36.attend kindergarten graduation (50x50)

When it's all said and done, Roddy loved this year at the New Century School and he'll get to attend two kindergarten graduations because we're redshirting him. 

Redshirting is the practice of postponing entrance into kindergarten of age-eligible children in order to allow extra time for socioemotional, intellectual, or physical growth.

This was such a hard year. He was the youngest of his class and it showed. Our first month was virtual and it was fucking hard, man. Jason and I aren't educators, nor do we want to be. Roddy is an adventure in and of himself, regardless of the activity in front of him. When we made the decision to move, we also decided to sign him up for kindergarten at his new school, Stoneleigh Elementary. 

He'll thrive with the confidence and all of the new disciples he can attract into his cult. 

43.save ~$675K (50x50)

There were so many competing feelings about moving: accomplishment, guilt, resentment,  excitement, grief, and relief.... pretty much in that order.

Even though Jason grew up in the Baltimore area, both of us were open to living in other cities as long as it made financial and recreational sense. Baltimore is the second most cost-effective place to live in the United States - you're close to DC and high paying jobs, but don't have to deal with the snobbery inside the beltway when it comes to living expenses. 

I'm no stranger to moving; since getting clean I've moved 10 times. From DC to VA to CA to VA to DC to DE to VA to MD to VA to MD and again in MD. The last three times have all been to set ourselves up for financial stability. We moved from Fells Point to my mom's to save money for a down payment on a house. Then we used that down payment savings for a house in Charles Village. We chose Charles Village because of it's proximity to Penn Station, so I'd be able to get down to DC and those projects easily, because of the diversity in the neighborhood, and because we could walk to the grocery. #RIPeddiesCV 

We felt so good to own one of the painted ladies on Calvert (well, potential painted ladies, it was on our list of things to do to the house - paint the outside as brightly as others' in the neighborhood)
One of the assumptions when we moved was that we would have some financial help to send the kids to private school, because, well, Baltimore isn't exactly known for it's stellar elementary and middle school programs (see all of the Sun articles on broken air conditioners, no heating, also, season four of the Wire). They are very well known for their magnet highschools - and I was holding out for them - until I couldn't anymore. After getting pregnant the third time, we couldn't make that assumption about financial support, and it's reasonable that when the circumstances changed that the financial expectation changed.

We did the math. Three kids, average private school cost per year is $15k, from primary school to 12th grade, equals $675,000. That's the equivalent cost to an upper middle class house in Roland Park! Except at the end of 18 years, we'd have that amount of equity to sell if we wanted. We started thinking of how we could get the kids into a public school district that was ranked better than Margaret Brent. 
This is where the guilt comes in. We are in enough of a financially stable situation where we could even have these conversations. I had joined the Friends of Margaret Brent parents group in 2017, as soon as we moved in. There are twelve other kids on our block in Charles Village who were zoned to go there, all the kids would have to do is cross Calvert street and they would be in the building from kindergarten to 8th grade. There are other families who are sending their kids there who are just like us (DC/NoVA transplants). Maybe if I had done more with the Friends group, we could have seen some movement with the school ranking factors. There are a lot of maybes.

Jason was on a bike ride when I took the kids to the Waverly farmers market in October 2020. After picking up donuts and a breakfast burrito we walked over the open space in the Abel neighborhood and met up with our neighbors who had just moved from Charles Village to Armagh, which is a tiny little neighborhood in northern Baltimore/south Towson. They had a covid baby too and had moved during the pandemic, so Lindsay's words were immensely comforting when she said that it was important to do what's best for our family, right now.

When we came to the decision that we would move, we were offered financial support to make the move faster than we had moved the last time to Charles Village (which took two years). Like, we needed to move before Congress counted the electoral votes in December 2020! I resent that I didn't put my foot down and say it was going to take as much time as it was going to take. Instead, when told to jump, I said, "how high?" 

That lived with me until ... still lives with me.

Back in August 2020, we reached out to Kim Lally Holmes (our kids have been making her name into one: KimLally) because as much as we absolutely love Charles Village - and the place she helped us find in 2017 (after two years of searching) - we had decided to move to a better school district. There are a couple of things to put this endeavor into context: 1) I had just given birth in June 2020, 2) the pandemic for personal safety reasons, 3) two toddlers - one of whom is currently in hybrid school because of the pandemic, 4) coming out of maternity leave, 5) KimLally had just started her own realty group, and 6) the pandemic real-estate market is BANANAS.

She managed to manage us into the sweet spot of selling our current home within a day of putting it on the market, with multiple offers, for full asking price and some wiggle room for finding our next house. She sent her stager, Julie, over first in October - to be a mediator between me and Jason about what updates needed to be made to the house. From there, we had a path forward and a clear list of things to get done to get the most for our house. When we were done with the house updates, we came up with a selling strategy in January and within a week it was on the market AND under contract.

On the buying side, there were times over the past seven months that I didn't think that we were going to find a place because the current inventory of homes is so low. KimLally is a staple of the Baltimore real estate community - whenever I'd show up at random open houses, the seller's agent would always have something positive to say about her. She dug deep into her network to find us our new home. She was always available to take us to see houses - some of which were just excursions to see what a huge budget could buy us. She was always pragmatic about the pros and cons of a house and never tried to sway us one way or another.

