As anyone with children can attest, bringing a baby into the world is probably the greatest—in all the senses of that word—change you can experience. Maggie and I have learned to parent at roughly the same rate our boy Leon has learned to baby. After ten short months, he knows how to army crawl, growl like a jungle cat, throw spoons, sleep 13 hours in a row, and win over roomfuls of people with his un-self-aware, two-toothed smile. An errand to the post office with Leon can be a pretty good time.
The travel was much lower key in 2018—walks around the block, strolls to the mailbox. But also a couple of road trips and lots of flights for weddings all over the country. We discovered that on a plane ride you can check the car seat for free, and—as any modern parent knows—pack a lot more crap into the storage bag than just the car seat. Also, we fly Southwest, and family boarding has really cut down on the C39 boarding position walks of shame, where you scan for an open spot, trying to catch the eye of a sympathetic early boarder while they use coats, bags, volleyballs with drawn on faces and baseball caps to try to fill the empty seat next to them.
Real Estate Update
We finished renovating the duplex we bought at the beginning of 2018. Maggie would say that we cut it close, but we had almost 4 whole weeks to move in and unpack before she delivered our baby. Plenty of time. I learned a ton working on this project, as most every aspect of the home needed repaired, replaced, or updated. Being a duplex, sometimes I got double the experience I would have had otherwise. We also finished the renovation of 1401 Patton with our friends at Urban Forest. I got to dust off the woodworking tools and employ some long-dormant muscle memory, while trying my hand at several new types of projects I'd never done before.