2015 Year-In-Review

After a ridiculously insane and overwhelming 2014, we were desperately in need of a calmer 2015. Thankfully, 2015 delivered such a year (for the most part). Praise God!

Here are the most noteworthy things that characterized 2015:

January-June:

After my church hired me in April of 2014 as the database administrator, I soon realized how lacking the software we were using was. After annoying the crap out of my boss about it and doing lots of research, we decided to switch to a different database software. It was exciting to switch to a better software, but it gave me and my supervisor (and lots of others) a boatload of work!

So, the first half of 2015 was super busy at work and pretty stressful for a couple of months as we approached the data migration and immediately after the transfer. That last sentence already got way too nerdy, so I won’t bore with further details 🙂 It was intense. But awesome. My face broke out a lot due to stress. But the end result was so much better. The end.

April:

Caleb turned 4! He had a great party with lots of friends from church:

And he woke up on his birthday to the most epic streamer obstacle course (which he navigated with Olympian-like skill…didn’t even knock a single one down):

He also had a fun celebration at preschool:

June:

• My sisters and niece paid us a fun visit:

• Later in the month, our long-time friends, the Cooks, also paid us a fun visit:

• On June 30th, I turned 30…my “golden” birthday! I had a great time celebrating with coworkers, and later with Sean:

August:

• Evie Love turned 2! We invited two of her best girlfriends from church to celebrate – Kaia and Atley:

• We visited my family in southern CA and had a great time, as always (minus the multiple times Evie barfed all over the car on the drive down. I just gagged recalling the experience). No pics captured of that awesomeness, but we did get these:

• After a lot of thought and prayer, I made the tough decision to leave my job at church. During my 18 months working there, I experienced many great things, learned so much, and contributed a lot. However, I wanted to spend more time with my kiddos, as well as pursue a dream of mine to start an online business. I miss all the wonderful people I worked with, but I do think it was the right decision.

September:

• Sean and I celebrated our 8th anniversary, which I just realized we still have yet to celebrate…
• Caleb began his second and last year of preschool:

• Sean was promoted to a lead engineer role at work – a great accomplishment!
• And, of course, the most exciting event of September was becoming pregnant with our third kiddo! Hmmm, maybe we did celebrate our 8th anniversary, after all 😉 We meant to take our standard “excited-to-find-out-we’re-pregnant” pic, but yeah…that never happened. Also, I informed Sean of the news via text. Sorry, Seth. We really do love you, I promise. #thirdchildproblems

October:

• We took Evie to the cleft clinic for her 2-year-old checkup. She had her speech and hearing tested and passed with flying colors! We weren’t concerned, but it was still nice to confirm that everything looked good. And following up on last year’s recap post, God obviously has a sense of humor because Evie is not missing a tooth – in fact, she grew TWO teeth where she should only have one! A problem that will certainly be much easier to correct than a missing tooth, thankfully. Woop!
• We spent 10 days in Hawaii with Sean’s fam, compliments of Nana and Pop Pop 🙂 It was beautiful and the kids had so much fun!

• With obnoxious (yet predictable) timing, morning sickness set in while in HI and kicked off the typical 3 months of first trimester hell. At least for me, pregnancy hormones are no joke and always work me over. So, for the last few months of the year, I became pretty depressed which is normal for me during pregnancy. This round, I also felt especially worn down, wrangling two “spirited” children, while growing a third. I didn’t get out much, avoided interacting with people, and wasn’t very productive (aside from growing a human…ya know, no big deal).

• At the end of the month, we said goodbye to “GG” (Great Grandma Jane). It is sad we won’t see her on Earth again, but she lived a very long, well-spent life and we know she’s in Heaven now. She was so wonderful with the kids and we’ll always cherish these great memories and photos:

November:

• Sean finished relandscaping (is that a word? It is now) our front yard, which was a project that spanned many months and was a great feat! It was a crazy amount of work and he did such an awesome job:

• We visited my family for Thanksgiving:

December:

We spread the news of our new mini human with this fun announcement:

 

And here are some various other memories from the year:

 

 

Looking back on the year-in-review post from 2014 and reading the goals I made for 2015, I would say I mostly failed. Ha! I guess they were a tad too ambitious. There’s always 2016. Wait – nope, we’re already more than halfway through 2016 and I’m still failing. Crap. I’ll definitely have to pull the I-grew-a-freaking-human-from-scratch card here. 2017?? Maybe? Obviously, I am very determined. To be continued…

2014 Year-In-Review
2013 Year-In-Review
2012 Year-In-Review
2011 Year-In-Review