drive out to Rochester, NY that night, which was about an hour away to look at the brand new pups that will have just arrived to see if we were interested. I went knowing that we weren't going to pick one out that night, but Chris went in knowing that we will be driving home with one that night (I guess you could say we had different expectations LOL). Anyway, we go and it's this black guy in a very shady neighborhood where the pups are held in a closed down warehouse...it was pretty sketchy looking, but we drove all that way so we might as well go in.
We walk in and it was actually pretty darn clean and the pups were very well maintained. He had built these cages out of plexiglass with plastic plumbing tubes to reinforce the corners. I have to admit, I was pretty impressed with how well this guy was taking care of these pups. We started looking at all of them, and the guy started telling us about the story of how he got these pups that were 1/2 lab 1/2 boxer. The story goes: The original owners had a female lab and a male boxer that were show dogs, and they didn't realize their dogs had gotten together and needless to say, the owners didn't want anything to do with these pups because of the status of their 2 adult dogs.
Okay so now flash forward a little bit, Chris is looking at a dog that he liked, a very beautiful brown lab/boxer and I was looking at a yellow lab/boxer. Chris said mine was sickly looking and definitely didn't want that one and asked me to look at the one he was liking, so I go and bend down to pick up this brown pup and out of nowhere, this yellow adorable lab/boxer came running from the other side and jumped right into my arms so I picked him up and told Chris what just happened.
I put this pup on the ground and we already had a name picked out, (Chris' long time need of wanting to call his first pup) "Dakota". So I called out "Dakota come here" and what do you know...he came :) So it was a done deal, we brought little Dakota home that night and as you can imagine he was exhausted from all the car travels he's been on that day. We stopped into Wal-mart at Midnight, because that was the only store open that late at night, and picked up a cage, bed, bowls, etc. to get us through the night. Dakota was approximately 7 weeks old at that point.
The next morning, Chris and I thought we got a dud of a dog, all he did was sleep all day. We took him outside to get some fresh air and all he did was try to find some shade so he could sleep, which happened to be under the water meter HAHAHA. The name Dakota only stuck for a couple of days, then we decided it was too long and shortened it to Cody, which seems to fit him better any way.
Cody turned out to be such a wonderful dog! If you wanted to go outdoors and hike, bike, etc., he would wag his tail and couldn't wait to go on the adventure. If you wanted to just relax and watch a movie, he would just relax. There was never once a time that he wanted to do something that we didn't want to do...he would just go with the flow and was excited just being apart of our family.
Some great memories over the years:
When Cody was only about 10-12 weeks old, we took him to Letchworth State Park and hiked. He kept up with us even with his little legs. I remember specifically, we were climbing up these stairs that were really steep after looking at some beautiful waterfalls and he would just jump, grab on, and get up them as well as he could. Chris and I were so impressed with him.
We use to base our vacation trips around Cody...making sure that where ever we go, Cody could go too.
We bought a guide book of dog friendly places and one weekend decided to just drive south and see where we ended up...we ended up driving so far south that we decided to just go to NYC. We took Cody to 2 different dog parks in Manhattan...he had such a blast and so did we.
We took him camping to a very dog friendly place called Daggett Lake, where they had a specific part of the lake just for dogs to go swimming and a very nice hiking trail that was pretty steep that had a beautiful view at the top of the mountain. Cody loved hiking and swimming but absolutely hated the camping part of it LOL. We had a 2 bedroom tent so we set Cody up on one side of the tent and we had the other side, well, Cody had a different plan...he slept in between us under the covers every night. He hated camping and staying at the tent site, but LOVED the adventure part of it. He hated it so much that he would bark at a leaf blowing by our campsite and I had to hand feed him because he wouldn't eat otherwise....YES, I was crazy and loved my dog very much that I was willing to hand feed him so he wouldn't starve :)
Another trip, we took him up to Lake Placid and we would just walk the boardwalk and find pet friendly restaurants to eat at.
For one of the 4th of July weekends, We decided to go cabin camping because Chris decided that he hates tent camping so we found a nice cabin in West Virginia. Cody and Chris loved it!! We had such a great time hiking and exploring the area. We even had an opportunity to go to Washington DC to see the fireworks. I remember driving to DC on an extremely hot hot day and we get there, park. and find out that dogs are not allowed on the monument steps...as you could imagine we were extremely frustrated and disappointed after driving all that way. Well on the way back to our car, a HUGE down pour came down on the city...it was like a monsoon came through DC...it was crazy! People were trying to find shelter, Cody was scared to death. We finally found this tent that was up and huddled around Cody and each other until it passed. As soon as it did, we tried going back to the monument steps since there was just chaos at that point, and was actually able to get through security with Cody in tow....needless to say, he was the ONLY dog on the property seeing the fireworks on the monument steps...it was AWESOME! We loved it and he did too.
