Open Diary is Back!

I’m excited to see that Open Diary is back up and running. I started this diary when I was seventeen years old and in just over a week I’ll be 35. I don’t know that I ever imagined still writing in this diary in my mid-thirties. Or that my first entry in over six years would be written during a worldwide pandemic.

So as I mentioned above, I’m about to turn 35. In a little less than a month, I will be celebrating eleven years with my husband and in June we will celebrate our eighth wedding anniversary. Our older son, Isaac, just turned four and missed his birthday party due to COVID-19. Our younger son, Benjamin, will be two in June.

Once I got a full-time job, I quit my job at the brewpub and ran for the Board of Directors. I finished my three-year term in 2017. I’ve been working in product marketing for five-and-a-half years (the last month from home), a job which isn’t thrilling in content, but allows me to work with some awesome people and travel the world (at least, until this whole pandemic put a damper on my traveling). My job has sent me to Denver (regularly), San Francisco, San Jose, Atlanta, Nashville, and New Orleans in the States and overseas to Tokyo once. It has helped me conquer my fear of flying and traveling (especially the 13+ hour flight to Tokyo). I really hope once the pandemic gets under control that I’ll be able to start traveling again; the single stamp (sticker, actually) in my passport is lonely.

Five years ago we bought our dream house about 20 miles northwest of where we lived before. It’s a big, gorgeous house in a quiet and friendly neighborhood. We’re in the process of replacing the windows (which is a complete disaster…thanks, Lowe’s) and hope to do more home improvement projects once our full pay is restored after the economy recovers. We bought the house in April 2015, moved in in May 2015, started trying for a baby in June 2015, and were expecting in July 2015. So we had a very short amount of time just the two of us before we added our two sons to the family.

Speaking of our sons, they are amazing. Isaac is incredibly smart! He started speaking at a really young age and sometimes it seems he hasn’t taken a breath ever since. He loves playing video games and making up games of his own. He started preschool at the end of last summer, but didn’t get the chance to finish the school year because of COVID-19. But his teacher told us that he knew everything she was teaching anyway. He just recently started riding a big boy bike with training wheels and just this evening he was flying through the neighborhood on our walk/bike ride.

Ben is also incredibly smart! He started talking a little later than Isaac, but his vocabulary has grown by leaps and bounds since he gave up his pacifier during the day. He’s very independent and has no fear, which makes it challenging to look after him while trying to work from home. I have to get him down from the counter several times a day, as he climbs on a barstool to get to the fruit bowl for a banana. He’s very loud and opinionated, but also a sweetheart. Both boys are adored by their daycare/preschool teachers, who all miss them terribly since they’ve been at home due to COVID-19.

I’m not sure how often I’ll update this diary. My life is pretty mundane and I have a hard enough time updating the Moleskine journal I bought before the pandemic. But it’s good to be back and take time to drop an update. Maybe the next time I read this I’ll be forty and it will be interesting to look back five years.