October Updates

Wow, I feel like a lot is going on lately, so I'll try to catch up. We spent last weekend in Tennessee with Chris' mom and step dad. It was actually quite a nice trip. Chris and I rented an adorable cabin up near Gatlinburg on Friday night and quite enjoyed some peace and quiet away from our precocious little one and her grandparents were thrilled to get some one on one time with Meredith. We stopped through High Point on the way home and saw Chris grandparents, dad and step-mom. We didn't get home until after 9:00 pm on Sunday, so it was a really long day, but we managed to see all of the Elliott contingent in one weekend!

We were all exhausted to start a long week, but Monday turned into a fabulous day at work. I had checked our Biogen stock online when I got home Sunday night and saw that it had skyrocketed in post-market trading on Friday. I had been out of the office on Friday and missed an email from our CEO telling us that the board has approved shopping the company around for purchase. This rumor has been going around for awhile and now it appears to be coming to fruition. So, based on this news our stock went through the roof to a 5 year high. I had a bunch of stock options that I didn't have much hope would ever make me any money and as a matter of fact, quite a few of them were so far under water that I had basically written them off. So, I jumped on it and set up my options to sell on Monday and I ended up doing quite well. It is like an answer to our prayers because we have been working so hard to get ourselves out of debt and this will get us a lot closer. The taxes on the sale makes me physically ill, but I figure that it is money we never expected to get, so I am thrilled about it. The word on the street and the net is that Merck may be a frontrunner right now, but supposedly everyone from J&J to GSK have perused the option of buying us. The sale may not even happen at all because a lot of analysts are saying we are already overpriced, so we'll see. If we do get bought out, our stock should go up even more and I'm surely going to dump even more stock!! Yippee!

The day after the good news about the stock, Chris got into a car accident and really messed up our Endeavor. He rear-ended a little Nissan pickup truck and their car fortunately had very little damage and he was fine, but our car is not. Thankfully, he didn't get a ticket, but we now have to pay our $500 deductible and our insurance will go up :( The silver lining is that when he sat down with our agent to see what the increase will be, they discovered that we were coded as Durham City & County, but we are really Raleigh City and Durham County, which makes a big difference in our annual payment. So, he is going to get it corrected 4 years retroactively, which should basically make up for how much our insurance will increase over the next 3 years.

Meredith is as busy as ever. A co-teacher of Chris' gave us a Little Tykes playhouse that her kids had outgrown and oh my gosh, Meredith is absolutely in love with it. Her OCD father is painting it the same colors as our house (with that paint that adheres to plastic) because it has definitely faded in the sun, so it should be really cute when he's finished. If anyone could have seen us the other night, it was quite a sight because Meredith dragged both Chris and I out to her house and made us both get in there with her....needless to say, it was a tight fit!

Another weird thing she is doing is she has gotten really picky about her cups. She'll just stand and point up to the cabinet where her cups are and just whine 'cahp' and I'll go through the whole cabinet asking her which one she wants and inevitably, she doesn't want any of them and just keeps pointing and whining. We may be buying a few more cups this weekend for variety!

All 4 teeth have made a lot of progress pushing through, but they still have a bit more to go. She is constantly drooling and chewing on things and I can tell she is uncomfortable. She's been a bit more whiny than usual lately and she isn't eating well, but doing well with them overall.

Her vocabulary is certainly growing these days. She still doesn't make a lot of sense a lot of the time, but it is really starting to come together. She most definitely understands what we tell her. Today we got home and we usually go get the mail together and she looked up at me and said 'geh mai', ie get mail! I was quite impressed :) She also knows body parts like eyes, ears, nose etc and she knows a couple colors and shapes. Oh yeah, her favorite is saying please. She kinda sticks her behind out, bends over a little, scrunches her face up and says 'Peeees'...it is quite adorable, although not sure she quite understands the reasoning other than she gets what she wants when she says it....we're still working on thank you since the attention span is gone once she gets what she was asking for!

Ok, if you're still with me, sorry about the novel of a post.
Still no pictures. Now our camera battery is dead, so I'll have to work on that soon.