In the Beginning

Welcome Welcome everyone. First let me introduce ourselves for those who may not yet know our family well. I am Char, about to turn 29 ...and will stop celebrating birthdays after this one. I am married to Canio (said like Connie-O) who is 34. And we have one ADORABLE little girl who is almost 14 months old, Emily. We live in a small town, Swoyersville, PA. And other than the weather and some crabby people in the NE, we love our neighborhood. Canio is in advertising sales for a local PBS station. His new job is going very good and he likes it much better than his previous station. His co-workers are great and we really feel like we made a good decision when he switched jobs. I am working at the Osterhout free library part time and for the most part like it as well. Emily is busy learning to walk. She still will not let go of our hands, but now we are working on her just holding onto ONE hand in hopes of encouraging her to let go soon. Her vocabulary is growing very quickly. She can now mimic a lot of what we say as well. She says cat, mom, dadad, ball, cup, fluff (yeah...we have NO clue why she says this), and duck. She tries to say balloon. She loves reading and pointing out several of the pictures when we ask her things like... "Where's the apple?" We are still battling sleep problems, but for 3 nights she has slept through the night, even though she hasnt fallen asleep until 10:30. Her laugh is absolutely contagious.

We will be posting more pictures of her so keep checking back. We will try to update this by every Sunday.

NEW YEARS We had a nice New Years - we made a ham and our neighbor came over for dinner. Then we played some board games and finished off the night with a movie and watching the ball drop in NYC. It was both triumphant and sad to see Dick Clark back. What a story of recovery for this iconic personality to make it back regardless of any lingering affects, but also so sad to see a man who no one thought would ever get old, struggle to say simple words. But hats off to him. We had to fix our car, get new tires, fix a toilet, and buy a new computer because our old one crashed all within 2 days. But when you hear about the terrible miners in WVA you realize what a blessing it is to have these small insignificant problems.

CHRISTMAS We had a nice Christmas. Emily got a lot of great gifts. Her favorites are a Shout Elmo from Santa, a singing frog from our neighbor, stacking cups from Santa, and a little people/leggo farm that makes animal noises from Mommy and Daddy. Canio's big gift-- XM Radio is all he can talk about. Look out world. He has a new toy! I started researching the Costanzo family line and made a pretty interesting gift for Canio's dad. I have gotten back to Canio's Great-Grandfather in just about 2 weeks worth of work (thanks to my sister Jen who is a geneology guru). If you're interested in that sort of stuff, let me recommend http://www.rootsweb.com or a pay site http://www.ancestory.com. The picture below is a 4 generation photo taken on Christmas eve. It is my little girl, Canio, his dad (Phil) and his mother Verna (aka Baba).