Raise your hand if you predicted that parenthood would make us even less consistent at blog posts. It's okay, don't be shy - my hand's raised, too! Hannah impressively pulled together a post within a month of Riley's birth, but now Riley's 5 months old so it's time for me (Jeremiah) to catch everyone up!
Parenthood has been a rollercoaster so far. The highs are even higher than I imagined. I didn't expect a simple smile from a baby could bring me so much joy! At first I thought babies were incapable of reciprocating love, but now I think a smile - an unsolicited, smiling-with-every-part-of-herself, full-eye-contact smile - is how she reciprocates our love. It's still different than parent-to-child love, of course: she's not sacrificing anything for me yet. But it's the most she can do right now. And if she giggles, too, I can't help but laugh right back at her. In fact, that once led to a solid 90 seconds of nonstop laughter as Riley seemed to realize the cause-and-effect relationship and kept giggling every time I caught my breath from laughing.
The lows, while not perhaps any worse than I thought they'd be, are certainly challenging. Only a few months in, I'm realizing parenthood can hold up a magnifying glass to the parts of myself I'd rather not acknowledge, like my impatience and anger. These gremlins rear their ugly heads in moments when she seems completely inconsolable, sobbing instead sleeping because, ironically, she's just so darn tired. I think my frustration in those moments comes from how unreasonable I think she's being, and particularly the fact that, without language, I can't reason with her. (Though parents of older kids may argue that understanding language still doesn't guarantee we can reason with a child!) But parenthood is about unconditional love, and that means loving her with my actions even in moments where I lack the feelings of love. Problem is, it's hard to have such a mature thought in a time of extreme stress! But, still... baby steps. No pun intended, as she's still nowhere close to walking. She did just start consistently rolling at will, though!
And don't let that last paragraph mislead you - I'm loving parenthood. And I'm also loving how beautiful parenthood looks on Hannah! Where I lack patience, Hannah makes up for it, plus adds a little more for good measure. I think we've functioned really well as a team so far, and seeing Hannah's love for Riley only deepens my love for both of them. We may not have as much time to invest in quality time with one another as we did before Riley - and I'm sure that will only become more challenging with time - but on the whole, I can confidently say parenthood has strengthened our marriage. I pray for the energy and discipline to ensure it continues doing so!
So let's pick up where Hannah left off in October: Riley was still only a few weeks old, and I'd juuust gone back to work! Speaking of work, it was, well, chaos. The project I'd been supporting for the last couple years was essentially at its most critical, work-intensive phase for the last quarter of 2023, which made it a rather inconvenient time to have a baby (especially for my coworkers who had to pick up my slack!). But as they say, there's never a convenient time! It took a couple days to get back into the swing of things, but once I did, it was pedal-to-the-metal every day. Thankfully the chaos (or at least, my exposure to it) didn't last long: I was only back for 4 weeks before I took another 2 weeks of paternity leave leading into Thanksgiving; then back to work for 2 days before our Beaver Creek trip; then 1 more week of work before my final 2 weeks of paternity leading into Christmas & New Year's.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. In late October my parents drove up from Phoenix to spend 2 weeks with us. It was so great to have them and Hannah's parents around for most of the first couple months! They gave us much-needed rest and quality time with Riley, so we rarely had to think about preparing meals, cleaning dishes, etc. Plus it was awesome to watch them interact with Riley, especially my own parents since there was no precedent (and certainly not SEVEN precedents!) for what they'd be like as grandparents. Riley's so fortunate to have four incredibly loving, generous grandparents with both the means and the desire to spend time with her despite living in a different state!