Some of Cody's favorite spots locally:
In the Winter time, Chris would take Cody to Oneida lake when the lake freezes over and just let Cody run and have fun on the ice...Oneida is only about 5 minutes from our house.
We would also take him hiking at various parks - Highland Forest being one of them and he absolutely LOVED going up to Fair Haven to go swimming on Lake Ontario and of course stopping to eat at Rudy's...one of our favorite places to take Cody in the Summer since we just eat outside on picnic tables with him. He use to get so excited when we would say "Do you want to go to Rudy's" he would start to get so excited to go in the car and as soon as we get close to Rudy's he would start whining to get out because he knew where we were :)
Oh there's so many memories that it would take a book to fill everything and all of his experiences. We just love him so much and can not believe how fast his life was shortened.
For those that don't already know: Cody was literally a happy 6 year old dog one day and the next day, he was like a senior citizen ready for his death bed...it was very strange and scary! Within an hour after his follow-up appointment that was scheduled for Thursday morning, he turned for the worse...he didn't eat or drink anything, his eyes were fully dilated and non responsive, and he was acting very strange with his back legs giving out. When we took him in to get checked out by the vet again, she was extremely shocked at how different Cody looked from the morning checkup and that moment. She ran a few more tests just to find out all was negative...we even got an x-ray and that came out clean. We knew at that point, it was something neurological going on with Cody and he needed help now. The only options left were, bring Cody to Cornell University for $3000-5000 just for an MRI and for a neurologist to review then if they find something and it's curable we would look at a total investment of about $10,000-15,000 at the low end and from what the doc said, Cody would not be the same dog as we know him. His quality of life will be downgraded. We decided to leave Cody at the vets office until the end of the day, which was only an hour and 1/2 later for them to just observe him. When Chris went to pick Cody up, the doc told him that Cody had a seizure while he was there and he is really suffering so needless to say, Leah and I rushed over there and realized that today was the day as the last thing we wanted for our Cody was for him to suffer and the doc even told us that she's not sure he can even see at that point as his eyes are non responsive to light or anything. Well, they brought Codster into the room where Leah, Chris, and I waited and as soon as I saw him, I knew he was gone. It was like his body was moving, but our Cody wasn't there. Leah said her goodbyes and gave him a great big hug and left the room with a technician, while Chris and I spent some time with Codster before we had to do the unthinkable. This was the hardest thing Chris and I have gone through. Anyway, when we were ready the doc came in and basically explained that if it is a neurological problem...he will act a certain way when she gives him the shot..needless to say...she was right! It was really hard for me to leave him that day knowing that we were going home to an empty house with all of his stuff there and no Cody. I guess the good news is that we know we gave Cody a great 6 years and he gave us the same. We love him so much and he'll never ever be forgotten.
It's been extremely difficult for us to get through the day knowing that he's not with us anymore. There's just too many memories everywhere and because we took him everywhere, there's a sprinkle of him everywhere we look or go. I'm hoping that writing about him today will help the healing process.
It all started when we decided to look at possibly getting a puppy. We looked in the paper, internet, etc. and thought the best dog for us would be a lab. We came across on ad on the internet for lab/shepherd mixes that we thought were absolutely adorable and decided to call about them. When we called, the gentleman said we only have 2 left (both females and we wanted a male), however, I'm on my way back with a litter of lab/boxer mix puppies from Warren, Ohio. We decided to drive out to Rochester, NY that night, which was about an hour away to look at the brand new pups that will have just arrived to see if we were interested. I went knowing that we weren't going to pick one out that night, but Chris went in knowing that we will be driving home with one that night (I guess you could say we had different expectations LOL). Anyway, we go and it's this black guy in a very shady neighborhood where the pups are held in a closed down warehouse...it was pretty sketchy looking, but we drove all that way so we might as well go in.
We walk in and it was actually pretty darn clean and the pups were very well maintained. He had built these cages out of plexiglass with plastic plumbing tubes to reinforce the corners. I have to admit, I was pretty impressed with how well this guy was taking care of these pups. We started looking at all of them, and the guy started telling us about the story of how he got these pups that were 1/2 lab 1/2 boxer. The story goes: The original owners had a female lab and a male boxer that were show dogs, and they didn't realize their dogs had gotten together and needless to say, the owners didn't want anything to do with these pups because of the status of their 2 adult dogs.
Okay so now flash forward a little bit, Chris is looking at a dog that he liked, a very beautiful brown lab/boxer and I was looking at a yellow lab/boxer. Chris said mine was sickly looking and definitely didn't want that one and asked me to look at the one he was liking, so I go and bend down to pick up this brown pup and out of nowhere, this yellow adorable lab/boxer came running from the other side and jumped right into my arms so I picked him up and told Chris what just happened.
