Despite keeping notes for this post all year, it's January
Here are the kids at the beginning and end of the year.
Travel
We took one big international trip and went to Boston, but otherwise stayed in western WA this year.
- Feb: Azores, Portugul and Boston
- I'm so happy Jack blogged about our hikes from his phone during the trip, because we have yet to write anything else about the trip: hike 1, hike 2, hike 3, hike 4, hike 5, hike 6
- Mar: Boston again (just me and Dd) <link>
- May: Fort Worden cabin over Memorial Day with two other families
- July: Deception Pass camping, Dd's first camping trip at nine months
- Aug: camping for four nights at Newhalem in the North Cascades, our longest camping trip in quite a while. Our friends joined us for one night and my sister for two. <link>
- Bainbridge (just me and Dd) with my sister <link>
- Poulsbo for two nights in a nice airbnb, while my parents were also there with friends
- Sep: Mt Rainier, Paradise Lodge (just me and J)
- Nov: Cama Beach cabin with Jack's mom and stepdad
- Dec: Cle Elum (just me and D) with my parents for some snowshoeing and sledding
Books, Music and Entertainment
- best solo read by J: Borne by Jeff VanderMeer
- best solo read by C: Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens
- best book we read together: Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik
- best book we read to D: Owls in the Family by Farley Mowat (according to the grown ups)
- In January we were listening to Dr Horrible's Sing-Along Blog on repeat with D and he knew almost all of the lyrics. It was fun but now he's over it.
- Dd and I took music together classes in the summer and fall. In the first class he was happy in the social setting but overwhelmed as soon as we started singing, which was surprising. By the third class he loved it and particularly enjoyed banging sticks. The xylophone was one of his favorite toys earlier in the year.
- D started piano in a relatively low investment way, with a before school, group class on keyboards. He has learned some and we will see if he is motivated to take more lessons.
- Beyond a Garfield High school jazz band concert, I don't think we made it to any concerts.
- I thoroughly enjoyed watching Blood, Water, Paint put on by www.machatheatreworks.com, where Jack's brother is a production manager. D and J also like their production of The Flight Before Christmas.
- Along with my mom and sister, we formed our own small book club and read four books to discuss in 2019. We read Becoming, Where the Crawdads Sing, Kafka on the Shore and 99 Nights in Logar, the last of which we haven't discussed yet.
- In June I joined a fledgling book club, which has been really fun. We read Becoming, as almost all readers I know did, Let's Pretend This Never Happened, [part of] Freedom Climbers, The Library Book, A Gentleman in Moscow, [sort of] Wild Swans.
- I paid for a New York Times digital subscription, for the first time. I feel so honest and grown up.
- D moved up to legos and for several months we had a "lego jail" set up for him in the living room. In the fall we got the duplos out again and both kids are pretty happy playing with them.
- The best thing I saw on social media was the Cloud Appreciation Society facebook group, which is just amazing pictures of the sky from all around the world.
- D's progress on reading was one of the most rewarding things about the year. We've been through all of the BOB books and some other random early readers. A few times we witnessed the magic of D reading an easy picture book to Dd.
- I discovered this great local musician called Brandi Carlile. Maybe you've heard of her?
- D has an ever growing playlist and we're all happy on car trips when he sometimes listens to the old iPod he got from my dad. It means Dd can sleep and J and I can converse with each other.
- We got to go to the exciting Sounders MLS cup championship game.
- For the second year, we enjoyed the Seattle Summer Teen Musical, which was a Willy Wonka story.
School, Work, camps, daycare
2019 saw lots of family and friends hunting for jobs, but not us. I spent most of 2018 and at least the first half of 2019 obsessing about childcare planning and options. From March through September, Dd attended a center on Capitol Hill on Tuesdays and Thursdays. As soon as he was old enough, at 12 months, he moved to four days a week at the neighborhood daycare D attended for several years. Finally, we arrived at a stable and much simpler plan. Meanwhile D started kindergarten in September. These two major simplifications have put us back in the position of not needing to drive on a regular basis. We do drive to D's school sometimes, but the school bus, city bus, biking and walking are all viable options as well.
first day of school
- I came back to work at the very end of February and managed to arrange to work 80% time through Dd's first birthday, in the beginning of October.
- A few weeks after I returned to work, we pulled the plug on D's three-mornings-per-week attendance at a French immersion preschool in Hillman City. The drive and 9 am drop off broke me.
- In the spring, Jack worked on Saturdays and watched Dd on Fridays for a few months.
- We had our first non-family (non-daycare center) babysitter who helped us out a few times a week in June.
- D was five during the summer and had many more summer camp options available to him. He did a Will Smith music camp, a reading camp at the UW (a study where he must have been in the control group and didn't actually learn much of anything), a bike camp, science center camp and kindergarten jump start.
- We are thrilled that his school offers before and after school activities organized by the PTA. He did piano and a cooking class in the fall. So far, his after school care has a been a mix of these classes, grandparent help and one day a week of entertaining himself at home while I work for an hour or so at the end of the day.
- I was happily shunted to full-time remote status at work, along with many of my co-workers, which was really not much of a change since I rarely made it to the office. Also I switched projects <link>
- Jack's best college friend came to work at his small firm, in a slightly surprising alignment of circumstances.
House, Car and Stuff
- We bought, and assembled huge new desks. It's the first time we've had our own desks at home since we lived in Pittsburgh.
- Our leaky windows were fixed (thankfully under warranty) for either the third or fourth time. It was the second time we had scaffolding set up on the west side of the house. It was a multi-month production.
scaffolding, behind us
- We turned a corner on the amount of baby stuff we have around the house and in the basement. It was satisfying to ditch bulky things like the jumperoo, baby bath tub and second stroller. Also Dd has grown so much that the differential in the kids' clothing sizes is much smaller, meaning we have way fewer in-between sized clothing stored.