If you're wondering why my parents drove instead of flying, they brought with them the crib my dad made for Riley! It is absolutely beautiful, and even more impressive when you consider he made it in just 6ish months of weeknight/weekend work. Plus, it's the first piece of furniture he designed to be disassembled, so that was a unique challenge for him to overcome! But you wouldn't know it by looking at it. And it matches the rocking chair (his wedding gift to us) so well! #InstantFamilyHeirloom
The weekend before they arrived, Hannah and I took Riley on what's become a little tradition at Halloween and Christmas: Chick-Fil-A for dinner, followed by driving around the neighborhood looking at decorations and sipping on milkshakes! Highlands Ranch makes it easy for us: they create a map of the best-decorated houses, so we can plug in an address and know exactly where to go!
My office always puts on a big Halloween party, too, and it's very family friendly, so Hannah brought Riley and we got to introduce her to a lot of my coworkers who were anxious to meet her! My team dressed up as snacks (I went as my favorite chip: Jalapeno Kettle) so Hannah kept Riley on-theme by DIY-ing a little Babybel cheese costume. Pretty impressive, right? Isn't she the cutest little curd you've ever seen??
For the holiday itself, we typically order in food and watch a Halloween-oriented movie. This year was no different! Jet's pizza and Ghostbusters, which Hannah had never seen and I hadn't watched in probably 10 years. Honestly it was better than I remembered, goofy and cheesy but exactly what it was trying to be. 10/10.
In mid-November, Brian and Terrisa paid us a visit, too. They timed it perfectly: they arrived right when I ended my 4-week stint back at work, and then I was off through Thanksgiving, so it felt kinda celebratory even though they weren't here for me! Haha. They helped us discover our new favorite boba place, Tiger Den, which is conveniently only like two minutes from us! And of course, Brian gave it a raving review (@brianlovesboba you can thank me later for the followers I'm sending your way, #1sip2balls). We also feasted on margs and chips right down the road at Los Dos Potrillos. Turns out, yes, you can make a full meal out of just margs, chips, and dips!
Just before Thanksgiving, Hannah and I drove down to Colorado Springs to catch up with my great Uncle Ralph and Aunt Jan, and introduce them to Riley. They were obsessed! It was so cute to watch Riley fall asleep draped across Uncle Ralph. And, per usual, Aunt Jan treated us to a delicious lunch.
Hannah's parents flew in Thanksgiving morning and helped handle Riley while Hannah and I prepared what I have to say was a pretty awesome meal! We had ham (who needs turkey?), green bean casserole, stuffing, and rolls, plus apple pie bars for dessert. It was fun to prepare food for them after so many instances of the other way around!
Then, if you know us well, you'll know that the following week was our annual Warren family trip to Beaver Creek. This year there wasn't much snow yet, so no ski-in-ski-out (only missed it by a couple days!), but still a good couple runs in the main village. Really, though, what made it special - what always makes it special - was all the uninterrupted family time, amplified even more this year by having Riley with us. This was her first time meeting Heather, George, Bobby, and most of her cousins. Some took quite well to her: Paisley loved holding her whenever she could, and was only mildly thrown off by her occasional spit-up. Others (cough, Reid, cough) felt threatened by her mere presence! It's okay, we give him a pass. How was he supposed to know his mommy and daddy hadn't spontaneously produced their fifth child?
We also celebrated Hannah's 29th birthday, as we always do up there, with pizza and games in the game room. We followed it up with ice cream upstairs! And after the trip ended, for her actual birthday, we went out to dinner at Postino for some faaantastic bruschetta! Then we came home and watched the Grinch while munching on peppermint bark and homemade Biscoff cookie milkshakes (which Hannah freaking NAILED, by the way. I'm drooling just thinking about them!).
The following Friday, we went on an amazing food tour of the RiNo (River North) neighborhood in Denver with the rest of my work team for an end-of-year offsite! Someone had to bow out last-minute, so my boss offered for Hannah to come in her place, along with Riley, too! I'm so grateful for teammates I enjoy spending time with and a boss who prioritizes our camaraderie (and good food)! Honestly, our whole team is maybe a tad too obsessed with food. But in our defense, it's a good conversation-starter because it's a shared experience no matter your age, race, etc.! Wish I had photos of everything, but the highlights were burrata, Japanese-fried chicken, pizza, tacos, and mochi donuts. We were stuffed!!
