Adam and I have mostly established a weekday routine these days. I wake up with him around 7AM and both have breakfast and get changed into daytime clothes. He’s in care from 8AM through 5PM while I’m working, and then we spend time together until his bed time around 7:30PM. Most evenings we take a walk and do an errand or two, stop by the bank or post office, or pick something up at the grocery store or pharmacy. I’m particularly grateful now we’re within walking distance of so many things. There are whole weeks where we go out a lot, but we don’t use the car until the weekend.

Beautiful walk to the library

I’ve been working a lot, including two Saturday events and a couple chunks of travel, which I’ve been writing about separately. Thankfully I have some flexibility in my job, which allows me to take some time off during the week if I work over the weekend. This has been a huge help with holiday travel, so I can take a comp day and return on a Monday rather than fighting the crowds during the weekend. But in all, it’s been a pretty exhausting couple of months in a year that’s broken records for how tired I am with the new kiddo. My last work trip of the year was a couple weeks ago, a quick trip to NYC for the Open FinTech Forum. Unfortunately work isn’t really quieting down much for me. I have a lot of work coming up in January that I need to prepare for since I’ll be in Australia for 10 days in the middle of the month. Still, many of my colleagues are away for the holidays, so I at least I don’t have many meetings!

But backing up a bit, these past few months! I’ve already written about some about house stuff we’ve been working on. We’ve also started hanging framed artwork in our house, finally. Adam’s room now has a couple pieces up, and so does my office and the downstairs living room. We still have a lot to do, but the forward progress is nice.

Event-wise, Castro Valley has a lot of local little events throughout the fall. In September the three of us spent one afternoon walking around the Castro Valley Fall Festival. They had live music, and lots of local vendors (more than I’d seen at a local event prior to this) and food. In early November I was disappointed to miss the Castro Valley Light Parade due to a Saturday work conflict, but MJ and Adam went out for it and then they met me at the BART station so I could at least see a couple of the floats.

And I didn’t miss Halloween! After years of missing Halloween due to work events, I made sure I was home for Adam’s first. LISA was just prior to it, but I flew home as soon as it concluded. He got dressed up as a dragon and his au pair and I walked over to the village to meet a local friend and her son (2 months younger than Adam!) and enjoyed the festivities.

Caligula got dressed up too! And he hasn’t killed me in my sleep yet for for that, but he could be biding his time.

That evening the trick-or-treating started around 6:30PM (good reference for next year!) and we got about 40 people coming by until things ended around 8:30. It was quite the chore to get Adam ready for bed in the midst of it though. And I’d like to put up a few decorations outside next year, I grabbed a last minute pumpkin from the store so there was some indication that kids were welcome to come back to our doorway. Then again, October 31st is the middle of conference season and the same reason I didn’t put up decorations this year will probably apply to every year.

A couple weeks after Halloween my cousin Audrey came into town. I saw her parents and her sister back in May when I dropped by Atlanta for work, but she was out of town at the time. We took the morning off and the three of us drove to the city and met at Ferry Building and had a lovely brunch. It was nice to see her and catch up, and for MJ and Adam to meet her. Adam and I then hopped on BART to head back home so MJ could get to work.

Otherwise November was crazy busy with work events, but had a nice conclusion as we flew to Philadelphia for the week of Thanksgiving. I had a lot of project work at work to catch up on, so I had a lot to do, but I was working remotely and it was light on meetings. Bliss! Thanksgiving itself was held at the home of MJ’s sister, as has become our tradition, but I think we may try to do it at our townhouse next year. Bonus: Good incentive to finally buy a proper dining room set for the townhouse.

During this trip Adam also saw his first snow! Alas, it was just a dusting and it quickly melted as the temperature rose. We also spent time on that trip starting to baby-resist the house. We replaced a vintage glass and metal lamp in his bedroom which a much more appropriate lamp and shelf piece we ordered from Amazon, and covered a bunch of the cords in his room. The weather upon our departure wasn’t great, with a storm coming through and hitting the northeast pretty hard. Philadelphia was mostly fine, but we still had over two hours of delays, and then another hour on the tarmac upon arrival in SFO. Adam traveled like a champ, but I was still a bit frazzled by the end of it all.