She also has a great sense of humor. On the night we visited the house that we would ultimately come to buy, we saw three homes and it was the second of three. The third was an immaculate renovation, very chic, like straight out of a Pinterest board. While we were walking around Jason made a comment that the second house seemed like we should be shooting heroin while listening to Nine Inch Nails in the kitchen in comparison. When we closed on the second house last week, KimLally sent us a text saying, "The heroin den is yours! Congratulations!"

That being said, we absolutely love the #hOme we chose and KimLally and her team hustled so that we could close within 19 days of submitting our offer. This buy has enabled a $675K cost avoidance. It was a rough year, but we positioned ourselves well financially for the future and that's what's important.

39.remain employed after current project ends (50 x 50)

It was early afternoon in Glen Canyon, Arizona, on an epic three-week long vacation with Roddy and Jason, when I got a call that changed our lives. It was from Deloitte, they said that it was official, I was hired. I had been working on a project for four years for a company that was a subcontractor to Deloitte.  I had started to look for work in Baltimore, since that was where we were going to make our life. When Deloitte heard that, they asked how they could keep me on the project. It was about a month before the contract was recompeted, and so when the project ended, I remained employed.

Lion's head in Antelope Canyon in the Navajo Nation on the same trip, maybe even on the same day. 

Since starting with Deloitte, I've had an amazing journey. Multiple projects, multiple accounts, two maternity leaves (completely paid for 16 weeks) and amazing coworkers. Not only have I remained employed, but I like what I do, it's easy to get up in the morning and go to work. #lovethislife

29.Get naked on top of Acadia National Park (50 x 50)

Since we celebrated Roddy's first birthday at the North Rim Lodge at the Grand Canyon in 2016, we've been traipsing around at the end of the summer to national parks to celebrate his birth... with a Simba pic... those will become MORE fun when Roddy gets to be an adolescent.

I don't remember where I heard it, but there's this thing about going topless at the furthest points of the continental United States. Acadia National Park is one of the first places that the sun hits the US in the morning - so I guess there's a thing about showing the Sun your boobies FIRST THING in the morning. I didn't actually show my tits because the top of Acadia is extremely cold first thing in the AM as well as ridiculously busy with tourists. But we did get Roddy's Simba shot without getting other tourists in frame.

We met my parents up there on their boat and sailed around the island with them for a few days. Roddy loves the boat; Grandbear got him a harness that attaches to the main halyard so if he went overboard we wouldn't have to go too far to get him.

I was seven months pregnant with Stella when we went to Acadia. Had I known how perfect it is for kids, we would have scheduled a longer visit. There are so many carriage roads for bike rides and so many places to go swimming. It was magical.

Roddy did not want to touch a lobstah.

the bubbles... look like boobies.

42. survive a pandemic (50x50)

Flippantly, when I think about this, I think there's no way that I could have added this to a leap list until after the fact. It just never occurred to me that, as an American living in Baltimore Maryland, I would ever experience a global pandemic and state-instituted quarantine. that's some privilege, right there.

we did though.

This was a spectacular year, literally, it was a sight to see and live through. We already knew that it was going to be full of change and adventure because we started the year off by deciding that we were going to become a family of five. We quit smoking before we arrived in Connecticut for the winter holiday. In Vermont we heard an announcement about another virus that was impacting Wuhan, China and we asked Roddy's school about the foreign exchange students expected to travel from China. It only took a few days for them to respond saying that they were cancelling the program for the Spring semester.

Grammy had moved in with us in 2019 so that she could split her time between St. Marks and Timberlost, the new house she was building from the ground up in Canaan Valley, West Virginia. We knew that the house wasn't going to be complete before bebe #3 arrived, but that we'd have support for going to Johns Hopkins hospital again. We knew that we would have six months of maternity leave with Deloitte from June to December.

Then shit got real.

Collectively, the adaptations that we faced together every single day were nothing short of revolutionary. We switched to 100% remote work, had a baby in a pandemic, lived through Stella's toddlerhood, absorbed Roddy back into the daily routine when school shut down, had to decide what to do about preschool for Stella and kindergarten for Roddy for the year, quit Mom's, had our car wrecked on Calvert, lived without a car for a few months, got promoted, bought a new car,  invited Christy to live with us because the YMCA was putting her at risk so she quit, managed a few months of remote kindergarten, switched projects and accounts after maternity leave, came back from maternity early, decided to move for a better school district,  had a serious health scare with Jason getting a blood clot in his kidney and Grandbear with another heart problem, sold Calvert Street house, bought another house, moved into a airBnB while improvements were made on Anneslie, moved into Anneslie, fought a serious case of dermatitis.

We went through a lot of bubbles. We wasted a lot of water in the backyard pool. We ate Lucky Charms for a week straight while we figured out a grocery game plan and the kids pooped green for a week as a result. We saved so much money with working remotely. We doubled down into living with the grand parents in Connecticut and West Virginia through maternity leave in the height of the pandemic. We took seven COVID tests. We went on a lot picnics after Amelia was born. We bought a lot of face masks, never had a problem with toilet paper, Grammy stocked us up when she moved in from Arlington. We had our little "pod" with the Coonce's. We never got sick, there were one or two little stomach bugs that passed through the family after a grocery trip. We had hose fights with the next door neighbors. 

We made it through because Jason is #allheart. Because Deloitte provided amazing benefits. Because I worked my ass off while Jason was a Stay At Home Dad. We never gave up on each other. We never lost our sense of humor (much).