Hope you all had a wonderful Christmas!  Since I couldn’t mail you all our Christmas cards and family updates, I thought I’d post a family/life up date.  An outfit post never seems like the right space to do that, but a virtual holiday card post?  DONE.  😀

I’ll start off by saying that my family and I are grateful for a year full of God’s grace and presence in our lives.  It’s been a year full of transition!  To name a few:

MAJOR TRANSITIONS

• I was still on my sabbatical from Nov ’16 – May ’17.  It was an incredible gift to have that space to pull away and refocus!  (The organization I work for gifts everyone a 6-month sabbatical every 7 years, but I was 12 years in and hadn’t taken one yet!)
• Benson got a new job in March–yay!  That in itself has a really cool story of us feeling like God had miraculously orchestrated it all, but that’s for another place.  However, it meant that he went from working at home 24/7 to commuting 2 hours a day.  Eek!  We finally found a sweet spot combo of him being in the office some days and working from home others.
• Somewhere in the middle of this year, Addie’s sleep habits changed, which are possibly the transitions we’ve felt the most.  She’s always been an amazing sleeper, but two things happened this year.  First, we potty-trained her in February.  That led to some early morning wake ups of her screaming that she needed to go potty.  After a month or two she adjusted and we were clear.  Whew!  But then some months later that I can’t recall, her bedtime got later.  What really happened is that she got older and just needs less sleep overall, and she just needs to drop her afternoon nap.  BUT the daycare we go to doesn’t allow that.  That means she went from a wonderful bedtime of 7:30/8pm to now not sleeping until 9:15pm–and there went our peaceful evenings and the margin in our lives to detox! ? While on one hand we enjoy the extra time with her in the evenings, overall we thrive with margin and space in our lives!  We’re still trying to figure out what to do about this, especially with Baby #2 on the way.
• In August, we found out we were pregnant!  We had been trying for almost a year, and anyone who’s been through that journey knows how up and down the emotions can be.  We are very grateful for this little baby.
• In November I scaled down to part-time hours with the organization I’ve been working for for the last 12+ years.  This is a super recent change as it only happened last month.  It was something I was processing during my sabbatical, and with Benson getting a new job, Baby #2 on the way, us wanting to troubleshoot Addie’s sleep schedule, and the things I was reassessing during my sabbatical, it felt right for this next season of life.  Also, while that job is incredibly flexible, blogging is even more flexible, so I’m looking forward to the adjustments we’ll be able to make.

 

ROLLING INTO 2018

Aside from all those transitions, we’ve been putting a ton of energy into a few different things and are looking forward to finishing them in 2018.

• Landscaping our backyard.  We have an enormous backyard (like bigger than the square footage of our house!) For the 3.5 years we’ve lived here, it’s been full of overgrown weeds and all the field rodents that love that kinda stuff (ew), plus the neighborhood cat that likes to chase those rodents.  For the latter half of 2017 we’ve been putting thought into the yard, and we are finally going to landscape that sucker at the top of 2018!
• Redoing our living room / dining space.  OMG, interior design.  It’s a beast for us because we don’t know what we’re doing.  But after a year of trying to figure it out, we’ve actually made some progress!  We have almost all new furniture, and we’re working on paint colors for walls and cabinets.  We have major decision-fatigue, but seeing progress is encouraging.
• Adjusting Addie’s schedule.  Like I said, her late bedtime is killing us.  With me decreasing my hours at work, for the few months before the baby comes, I’m going to experiment with bringing Addie home early a couple days a week so she can skip her nap and so Benson and I can have a couple more breathable evenings each week.  Particularly for Benson.  He’s more introverted than I am and really needs some quiet evenings!  It’ll also be nice to have a bit more time with Addie before the baby comes.
• Um, taking care of a newborn baby and transitioning to life with two kids.  Does that count as a project?  ?

All in all, I’m looking forward to 2018, but I’m also bracing myself for the changes to come!

P.S. We’re having a girl!!!

Photos by Yana Matosian Photography