2017 Year In Review

With 2017 officially coming to a close, I wanted to take a moment to look back at this year and reflect. All in all, 2017 was an incredibly good year. So many great things happened for me personally and for our family. It was a year of big change, big moves, and big accomplishments. My wife and I discussed some of the most memorable parts of the year for us as we counted down to midnight. (Full disclosure, neither of us actually stayed up to midnight, we called it quits early. Parenthood, right?). So here they are, in no particular order. Well, it's pretty much chronological order. But whatever.

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After nearly 7 years doing product management with Goldman Sachs, I made a significant career change, jumping into education technology and joining WGU. You can check out the details behind the move in another post, but it was something I had been preparing to do for a while and was fortunate enough to find the perfect role in a great place to work.

About the same time I was changing careers, we also sold our home. Again, this was a move that we had long been anticipating as we had outgrown our home and would need some additional space as we planned to add to our family as well as comfortably have Kelli's family come visit us from Texas (which happens several times a year). I certainly wouldn't suggest changing careers and selling your home at the exact same time, just as a general rule, but we don't really follow any general rules.

Fortunately, my amazing parents were willing to let us move in with them after our house was sold (more on that in a second). Not only that, but they moved into their own basement so we could have the main floor. Now merging two families into a single house isn't easy, and it wasn't in our case, but it was great to be able to spend the summer with them. Especially for the kids, who were showered with more attention than they knew how to handle. 

Of course the reason for selling our home and moving into my parents' house was so that we could build a home. We had been watching the market for some time, and had been keeping an eye on houses we were interested in. But when this floor plan came along in the exact area we were looking for, it was almost too good to be true. And it couldn't have worked out better. We were literally able to build our dream home.

Kelli and I also began a tradition of taking a nice vacation together. Surprisingly, this isn't something we've really done until recently (starting with a cruise late last year), but hopefully it is something we can continue doing. So we celebrated our 9 year anniversary in the best way we could think of - in Hawaii. 

We also had the amazing opportunity this year to see our children grow and blossom like they haven't done before. McCoy started both preschool and soccer. He went from being so reserved that he wouldn't leave our sides, to having no problem going out on his own and having fun with other kids. The first soccer game he played, he wouldn't take the field without me holding his hand (so yes, I got to run around with the kids too). But fortunately he overcame that fear by the second game and was off to the races.

In a similar vein, McKinley began taking dance classes and has grown into our little dancer. Not only is she the best dancer in the group (totally unbiased opinion on my part), but she takes it very seriously. She constantly dances around the house, practicing what she has learned. She also refers to herself as Kinley Ballerina. She looks forward to her dance class every week. I expect we'll look back on this year as when her love for dance started. And I expect in the not too distant future we'll be needing to move her to more and more advanced programs as she gets better and better.

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Of course I could go on for quite a bit longer with other highlights from the year. There were quite a few and we really did have an amazing year. But those were certainly the ones that stood out most to me and Kelli as we looked back. It's exciting to think of what 2018 will bring. 

I hope your 2017 was as good as ours, and hope that 2018 will be an amazing year for all of us!