This is my final 2012 New Year's Resolution update post. I MADE IT!!

The season is officially over for the Chicago Bears. It's also over for the Pittsburgh Steelers.

This means that I'm basically done watching the NFL until the Super Bowl when Katie and I will randomly pick a team to root for while hoping against hope that the commercials will buck their current decline and actually all be enjoyable.

When I first conceived of my 2012 New Year's Resolutions, my thought was that making homemade pasta would be a gimme. A one-time thing? Sure! Easy!

But, as time went on, I became less and less convinced I would ever get it done.

I know many of you aren't really going to sympathize with me on this, but I'm sad. Why? Because today is the final workday of my leave at home with Nathan.

I can hear the derision now... "Ohhhh, poor baby. You had seven weeks off and are going to whine about it coming to an end."

I've gotta do my Year-End Best-Of (YEBO) Movies list a bit differently than in years past. The problem is that Katie and I didn't see all that many movies this year and, to put it bluntly, there are very few we would truly consider to be "great," let alone 10 of them as my previous list formatting would require.

I really enjoyed how I changed the final Snippet Wednesday of last year into my New Year's Resolution kickoff.

From the three of us to all of you, Merry Christmas!

I love it.

We just got home from our third family Christmas celebration. Our fourth, and thankfully final, is tomorrow. Katie is reading The Polar Express to Nathan for the 24th time this month. When he's down, we're going to watch what has become our annual Christmas movie, Love Actually.

And then we're going to bed.

Tomorrow we will wake up to spend our first Christmas as parents.

I seriously cannot wait.

I'm just clipping along on these Year-End Best-Of (YEBO) lists, aren't I? If this were any other year, I'd be waiting until the tail end of the year (even more tail end than today, December 23, represents) to write these. Now I'm actually done with all but two of my YEBO lists.

I'm such an overachiever! Must. Stop.

I really need to keep an audio recorder hidden in Nathan's crib to catch all the strange little chirps and beeps and honks and snarls and whatever else it is that emanates from that tiny little body.

I don't have a lot of time before we hit the midnight mark and I officially blow it with KapBloPoMo, so I'm going to take a few quick moments and present you with some of my favorite apps I've been playing with on either my iPhone, my iPad, or both. We'll consider this my Year-End Best-Of (YEBO) App list. Cool?

I'm going to first list a general category and then the app that best fits it.

A cool thing happened recently. The City of Geneva, IL, was bestowed with the prestigious honor of being named the 2013 Best Place to Raise Kids in Illinois by Bloomberg and Businessweek.

Why is this significant? Two reasons:

I wanted to take a quick moment to apologize for the relative lack of relevance of posts this month.

In case you haven't noticed, I've actually posted every day this month so far. I'm making up for the bad month I had in November... and October... and September... and so on and so forth, by doing an unofficial KapBloPoMo (Kapgar Blog Posting Month). 19 days and 19 posts. Not bad. Gotta keep it going, though, even if that means blogging some fluff.

Forgive me?

The way I figure it, this might just be the last opportunity I have this calendar year to present you with a Tu(n)esday! Next Tuesday is Christmas and the one after that is the first day of 2013. Well, if we survive December 21, that is.

Wow. Where does the time go?

The big news today on the Intarwebs is that the terms of use (TOU) are being changed by Instagram.

I'm tellin' ya, folks, don't mix sinus and cold medications with alcohol. You will have seriously effed up dreams.

For background's sake, I've been sick since Wednesday. Mostly coldlike symptoms... severe sinus congestion, cough, sore throat. No fever, thankfully.

And our monster season of family Christmas parties began tonight with the largest of the bunch with Katie's paternal family (I hate saying "Katie's Dad's family"... double possessives suck).

How can you think about anything other than those who lost their lives and their family, friends, and coworkers in Newtown, Connecticut, right now? 18 elementary school students dead at most recent count?? 27 total dead??

Sick and wrong.

Sorry I didn't give you a Snippet Wednesday last night. But I've got an idea for you... I need to start doing my year-end best-of (YEBO) lists and I thought, at least with a few of them, I can do them as Snippets. Might be interesting, right?

Plus, I've gotta change things up a bit around here with my YEBO lists as I don't feel right doing a top 10 countdown for music or movies as I wasn't entirely "committed to the cause," as it were, with either. I can easily name a favorite album of the year, but movie? Not so easy this year. So I may just do Snippetized lists of ones that I enjoyed of each.

TV Awards will be done the same, though. No way to Snippet that. Oh, and I'm adding one or two YEBO lists this year. And this is the first of those...

12-12-12, eh?

The final triple date we'll have until the 22nd century. If the human race survives that long, of course.

I realized that today also marks the start of the single-digit countdown until the Mayan prediction of the end of the world.

Guess I can stop paying my bills.

When I was growing up, the big Christmas film to watch was A Christmas Story. This movie came out when I was about six or seven years old and, as I recall, was re-released each holiday season for the next several years and then it was picked up by network and basic cable stations and played to death. Yet we still tuned in annually.

This is not to say that we didn't watch other Christmas movies, but A Christmas Story remained a favorite.

Today, while taking care of Nathan, I discovered the joy that is BBC-America.

Sure, I've recorded shows that air on BBC-A, but I've never just "watched" the channel.

Several months ago, when it was announced that Facebook was purchasing Instagram, loyal IG users the world over quaked in fear over what travesties could befall their beloved service at the hand of the devil, Facebook.

For a while, it seemed our fears were for naught as nothing happened, good or bad.

Today was Nathan's first photo with Santa. Or should I say "photos"?

It was an interesting shoot. Thank you, Santa, for your patience.

If you're my age and walking around a college campus pushing a baby in a stroller, do you think you're immediately thought of as some pervy old guy using a baby to pick up coeds?

You know how when you look at a baby and can't always tell if it's a boy or a girl and then have to ask that über-embarrassing question of the parents?

I hate that.

I'm not usually one to do this, but how about a Snippet Wednesday all about moi? Why? I'm sure you'll piece it together by the end of this post.

I get the feeling that I may come out of this paternity leave a few pounds lighter.

What's the secret to my diet? Sitting on my ass. Sitting on it plenty.

I don't care what you may hear if you're listening outside the window to my bedroom, I am not, repeat NOT, watching soap operas. It's just what happened to be on the TV after I switched out of OnDemand when I finished this season of The Walking Dead this morning.

I swear.

No soap operas here, folks.

I'm not entirely sure why I did it or completely certain what I'm going to do with it, but, last week, I caved and started a Tumblr account.

I was *this* close to having a 50% posting rate last month. *THIS* *CLOSE*. I missed it by one day because I got lazy yesterday. D'oh!

I'll hold that post until tomorrow or the day after and will, instead, give you my New Year's Resolution Recap for November. 

Enjoy!