It’s likely that the idiom “when it rains it pours” refers to bad things seeming like they happen all at the same time, but I’m repurposing it for when great things happen at the same time! I could look it up but I won’t. The last post I wrote was many months ago right before I started my new job and right before Bill and I moved in to our new apartment. Since then so many other great things happened!

Around the end of March we had to go to New York for my work on-boarding, since that happens at the global HQ. We were there over Bill’s birthday, and stayed for about 10 days. I work at a company called Knotel, and I am so happy to be out of the traditional architecture firm scene, but really happy to still be doing architecture. The company is a “real estate tech startup” that takes up long-term commercial leases, does a full renovation, then sub-leases it out to a company in need of a new or expanded office. My title is Workplace Strategy Manager, and I am involved in much of the process of the full tenant improvement and working with the client to make our space work for them. The San Francisco office where I work is the most successful location of the global firm, and it feels good to contribute to the success. We are a small team of about 30ish people but we are really crushing it! The job is a lot of work, and it is pretty stressful, since we are making a lot of it up as we go, but it is a lot of fun and feels rewarding. Plus, our office is 2 blocks from Bill’s office! Our commutes are the best because we commute together!

Our new apartment is pretty cookie-cutter, but we like it a lot. We especially love how close it is to the ferry. We ride our bikes to the boat, put our bikes on the boat, sit on the clean and pleasant ferry to San Francisco, then bike about 10-15 minutes to our offices. It is a great way to get to work. It takes about 20 minutes longer than BART (the Bay Area Rapid Transit subway system) and is about $1 more each way, but it is clean, it is pleasant, delays are super rare, you always get a seat, and there’s free wifi.

April and May brought guests! Gregg came out for a long weekend for fun and activities. We went to a baseball game (I got nachos!) and a magic show! Bill and I had been to this magic show before, but it is SO good we were excited to go again! Rich and Kaitlan, my brother-in-law and sister-in-law, also came out to visit for a fun long weekend. We went on a hike in the Berkeley Hills, rode bikes over the Golden Gate Bridge, went up to Napa Valley for more bike rides, delicious food and drinks, and a 2 hour massage and facial pampering session. It was so much fun to spend quality time together. And we got to see them again a few months later in June when Bill and I went back to Chicago!

I convinced my work that I should go to a conference for commercial interiors called NeoCon in Chicago and that I shouldn’t pay for it, and they agreed! I was sponsored by our incredible furniture vendors, and they put us up in a great hotel, had planned events like an architecture boat tour, happy hour, cooking class, and more happy hours, outside of the normal conference. It was really awesome. I had never been to NeoCon and it was a really great experience. Bill and I flew out the weekend before the conference, so we could spend time in the burbs with the family. We LOVE spending time with our amazing and energetic nephews and niece. It was SO fun! We then moved to the city for a few days during the conference but then back out to the burbs after it ended and flew back that weekend. It was a whirlwind, but a really great week in Chicago. We got to see lots of friends multiple times, and spend time with family (despite having to work during the days).

Love this picture.

Beep beep!

July brought another trip to New York. Bill’s parents were going to visit my parents for the holiday weekend, and we decided to crash their party. We wanted in on the fun too! I worked from headquarters and Bill worked remotely, but we took a couple days off too. July 4th was on Thursday, so we took Wednesday and Friday off for a full 5 day vacation! We landed late on Monday night and had to go to work on Tuesday, but we had a great family dinner in my parents’ tiny New England style house’s dining room that evening. I asked Bill if he wanted to show off his card tricks that he has been working on. He did a couple of very impressive card tricks, but ended the magic show with the most impressive of all! He had his mom pick a card, show all of us, memorize it, then put it back in the deck. He then had her look on the bookshelf behind him to look for her card and she found an oversized card folder. Inside the folder was another oversized card. Was it her card?! Nope. It was an even better card! What card was it? It was the WE’RE HAVING A BABY – COMING DECEMBER 2019 of Hearts card!!! It was the best surprise and such a fun way of announcing to our families in person together! (Actually, Rich and Kaitlan already knew because I didn’t drink on our Napa Valley wine country excursion, and they did a great job keeping the secret!) Everyone was so happy. There were hugs and tears and so much excitement.