- We hauled our loaner hot tub up on to the roof and got it hooked up this fall.
- Our darling cats flunked out of any kind of litter box convenience and refused to use wood pellet litter too, so we are back to the smelly drudgery of scooping the litter box. Luna was actually good with alternatives but Toru just happily crapped on the floor when he didn't get his way.
- Within a block of our house, eleven new houses/units are being constructed, in place of three old single family homes. We're grateful to have our little off street parking spot as the density will soon ratchet up. I'm a bit tired of all the noise, since it's been going on for almost 18 months now, across the street.
- On the third floor we put up seven electric blinds (on just the west side) and another seven corded blinds in our bedroom. It's a big upgrade for our bedroom from the various paper window coverings we've had up for the past several years.
new blinds behind the borscht brothers
- We stepped our retirement savings up again, after slacking a bit during house construction and the aftermath.
- Somehow we managed to keep Dd sleeping in our bedroom until he was seven months old. Then we moved him down to the first floor in the beginning of May.
- After months of preparing D's expectations we then had the kids switch bedrooms in December. Our thinking was that it's good for them to not get too settled and inflexible and switching rooms has the added benefit of encouraging a deep clean and a reevaluation of all the detritus they, mostly D, have acquired. Since we do not plan to move for many years, this kind of swapping is extra important.
- Lastly, I found the letter "H" from a nice alphabet puzzle that was complete at the time I packed it up in our apartment. It only took three and a half years to get to the box that it had fallen into.
- We bought a snazzy new bike rack for our car and Jack got a new bike to replace the one that was stolen in 2018. For D we also bought a "ride-along" thing that connects to a grown up's bike opening the door to more types of family bike rides.
- Our meyer lemon tree succumbed to pests :(
- Jack built an awesome permanent baby gate <link>
Recreation and Community
- Dd's first bike ride in our bike trailer was just before he turned six months old and we rode out to a park on Mercer Island. In August our "Epic Family Bike Ride" took us twenty something miles, including some non-trail riding.
- While we didn't finish all of the trails on Cougar Mountain as we aspired to, we did hike there nine times. <link>
- Jack got a new, much nicer, pitching machine which he enjoyed using in our boxy yard.
- Jack coached D's second season of T-ball and his throwing, catching and hitting are vastly improved. His grandparents played a lot with him in our yard. He's perfectly able to hit a slow-pitched ball. <link>
- In the fall D played soccer for the first time and had two practices a week and games on Saturdays. Thankfully his grandma likes soccer and helped us out by taking him to practice once a week.
- Jack did the tunnel/viaduct 5k run with my sister and cousins, in February. The rest of us walked through the tunnel a bit when it was opened.
- We snowshoed a few times as a family.
- Labor day weekend we celebrated Jack's 35th birthday with a kid-free game night <link>
- We ripped up most of the grass in our parking strip and planted a meadow mix, that did pretty well. We really don't want to deal with cutting grass and flowers are nicer anyway. Our japanese snowbell trees are still with us (and actually smelled good for the first time this year <link>) and our little Christmas tree that usually lives on the roof served us for a third Christmas.
- On the roof some of my favorite plants were the kale and lettuce and a jasmine plant that did pretty well. We put in a north country blueberry bush but failed to plant more than one so only got about six blueberries. The raspberries also failed to produce. We've got a lot to learn about gardening still.
- D and I volunteered planting trees at an Earthcorps site on the Duwamish river that my sister helps run.
- Of course 2019 was also an exceptional snow year. I was the 3rd coldest February on record and Seatac airport got a total of 20 inches of Snow. On the night of February 9th, Seattle got about 8 inches of snow. We were happy to trudge to the bus stop in the snow to escape to the rain and wind of the Azores and to witness cleanup of a similar amount of snow in Boston.
- Jack hit two home runs!
Food and Health
- Our salad innovation was fresh mint in spinach salad with crunchy, spiced (packaged) chic peas and often cucumbers.
- I read a great New York Times article that convinced me to start steaming eggs in stead of hard boiling them.
- I sampled Oregon Grape berries from our little yard for the first time. They are not poisonous but they are also not good.
- At the beginning of the year I was continuing the post-partum physical therapy I probably should have done after D was born. Then I went back to work and I didn't prioritize it any more. I did learn a lot from it that I am now applying to the MuTu system post-partum exercise program I started in early December, which I am optimistic about.
- Dd came down with a mild case of hand, foot and mouth disease over winter break. <link>
Friends and Family
Our parents had more health issues than usual in 2019. My dad had a small surgery in January that was a follow up to his previous cancer surgery. In June my mom passed out and broke her collar bone badly. She then had surgery and a few months later bent the metal plate that had been put in. Just before Christmas, Jack's step dad had an urgent surgery that had some complications and led to him being hospitalized much longer than expected.
Our visitors were:
- my aunt and uncle from Houston
- Jess and Adam visited from Ann Arbor/Chicago
- Meredith and Nathaniel from D.C.
- my cousin Jacob, after his college graduation
Other pivotal happenings were:
- My brother-in-law got an attending position in Seattle, which will keep them here for at least several more years, if not longer. The job search process was harrowing and stressful, even to witness. Just before the end of the year my sister also found a job that is off to a good start.
- Our good friends Read and Anne moved back to Seattle, from Portland.
- My uncle passed away after battling brain cancer
- A family we were becoming good friends with moved up to Alaska. In doing so, the one existing friend D had who would have been at his elementary school, skipped town.
- My other brother-in-law, Jack's brother, moved out to his own place.
- Our good friends, who we normally see frequently, lived in China for several months, followed by some amazing travels in other parts of Asia.
This makes me miss you guys. Can we come camp with you this year?
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