After a final brief stint back at work, Hannah and I had a nice couple weeks off together with Riley before we drove down to AZ for Christmas. For our Christmas light-viewing drive around Highlands Ranch this year, we dropped by "The Gingerbread House", which was featured in a previous season of HGTV's Great Christmas Light Fight. They lost to some drone-obsessed nerds in Texas with way too much time on their hands, but that didn't take away from their own awe-inspiring facade of lights. It literally looks like a gingerbread house, it's so colorful and coordinated and precise!
Hannah and I have always enjoyed roadtrips, ever since our first one (and still biggest to-date) from Phoenix to Orlando back in 2014. Since moving to Colorado, we've always cherished the opportunities to drive down for the holidays instead of flying! We were curious if we'd still feel that way after trying it with Riley, and fortunately, she was about as cooperative as she could have been, so we're still in the "I love roadtrips" camp!
While it's normally a 12-hour drive we knock out in one day, we knew that wouldn't be feasible with Riley since we'd have to stop every few hours to feed her. Fortunately, our friends Mel and Mason moved to Durango last summer, which is a nearly perfect halfway point! So we split it up over two days, and took an extra day on the way down to spend more time with them. They took us to their favorite little bakery for breakfast and a delicious Chipotle-style Mexican spot for dinner! We also met their new fur-baby, Bandit, went on a leisurely walk along a river, played a lot of cribbage, and watched Klaus (which is now one of my favorite Christmas movies, by the way! So good!). We're so grateful for their friendship even though they did us dirty and moved away form us. (Please ignore the hypocrisy of that statement, AZ friends...)
Our time in AZ for Christmas was, as expected, wonderful! We rolled in the night of the 23rd, and my family immediately went to town hanging out with Riley. They got so many chuckles and "talking" out of her, she must really love them! And on Christmas Eve, we got to introduce her to my grandparents as well as my Aunt Sam, Uncle Paul, and cousin Troy. Riley accommodated all the new faces and pass-offs quite well! It was also a meaningful Christmas Eve in that it was likely our last at my grandparents' house, as they're planning to stop their snowbirding and settle down in Salina year-round starting this year. Thankfully Salina's still only a 6-hour drive from Denver!
Christmas Day was another one for the memory book with Hannah's family. We typically only buy gifts for the nieces/nephews, but even that has become challenging now that there's 8 of them! So this year, every couple came with 1 or 2 games/challenges that we all played together, and whoever won would get to pick a prize from a pool of miscellaneous gifts like gift cards, Legos, candy, etc. In addition to our traditional Saran-wrapped ball unwrapping, left-right-and-center, and candy-based white elephant, some of my other favorites were: moving candy canes from one pile to another using only a candy cane held in your mouth; shaking ping pong balls out of a tissue box wrapped around your waist; and family trivia.
The next morning we took my grandparents out for breakfast (our Christmas gift to them) and spent a bit more time with them at their house, since we don't get to see them very often and especially wanted to make sure they had a lot of time to meet Riley. It was so nice!
Later that week, we introduced Riley to our best friends, Tommy and Emily, who are expecting their own first baby any day now! They made us a delicious lunch, and we had fun playing games and just generally catching up. It was brief, but thankfully we got to see them again just a couple weeks later! More on that later.
We also got to see a couple friends from our old small group, Sam and Kim, who we hadn't seen in probably 6 years! They're in the thick of parenthood right now with 3 young boys, but seem to be thriving and cherishing it, and we expected nothing less!
Apart from that, the trip was just a bunch of great family time, which included street hockey in Brian's neighborhood and a delicious adults-only dinner out with Hannah's parents and siblings. We drove back to Durango on New Year's Eve, which was fun to celebrate with Mel and Mason - Riley went down pretty easily and then we got to hang out with them the rest of the night! Then we finished the drive home on New Year's Day.