The rest of the week was full of fun family hang outs, like going to my mom’s museum – the Hudson River Museum – having lunch at a restaurant right on the Hudson River, going to see the musical the Book of Mormon (it was funny and the actors were so talented, and I can see why it won all those Tonys, but it seemed like it was vulgar for vulgarity’s sake, and not really contributing to the story progression, but I’m not a Broadway critic), walked in Central Park on July 4th (the city was EMPTY!), ate lots of food, watched fireworks, watched the USWNT take names and be boss, and just enjoyed being together. We drove up to Albany to drop of Bob and Judy at the airport (they flew out of Albany because on their way in they made a stop in Upstate to visit a friend) on Friday and mostly relaxed the rest of the weekend before work on Monday and Tuesday. We went to the community pool, went to the city to play board games and have dinner with friends, decorated cookies that my mom made just for us to have fun decorating cookies, went to an Abba cover band concert, saw more friends and their new baby, and then flew back to SF and went straight to the office on Wednesday. Bill and I told our respective managers of our happy news and everyone is so happy and excited for us! We are too <3.

At the time of this blog post, I am 22 weeks along, so that’s more than halfway! We have decided not to find out the gender and be surprised once Zoltron is here. We also don’t want to limit Zoltron to societal constructs of gender (you know, girls wear pink and are sweet and boys wear blue and are strong). Babies are babies and we want to nurture Zoltron to grow into whoever and whatever Zoltron wants to be regardless of how they identify. Zoltron is what we are calling our superhero robot baby by the way, which is a combination of a Hungarian boy’s name and a Transformer. We love Zoltron. Zoltron loves having dance parties, getting the hiccups, and moving around. Zoltron is still a little too tiny for me to feel all movements, but bigger flips and pushing off I can feel! Zoltron has been a dream so far – no morning sickness, no vomiting, no debilitating nausea, no weird food cravings, no weird food sensitivities, nothing. The first trimester though I was really tired. Walking up a flight of stairs would have me crazy exhausted and I would sleep until noon on Saturdays! Bill would go play ultimate at 8:30am and come back around 11 and find me in the same place in bed sleeping/resting. I would get up when he told me the blueberry pancakes were ready. He really is the best.

Zoltron is brewing up just wonderfully. All organs are there, all my bloodwork testing for a million different things all came back negative (<- that’s good, it means there is nothing wrong), and we are both healthy! Zoltron is in the 53rd percentile of weight and length, which is exactly average, growing perfectly! (This is the only time this tiger mom will accept average. Just kidding! But also you’re taking every AP and Honors class just a heads up.) That was reassuring because Bill is a whole foot taller than me, has a big head, and was a big baby himself, and it is possible I might start to worry about getting a big superhero robot baby out of me! But I trust UCSF, our amazing hospital, to know what to do when the time comes. Bill and I will also be as prepared as we can be, but in general we are taking things pretty easy. The only books I read are the two by Emily Oster, an economics professor at Brown who did the hard work of compiling data on everything pregnancy and childbirth and infancy so families can make their own decisions based on statistics. There is a lot of wrong information out there on the internet and lots of outdated information out there in the minds of well-meaning people, so her books, Expecting Better and Cribsheets, lay out the numbers for readers to make their own decisions based on facts and non-biased analysis. Parenthood, and motherhood specifically, seems to invite judgement from everyone, and the words in the books empower the reader to not feel judged when making an informed decision that is right for their family. What is right for you and your family might not be right for me and my family, and yet we are both right! Imagine that!

Bill and I are so happy and so lucky and really looking forward to all that is to come! There’s still lots of logistics and things to work out, but for now, and probably forever, we will just live it up one day at a time.