Valentine's for school friends during the first week back to school / our first date in 10 months – we got coffee and went to get Chris's second vaccine! A lot of big things happened this month. The boys started back to school in-person at our neighborhood school. It's been such a great change for us all and I'm so thankful that we have the option to have them in-person. My parents arrived in town earlier this month and received their first COVID vaccines a few days later. They will get their second shots this week. Chris's parents are also... Read more →

Last Thursday we dropped the boys off at school for the first time this school year. To describe it to you I want to overuse the word familiar and keep deleting the sentences. So much has felt unfamiliar this past year, and hard in its unfamiliarity, that being familiar is wonderfully novel. And yet familiar does not fully capture the ache of normalcy that returning to our school community brought to me. It felt so good (so! good!) to see so many people I recognized and to exchange pleasantries even if hampered a bit by our masks and tinged by... Read more →

For the past few years around my birthday (December 22) I've put together a list of favorites from the past year. I drafted this post on my birthday but it's taken me until now to finish it. Better late than never! In honor of being 36, here were my 36 favorite things this year: 1. Long evening walks around our neighborhood during the last weeks of my pregnancy. I listened to audiobooks, felt my baby girl kick, and luxuriated in wondering when she would arrive and what she would be like. 2. Maeve's nursery which is cheery and functional. 3.... Read more →

For my fifth stay at home check in I come to you with weariness and optimism – weary optimism? That feels accurate. Simultaneously I feel so done with the current situation while also feeling nascent optimism about the effects of vaccines plus having a functional federal government. To write this update I went back to read my last check in post, all the way back in August, which feels so so long ago. We're still at home but since then a lot has changed. Our school situation has changed and we are considering changing it again and re-enrolling the boys... Read more →

I'm finishing this post in the 5 a.m. hour because Maeve finally finally had a good night of sleep for the first time in weeks which left me rested enough to wake up this early. Sleep seems to go so up and down for Maeve so I'm not ready to declare a new pattern quite yet. But appreciating the good while we have it! At our house we're heading into our first full month with both boys doing "homeschool" instead of online school. Within the first week of Dash returning to virtual school we made the decision to withdraw him.... Read more →