I put this pup on the ground and we already had a name picked out, (Chris' long time need of wanting to call his first pup) "Dakota". So I called out "Dakota come here" and what do you know...he came :) So it was a done deal, we brought little Dakota home that night and as you can imagine he was exhausted from all the car travels he's been on that day. We stopped into Wal-mart at Midnight, because that was the only store open that late at night, and picked up a cage, bed, bowls, etc. to get us through the night. Dakota was approximately 7 weeks old at that point.
The next morning, Chris and I thought we got a dud of a dog, all he did was sleep all day. We took him outside to get some fresh air and all he did was try to find some shade so he could sleep, which happened to be under the water meter HAHAHA. The name Dakota only stuck for a couple of days, then we decided it was too long and shortened it to Cody, which seems to fit him better any way.
Cody turned out to be such a wonderful dog! If you wanted to go outdoors and hike, bike, etc., he would wag his tail and couldn't wait to go on the adventure. If you wanted to just relax and watch a movie, he would just relax. There was never once a time that he wanted to do something that we didn't want to do...he would just go with the flow and was excited just being apart of our family.
Some great memories over the years:
When Cody was only about 10-12 weeks old, we took him to Letchworth State Park and hiked. He kept up with us even with his little legs. I remember specifically, we were climbing up these stairs that were really steep after looking at some beautiful waterfalls and he would just jump, grab on, and get up them as well as he could. Chris and I were so impressed with him.
We use to base our vacation trips around Cody...making sure that where ever we go, Cody could go too.
We bought a guide book of dog friendly places and one weekend decided to just drive south and see where we ended up...we ended up driving so far south that we decided to just go to NYC. We took Cody to 2 different dog parks in Manhattan...he had such a blast and so did we.
We took him camping to a very dog friendly place called Daggett Lake, where they had a specific part of the lake just for dogs to go swimming and a very nice hiking trail that was pretty steep that had a beautiful view at the top of the mountain. Cody loved hiking and swimming but absolutely hated the camping part of it LOL. We had a 2 bedroom tent so we set Cody up on one side of the tent and we had the other side, well, Cody had a different plan...he slept in between us under the covers every night. He hated camping and staying at the tent site, but LOVED the adventure part of it. He hated it so much that he would bark at a leaf blowing by our campsite and I had to hand feed him because he wouldn't eat otherwise....YES, I was crazy and loved my dog very much that I was willing to hand feed him so he wouldn't starve :)
Another trip, we took him up to Lake Placid and we would just walk the boardwalk and find pet friendly restaurants to eat at.
For one of the 4th of July weekends, We decided to go cabin camping because Chris decided that he hates tent camping so we found a nice cabin in West Virginia. Cody and Chris loved it!! We had such a great time hiking and exploring the area. We even had an opportunity to go to Washington DC to see the fireworks. I remember driving to DC on an extremely hot hot day and we get there, park. and find out that dogs are not allowed on the monument steps...as you could imagine we were extremely frustrated and disappointed after driving all that way. Well on the way back to our car, a HUGE down pour came down on the city...it was like a monsoon came through DC...it was crazy! People were trying to find shelter, Cody was scared to death. We finally found this tent that was up and huddled around Cody and each other until it passed. As soon as it did, we tried going back to the monument steps since there was just chaos at that point, and was actually able to get through security with Cody in tow....needless to say, he was the ONLY dog on the property seeing the fireworks on the monument steps...it was AWESOME! We loved it and he did too.
Some of Cody's favorite spots locally:
In the Winter time, Chris would take Cody to Oneida lake when the lake freezes over and just let Cody run and have fun on the ice...Oneida is only about 5 minutes from our house.
We would also take him hiking at various parks - Highland Forest being one of them and he absolutely LOVED going up to Fair Haven to go swimming on Lake Ontario and of course stopping to eat at Rudy's...one of our favorite places to take Cody in the Summer since we just eat outside on picnic tables with him. He use to get so excited when we would say "Do you want to go to Rudy's" he would start to get so excited to go in the car and as soon as we get close to Rudy's he would start whining to get out because he knew where we were :)
Oh there's so many memories that it would take a book to fill everything and all of his experiences. We just love him so much and can not believe how fast his life was shortened.
