2014 highlights

Single best thing: baby H!

Best personal decision: quitting my TT job

Best professional accomplishment: affiliation (senior research fellow) & hired to teach at local university

Best professional decision: turning down a sales/marketing job at an educational software company

Best trip: seattle & Olympic peninsula with the whole family

Best meal (restaurant): Parkside for brother's rehearsal dinner

Best meal (home cooked): Wild pork carnitas

Best dessert (restaurant): Nutella pot de creme at foreign & domestic

Best dessert (home cooked): LTC's "failed" chocolate cake with chocolate ganache

Best party: brother's wedding!

Tastiest breakfast experience: fancy kolache pop-up shop at foreign & domestic 

Best coffee: TFB latte with tweed coffee

Weekend highlights

Beautiful, beautiful weather here on Saturday - one day of sunshine and warmth between cold & rainy and bitterly cold. We headed to the local elementary school to play ball with the dog, let the baby crawl around and watch other kiddos and soak up the sunshine. After that we headed to a natural baby store for wool diaper covers (we need a new nighttime diaper routine) and to try out baby carriers. We had great customer service, got to try several things out and got to buy local. (I almost always succumb to the convenience of Amazon). We ended up with a great carrier and lovely, soft wool pants. 

We were supposed to head out of town this weekend to the ranch, but ended up changing plans. After the busyness of the holidays it was really nice to rest up at home. My parents generously offered to watch H on Saturday night at their house so we could go out. So thankful for family that lives just a few blocks away! We saw an excellent movie – the immitation game – at a fun place that serves dinner during your movie. Bottomless popcorn, two great beers (Green flash hophead Red for me), a blue cheese burger, Caesar salad, and a boozy milkshake! Indulgent, but not too indulgent!

Sunday morning had us all up bright and early, but we made the best of it by taking a family field trip to the grocery store. We have a lovely local market with an attached café. I often go on weekend mornings alone and see lots of parents (particularly dads) with kiddos. We had a lovely breakfast with pastries and coffee and then did our weekly shop. We got to exchange glances with other parents who had likely been up for hours too. I even got complimented on my boots by another mom and we saw one of my sister's friends in the checkout line.

Not sure what it says about me that both of our weekend highlights involved shopping. I think the lesson is that during this time of life, we might as well make our errands a fun thing. Since there's not a lot of time for anything else at this stage, might as well make the routine things fun.  I hope we can make that morning grocery trip a regular gig, at least on the weekends we are in town.

2014 By the Books

Thanks to GoodReads here are the books I read this year. Almost all of them were checked out from my local public library - either on ebook or audiobook.I feel like there are some that aren't on the list but I can't remember...I wish Overdrive (much preferred to kindle for the iPad) or the library kept track of the books you have checked out. There were 22 in total - much less than 2013's 67 - but I guess not too shabby considering I had an infant for 11 months out of the year.

My favorite fiction book was Elizabeth Gilbert's The Signature of All Things. I don't remember loving it as I was reading it, but it was full of surprises, and elements of the story really stuck with me.

My top five non fiction books:
All Joy and No Fun By Jennifer Senior - very thoughtful and unexpected book, well researched and not the typical overworked-mom-trying-to-do-it-all narrative

The Whole Brain Child by Daniel Siegel - lots of interesting stuff here, a good blend of neuroscience, psychology and

Navigating the Path to Industry by M.R. Nelson - a short ebook by a blogger I really like, an excellent guide for a job search

Breastfeeding Made Simple by Nancy Mohrbacher and Kathleen Kendall-Tackett - with a subtitle of Seven natural laws for nursing mothers, this was not a book I expected to like, but this is excellent, science-based, not preachy or biased. or maybe its just biased in the right way, but I will recommend this & only this to friends.

The Sports Gene by David Epstein - Its amazing what the human body can do. This book hit my popular science trifecta - fascinating subject, solidly researched, and excellent writing. This was great and I don't even like sports.

I've set a goal of 52 books again for 2015 - you can follow along with my progress at GoodReads.