Since then, the theme has been finding our new rhythm as both Hannah and I returned to work having used up our parental leave. Well, sort of... Colorado recently started a program that offers up to 12 weeks of paid leave within the first 12 months of your baby's birth/adoption, and for 2023 babies, it does NOT run concurrently with the FMLA Hannah already used! The pay maxes out too low for us to afford me using it, but it almost completely covers Hannah's pay, so she's been working with her manager to figure out times to use that paid leave. It's already come in handy - you can use it down to the hour, so she's been using it in place of PTO, which is helping build her PTO back up after she (forcibly) burned it all as part of her maternity leave.
Daycare has been going pretty well! It's right across the street from my office, so I handle drop-off and pick-up without adding much time to my typical routine. Riley's always happy to see her teacher when I drop her off, and then happy to see me when I pick her up, so I think they're treating her well! We also get updates throughout the day via an app on our phones, which is helpful to keep tabs on how the day's going. If we're lucky they might even post a photo or two!
This last week, we took advantage of daycare's wide window (they're open 7am to 6pm) by dropping her off just after they opened, then driving up to Copper Mountain for some skiing just the two of us! And with the light weekday traffic, we were able to ski from 9:45am until 2:45pm and still make it back to pick up Riley at 5:30pm!
We also fit in a couple days at Copper in mid-January: my mom flew up on a Tuesday afternoon, then we drove up Wednesday morning for skiing Wednesday and Thursday, staying at a hotel in Silverthorne (~20 minutes from Copper) Wednesday night. My mom just hung out with Riley in the food court while Hannah and I skied, and then we'd pop in every few hours for Hannah to feed Riley! It was a win-win: Hannah and I got to ski a lot, Riley bonded with Grameva, and my mom bonded with Riley (without having to share her with anyone!). Hannah's parents will be flying up in March for a similar trip!
The weekend before that little ski trip, Hannah and I flew back to AZ for Tommy and Emily's baby shower! It was a super quick trip, out Friday night and back Sunday night, but we still managed to fit in time with both families on top of the shower and some bonus time with T&E! It was a beautiful shower, lots of tasty food and a fun, bubbly atmosphere. They had home videos playing in the background, and it was remarkable how unrecognizable both Tommy and Emily were until they were probably ~12 months old or more. Made me wonder what Riley will end up looking like, if it won't match how she looks now! But I suppose as a parent I'll always see a bit of 5-month Riley in her! Also, happy to report that her first plane flights were good ones (though I've heard it only gets harder from here...)
That Saturday also happened to be my birthday, and Tommy and Emily couldn't let it go unnoticed even at their own event: they brought out a little cupcake with a candle in it and sung a quick, private "happy birthday", which was sweet. We'd also celebrated that morning by going out to breakfast with my family, and then that night Hannah's family ordered Barro's pizza and her mom made a fantastic PB-chocolate cake! So despite the fact that the trip was for celebrating T&E, I felt pretty celebrated too!
The next weekend, my cousin Carly happened to be in town for work, so she spent Friday night and Saturday morning with us and got to meet Riley! It was awesome to catch up with her and see her dote on Riley. I can tell she's gonna be a great mom some day!
On Super Bowl weekend we got not one but two opportunities to catch up with old friends that we hadn't seen in years! We met Jess and Josh for breakfast, then Stacey brought us Rise and Shine biscuit sandwiches for lunch!
Since then, things have been pretty chill... I enjoyed making sourdough for the first time in months, we've gone on some nice walks as the weather's been unseasonably warm (read: comfortable), and we're just taking each day as it comes, trying to cherish these moments before they fall right through our grasp!
To close: a photo dump of everything I couldn't fit in organically above. Took me way too long to winnow it down, and it's still a lot!
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