J and M + j + s: March 2016

I started this post back around New Years, and I've decided to finally finish it and post it. Even if we are a bit late, I love looking back at old posts to remember what we were up to and how I was feeling about everything.

As 2015 comes to a close, I wanted to take some time to reflect on the year. As our life has gotten much more busy, we have less time to post here and even less time to post our general reflections instead of just events that are happening. It has been a very challenging, although also rewarding year.

Obviously the big news of the year was Sam's speedy arrival, and our family of three becoming four. So far we are loving being a family of four, and Sam has fit right into our lifestyle. All of my cousins were right though, after the first kid you can still pretend you have a life....but once you have two, your kids are your life. I'm not sure we would want it any other way though :-) We have really been enjoying doing fun kid friendly things most of the time. We have lost any desire to go out to eat someplace with kids where you can't throw food on the floor, because it is just too stressful. We like to prioritize having both kids nap in the afternoon so that we can get things done, so we tend to keep our weekends low key. I hope in the next year we will get out a bit more for date nights, particularly now that Josh has been better about being left with someone.

Before Sam's arrival, we spent a lot of time fixing up the house to get ready. It has been great this winter that we have new windows, because they really keep the house much warmer. We have also loved having Josh on the main floor. I would still consider having the boys share a room once they are on the same nap schedule, so that we could get a bit of extra space on the main floor--but for now it works well to have them separate. We have a few things on our to-do list for this year, the big one being to redo our front walkway and steps. We have some drywall repair to do, and I would love to do some painting. But we have been having a hard time finding the motivation to get started on something big.

We managed to do a few fun trips this year. Atlanta before Sam was born, then the beach, Lancaster, PA and Nashville over the summer, Landsdale PA for my cousin's Bat Mitzvah, then Florida for Christmas. Traveling as a family of 4 requires much more careful packing and planning, since we have to be able to manage all our stuff. This year we are planning a trip with extended family to Costa Rica, which will be the first trip out of the country for boy boys. We have been thinking about a few other trips, but nothing planned yet. Both Julian and I wanted to get through the winter to see how much vacation time we would need for sick/snow days before planning much.

In a bit of sad news, this year we lost our cat Jeter. Julian's family rescued her as a kitten 19 years ago (we think), and she has been living with him since he graduated college. She was my first ever cat, and she was a good one! We took many many naps together :-) She had a rough last month health wise, so her death was not unexpected. I started a post about this, but never finished it-hopefully this will be a reminder to find the post.

2016 has already been very busy, and filled with snow :-) We are excited to see Sam growing into a toddler (ahhhhhhh) and Josh growing into a preschooler. He has learned so much in the past year, and while the millions of questions gets annoying sometimes.....we love how much he is understanding and learning.