As I mentioned last year, I like to make myself a list of events throughout the year as a tradition on New Year’s. This year I barely paused to recognize that holiday, due to exhaustion induced by our newborn. Suddenly we’re a month into the new year and I haven’t had the time to reflect on the one that is past! Most of last year was wrapped up in preparation and anticipation of his arrival, but there were plenty of other things to enjoy along the way:
- We took a big trip to Florida in the end of January, beginning of February. We had planned a visit to Universal Studios for the first time in over a decade, bought season passes because of how many days we were staying. The passes got us discounted reservations to stay in a hotel on property for a few nights. I felt like a real tourist, since it’s been two decades since my family had last stayed in a hotel in Orlando.
- March was a little bit mixed. My sisters were on Spring Break so my Dad flew up to visit and we had everyone at our house again. But that same week we had the dog fixed and my husband got food poisoning.
- We found out we were expecting in April, but didn’t tell anyone until May, so we spent an awkward Easter dinner trying not to react to jokes that we would be the ones in the family to wind up with twins (since my grandma was a twin) and at that point we didn’t know it wasn’t twins!
- We took a relaxing trip with our friends over Memorial Weekend to my favorite campground. It’s the place I go when I need to get away from what’s going wrong around me and just focus on the beauty of the beach. It was so much fun catching up with everyone and getting to tell them we were expecting.
- The summer was spent very busy. We had some home improvement projects with the deadline of completion during that month. Most of them got done, but the pool never stayed clean long enough to enjoy.
- Work was busy over the summer as well. I stepped into a training role and stopped writing code for a while. It was a challenge to balance responsibilities between answering questions for our new hires and critiquing code for our remote team as they all got up to speed. I learned a lot about how to be successful in communicating with my teammates and had a much better experience than training last Sunday. Instead of dreading the task I grew to look at it as one of my favorite parts of my job.
- We got to enjoy a gaming convention in the summer as well. That was a new experience for me as a participant, having attended in my toddler years.
- Summer ended with another trip with friends, over Labor Day this time. We used my parents house as home base to tour them around the theme parks. We escaped the state on one of the last few flights out before the airport closed for Hurricane Irma.
- After all that travel and renovations we ended up needing a new car when our only vehicle (single car household) needed repairs exceeding the amount it was worth, and not guaranteed to fix the issues we were having with it. A new car seemed like a good idea considering the new baby coming in the winter.
- In October I started bagpipe lessons. Fulfilling a dream I’d had for at least a decade. I still end every practice session with a smile on my face.
- November was filled with last minute preparations for the impending arrival and enjoying every “last” thing with just the two of us.
- A lot of that spilled over into December, since it took so long before the Wiggly Little Boy was finally born. He was my obsession for the month of December (and ever since, hence the lateness of this post).