A quick trip to NYC for work concluded my work travel for the year in early December, and we had a nice little 16th birthday party for Caligula on December 13th. It’s hard to believe it’s been 16 years since my little Egyptian Mau was born, we’ve sure been through a lot together.

It’s also hard to believe that Adam is almost 1. Before flying to Philadelphia to visit over the end of year holidays I got everything prepared for Adam’s first birthday party, which we’ll host the Sunday we get home. I’ll just need to pick up the cake and balloons on Sunday morning and we’ll be all set. We also decided to do a tiny party here for family before we leave, which will pretty much just be cake.

We’re in Philadelphia for this final visit now. We’ll be spending all of Hanukkah out here this year due to the timing, and New Years. Some visits with family and friends are planned.

Owning a home is a never-ending project, and doing home improvements during the first year of adjusting to life with a tiny new member of the family has taken Herculean effort. But we’re making it through. Each weekend we pick another task, even if it’s completing a small task, like organizing the laundry room or making progress on a larger one, like getting closet doors installed.

Our house is quite unusual, as I’ve talked about before, but one of the “smaller” things we noticed when we first looked at the house was the lack of closet doors in the bedrooms. Once we moved in, the reality of just how weird that was set in. It looks like the previous owners put up curtains, at least in the master bedroom, to cover the closets, since there were tension rods still up when we moved in. It’s unclear if anything was done in the other three bedrooms. Still, it was something we wanted to solve, so we ordered doors late last year, had them painted a few months ago, and are finally getting around to installing them. The first weekend we embarked on this project required us to go to the hardware store a couple times. About half the rails for the doors are installed now, so we’re getting there!

Another project we’ve been working on was getting the storage pod finally delivered and contents integrated into our home. The big part of this job was actually getting the storage pod delivered and emptied into a staging area in the garage so we could sort through it. First, we had to do some car shuffling. We learned that the space next to the house is indeed large enough for a car to park in it! And then were able to park the truck on the street for a couple days while the pod was parked on the driveway, with just enough space to squeeze my car in and out of the garage.

Then we had movers come over for a couple hours to empty it out. They brought a bunch of furniture into the house, so we now have a living room downstairs that actually looks lived in, and some pieces of furniture for the television in the upstairs family room to sit on, though we still lack a couch in that room, so watching TV in there isn’t feasible yet. We still have some work to do, the huge china cabinet that’s now in the living room needs some repairs before we actually put dishes in it, and it should be anchored to the wall in case of earthquakes or enthusiastic, climbing children. We also have some work to do to move stuff from storage totes to where they actually belong in the house, but first we need to establish those spaces, and I think much of that will happen slowly over the course of several months rather than being specific projects. I did bring my Sparc Ultra10 into my office though, even if I haven’t managed to find my Sun keyboard and mouse yet.

Another project has been preparing the roof for solar! I think I’ve mentioned before that the house was built in the 1956, so all the vents were haphazardly placed all over the roof. In order to install solar panels most effectively, several of them had to be moved. So we’ve worked with a few contractors to get the work done, and finally a couple weeks ago the work was finished with a roofer who came by to inspect and seal up any spots that needed it after the work of the plumbers and others. The actual solar work is a few months off due to there being a wait list, but I’m happy we’re finally able to move forward with it. We’ve been lucky that none of the rolling power outages in our area have hit us, but they have touched other parts of our town and we remain a little on edge about the possibility. Having solar panels to at least keep us going during the daytime will bring considerable peace of mind, and we’ve also been considering batteries.

And now the project that has suddenly usurped all others: baby-proofing. Many of the cabinets in the kitchen already have anti-child clips, so we just need to finish the rest. A gate needs to be installed at the top of the stairs, which we thought would be easy but the first one we bought conflicts with the railing on one side, so we need to go back to the drawing board there. Highest on our list is protection of gnarly wire farms around power outlets in rooms he frequents and securing some of the furniture to walls. His bedroom is where we’ve started the work, and the giant bookcases in my office will be next up. I think we have a solid plan and all the tools we need now, so we just need to carve out a weekend to finish it.

There’s still so much to do, and I’m trying to strike a balance between making progress on things and giving us all the rest and grace we need. We need to keep pushing forward on projects, but spending quality new family time together doing non-projects is important too.