🍁 Welcome Fall!
Hello friends,
The Pacific Northwest summer wound down a bit earlier than last year but I feel okay with it. JP and I had a whirlwind summer this year. Some highlights:
The USA<->Canadian border opened up so we hosted Justin’s parents and one of his younger brothers at our house for a whole month. We’ve had to make do with FB video calls with the family in Canada for two years. I enjoyed the slower paced interactions of just living together as we had enough time to settle into our little rituals. It was luxuriously slow living as JP and I were both on parental leave. Every morning, I'd walk Froggy out to the garden to pick peas, tomatoes, or strawberries. Our regular group excursion to a beach or a hike. At night, we'd make sidecars and wind down by a fire in our backyard.
Got every dress I own tailored - recovering from pregnancy really drove home that I will run out of years of beauty long before I run out of money.
Clocked in three destination weddings - all dear friends getting married, a bachelorette party. We had a Tahoe, NYC , and a Santa Cruz wedding.
Chance encounter at the NYC wedding of our friends Lauren and Peregrine - we're all masked up and we chat up a guy in line to get drinks.
"So, where are you from?"
"Seattle? Oh me too - well, Bellevue"
"Oh yeah, I'm in such and such neighborhood"
"Huh, me too - I'm 4 minutes south from this extremely specific neighborhood park"
And that's how we ran into our next door neighbor at a wedding in New York! They hosted a BBQ a few weeks later and we had a great time hopping the fence to crash the party.
JP’s product shipped - Ray-Ban Stories! He always chooses the most cutting edge technology projects. He never leaks me any information but I could tell it was going to be juicy because he was so exicted about the project the entire time. It should solve a personal problem for me. I want to take more photos to remember the moments, but taking a photo takes me out of the very moment I want to memorialize.
My team GAed a new product- Stripe Revenue Recognition! IYKYK - we automated a good chunk of accounting that is considered tedious. In all seriousness, building this product was a pleasure and a fascinating deep dive into the scorecards and infrastructure holding up our financial system.
Caught the majestic Mt. Rainer fully out on a sunny day
On the Froggy front - every month with him is my favorite month yet:
We’ve started Froggy on solids, which is actually pureed foods. We do 3 days in a row of each new food to monitor for any allergic reactions and have been sticking with lower risk foods - his favorites are avocados and sweet potatoes. I always thought I'd be the tiger parent but actually JP is the strict one. On his 6 month half-birthday, I wanted to offer him a lick of ice cream but JP insisted on the regular scheduled programming of pureed veggies. Poor Froggy was downgraded to smelling the ice cream! 😂😭
Froggy is on the brink of crawling - which is strangely early as a 6 month old baby. He can scoot around with his arms when he's very motivated. Froggy also rocks back and forth on his hands and knees with his butt high in the air, which I am told is a classic pre-crawling milestone.
We’re working on sleep coaching with Froggy. [0] Our strategy is to slowly ease up on how much we do for him before bed and to give him the tools to fall asleep. We used to rock him to sleep in our arms before bed. Now we put him to him to bed drowsy and let him sleep himself.
Froggy has a huge assortment of toys now. I thought I'd be a parenting minimalist but it turns out I'm a spineless sheep, descended from sheep, married to a fellow sheep. Anytime any of us see any baby really enjoying a toy in any sort of social media or advertising, we rush to get one for Froggy just in case he likes it. One time, my mom, JP, and I got 3 versions of the same toy...and I think we just decided to keep all three in case there was a variant he liked more?? [1]
I've been surprised by the ways that having Froggy has changed my view of the world - it wasn't an overwhelming change of identity but a softer difference in the texture of the world. I used to care about things like the environment or equality because I wanted to be a "good person" but now I want it because it's the world Froggy will inhabit. I feel more relaxed - I've already accomplished something big by bringing Froggy into this world. I don't need any more gold stars from society. [2]
[0] Also known as sleep training, but I find that sleep training makes folks think of some crazy athletics training program.
[1] The serious version of this is that it's tiring to engage with a baby all day, especially with our no screens policy. Having a variety of toys that we can swap in and out to keep him engaged and setting up multiple play areas near where the adults want to spend time makes life more simple.