January 2017: Recap

One of my New Year’s resolutions was to be better about blogging (isn’t it always?!) and taking that one step further, to do a recap of each month. When I did my look back at 2016, I realized how many smaller moments would happen each month and how I didn’t want those to get lost in the shuffle of the bigger moments, and monthly recaps were the perfect way to make sure that didn’t happen. Which is all a long way of saying, let’s take a look at January!

To kick off the month, The Boy turned 2 months old, right on New Years Day. We “celebrated” with a walk downtown for coffee for Mom and Dad. Not that we truly needed it because he is a pretty good sleeper, only waking up once or twice for a “midnight snack”, then immediately going right back down. Halfway through the month, on the eve of my 34th trip around the sun, he gifted me five consecutive hours of sleep and it was glorious. (He later teased us with a full eight hours…we freaked out when we woke up at 4:00am and realized he hadn’t woken us up!)

On my actual birthday, I received a card with the sweetest inscription from The Boy (with a little help from Dad) and it was the best birthday yet.

My birthday was also celebrated with my favorite dinner, thanks to my mom and dad. My grandmother made my cake and it was the perfect way to greet 34.

It was also about this time that The Boy started teething. The copious amounts of drool gave it away. That, and he wants to find a way to have his whole fist in his mouth at once. No sign of any teeth yet (I was shocked he was even showing teething signs this early) but I just feel so badly for him. I can tell his teeth are shifting around and bother him even more in the evenings. We tried to establish a routine at night, since we read that helps comfort them, and so far it does seem to be working (until sleep regression hits, I’m sure). It’s also been nice to know that Dave and I have the teeniest amount of time in the evenings to catch up with one another (teeniest, because we’re usually not far behind The Boy when he goes to sleep).

Another New Year’s resolution was to start up Sunday dinners with my family. Actually, this has been on my bucket list for a long time, but we’re finding that now that we have a kid, we’re prioritizing things differently (go figure). It’s been a nice way to wind down the weekends and head into the work week.

Speaking of the work week, I headed back to work in January, with the help of my mom who watches The Boy for us. We’re grateful to have someone who loves him as much as we do looking after him and especially happy he gets some quality time with Grammy.

I’m also feeling very lucky to have hit the ground running in January. I wasn’t quite sure how this “maternity leave” was going to go down, since 1) it was self-managed and not regulated by state/federal laws and 2) I’m a company of one and basically had to shutter my doors for a bit. I really didn’t want to lose steam because I genuinely love what I do. So needless to say, I’m thrilled to get working on the new projects I have coming up and feel really fortunate that my clients stuck with me while on “leave.”

The whole month felt like it flew by, but in looking what’s on tap for February, that seems like it will be even busier. Here’s hoping I remember to slow down, take a breath and savor some of the little moments when they happen and hopefully, holding myself to these monthly recaps will remind me to do just that.