For those that don't already know: Cody was literally a happy 6 year old dog one day and the next day, he was like a senior citizen ready for his death bed...it was very strange and scary! Within an hour after his follow-up appointment that was scheduled for Thursday morning, he turned for the worse...he didn't eat or drink anything, his eyes were fully dilated and non responsive, and he was acting very strange with his back legs giving out. When we took him in to get checked out by the vet again, she was extremely shocked at how different Cody looked from the morning checkup and that moment. She ran a few more tests just to find out all was negative...we even got an x-ray and that came out clean. We knew at that point, it was something neurological going on with Cody and he needed help now. The only options left were, bring Cody to Cornell University for $3000-5000 just for an MRI and for a neurologist to review then if they find something and it's curable we would look at a total investment of about $10,000-15,000 at the low end and from what the doc said, Cody would not be the same dog as we know him. His quality of life will be downgraded. We decided to leave Cody at the vets office until the end of the day, which was only an hour and 1/2 later for them to just observe him. When Chris went to pick Cody up, the doc told him that Cody had a seizure while he was there and he is really suffering so needless to say, Leah and I rushed over there and realized that today was the day as the last thing we wanted for our Cody was for him to suffer and the doc even told us that she's not sure he can even see at that point as his eyes are non responsive to light or anything. Well, they brought Codster into the room where Leah, Chris, and I waited and as soon as I saw him, I knew he was gone. It was like his body was moving, but our Cody wasn't there. Leah said her goodbyes and gave him a great big hug and left the room with a technician, while Chris and I spent some time with Codster before we had to do the unthinkable. This was the hardest thing Chris and I have gone through. Anyway, when we were ready the doc came in and basically explained that if it is a neurological problem...he will act a certain way when she gives him the shot..needless to say...she was right! It was really hard for me to leave him that day knowing that we were going home to an empty house with all of his stuff there and no Cody. I guess the good news is that we know we gave Cody a great 6 years and he gave us the same. We love him so much and he'll never ever be forgotten.
Rest in Peace Codster! We all miss and love you very much!!
Tuesday, August 03, 2010
It's a boy!
So it's official...we are having a boy! Chris and I never had a preference on what we wanted, but it seemed like the family wanted a boy. Chris and his cousin Jeff are the only 2 boys that are able to carry on the Grosso name for the family so you can imagine the pressure we had. Here are some sono pictures at 5 months:
It's a BOY!!
See my feet?
Here I am! Do you see me?
(Head is to the right, lying on his side, with belly sticking up and his foot on the left)
Friday, July 30, 2010
Leah's 2nd birthday party (Sunday, July 25, 2010)
Chris and I can't believe our baby girl is two! The years are just flying by and it's ridiculous! I wish there was a way to just slow down time for just a little bit.
Well this year Leah had a WordWorld theme birthday party, but unfortunately I wasn't able to get pictures of the decorations since Leah woke up about 10 minutes before her party began at 3pm so I of course was upstairs getting her ready for her big surprise. While she was napping, Chris and I got everything setup and decorated the house with balloons, streamers, WordWorld theme character stickers on the wall, etc. When Leah got downstairs she was so excited to see all the balloons and of course her favorite characters on the walls.
Leah had such a great time at her birthday party! She had about 45 people at her party and it ended up being a very nice sunny day. We had rented a fun bouncy house for the kids to play in so they were all busy having fun in there including the birthday girl (when she wasn't stolen away by people wanting to hold her LOL).
Here are some pictures that people took for us and YES, we will also be putting up some videos later :)
Well this year Leah had a WordWorld theme birthday party, but unfortunately I wasn't able to get pictures of the decorations since Leah woke up about 10 minutes before her party began at 3pm so I of course was upstairs getting her ready for her big surprise. While she was napping, Chris and I got everything setup and decorated the house with balloons, streamers, WordWorld theme character stickers on the wall, etc. When Leah got downstairs she was so excited to see all the balloons and of course her favorite characters on the walls.
Leah had such a great time at her birthday party! She had about 45 people at her party and it ended up being a very nice sunny day. We had rented a fun bouncy house for the kids to play in so they were all busy having fun in there including the birthday girl (when she wasn't stolen away by people wanting to hold her LOL).
Here are some pictures that people took for us and YES, we will also be putting up some videos later :)
Leah just before entering the fun house!
Awww....mommy & daddy's big girl :(
Pinata time!!
YES! Lexi pulled the correct ribbon, however, she wasn't able to pull hard enough so we kept going, knowing that the pinata won't open LOL
FINALLY, all were pulled off of the poor pinata and Cousin Jen came to the rescue
CAKE TIME!!
(Top layer was an "adult" cake Mojito flavor and the bottom was lemon cake with fresh fruit layers)
Leah's "smash" cake was also a fruit filling cake but was a soy-based cake and had no dairy in it
Leah is such a sharer!
Just for the record...even after eating as much cake as she could possibly fit into her belly...she STILL didn't manage to get any on her clothes...she's the cleanest cake eater I've ever met (no bib either)!
Time for PRESENTS!!
Since so many complained last year about her not opening gifts in front of everyone, we decided to have her open them this year and have everyone sit through this long and drawn out process. Hope you all enjoyed it and thanks to Lexie, Cordy, and Ella for helping Leah out. If it wasn't for them we would still be here opening gifts LOL :D
What a big girl...feeding the baby :)
The BIG FINALE was Grammy & Grandpa's gift....THE WAGON!!!
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