2023

Reilly Family Holiday Letter

It was a wholesome year. Full of fun and maxing out medical bills.

While this has been a rollercoaster of a year, we have had so much to be grateful for. In January, we were overjoyed to find out that we would be expecting a baby boy in September. With this news, we naturally wanted to have some fun in preparation for the little one's arrival, so we planned many weekend trips and adventures together. Those adventures gradually became less active as Andreea's pregnancy progressed. However, Nick still couldn't keep Andreea off her bike even just one week from her due date.

Our trip highlights included skiing in Winter Park, CO, going to Mexico City with our friends Brandon & Tory Musser, visiting Boston & New York, baby mooning in Hood River, Oregon, and spending time in nature together hiking with Oslo. We've added some photo highlights of these adventures below.

Welcome Landon Reilly

We welcomed Landon Gabriel Reilly into the world on September 11th, 2023, giving us a positive reason to celebrate each year while we all remember 9/11. We envision many America-themed birthday parties in the future. He weighed in at 8 lbs 5 oz and measured 20.5 inches long. He’s got blue eyes like his dad and we are loving our time with him while he’s growing fast.

The sleepless nights and difficulties with Nick’s injury have been made easier with Landon’s smiles that always seem to come at just the right time.

We are Grateful

While you may read on below about Nick’s injury that has made becoming first-time parents just a bit harder than it needed to be, we wanted to share a moment of gratitude.

We have been so blessed to have so many wonderful friends, family, strangers, colleagues, and clients of Nick’s business, come together to help us through what has been a difficult few months. We could go on and on about the love, help, and kindness that everyone has shown us. It’s been a valuable lesson for us and we look forward to the opportunity to give back in so many ways.

Nick's Injury

Life throws twists and turns for us all and without rough times, we can’t fully appreciate the good times. While Nick has lived a life full of injuries, he’s got to admit this one’s been the toughest by far. For those who don’t know, or those who wish to have an update, feel free to read on. If you get woozy, you may want to skip ahead to the pictures 😉

On 8/17, Nick landed weirdly while wakeboarding, resulting in a tibial plateau fracture where his knee was also dislocated. The dislocation resulted in a tear of his LCL, ACL, and PCL ligaments, with a partial tear of the MCL. As if that weren’t enough, he also tore his right shoulder’s rotator cuff in the process.

Due to the severity of the way the leg bent, his peroneal nerve was stretched and damaged in the process, resulting in a "foot drop" that has him unable to lift the foot or toes or move the foot outward. So far Nick has had two surgeries to repair the bones at Harborview Hospital and one in November to reconstruct the LCL ligament and clear up much of the scar tissue that was putting pressure on his peroneal nerve. While cleaning up the area around the nerve, they performed neurolysis to try and kick-start the regeneration and healing process of the nerve.

Nick is working hard with physical therapy and doing all that he can to improve his chances of a full recovery. He has just been cleared to put weight on the leg and expects to wean off crutches over the next month and transition towards using a orthopedic foot device (AFO) to keep his foot up. That way he can get back to walking and biking while he waits out a potential surgery next fall to reconstruct his ACL and PCL ligaments.