2024 is off to a beautiful start. We started off the year completely focused on Elle and ended it celebrating our last trip as a family of 3. I am so excited for the year to come.

We started 2024 strong. After a beautiful dinner at The Modern to close out 2023 we began the year with a beautiful cold walk in Riverside Park and spent the following few days starting to look at daycares for Elle. I’m sure it’s an overwhelming experience for any soon-to-be parent but the added difficulty of being in New York City feels insane. We found two different daycares we liked and got on their waitlist. We spent a lot of time braving the cold in early January with our first snowfall in years. Nothing stuck around for all that long but I’ll never forget walking back from brunch and looking at furniture to snow coming down. We still love it.

We did our best to get out as much as Jenn was up to. We got a few great brunches in and a stunning but underwhelming Korean BBQ Restaurant called Gaonnuri in midtown. We had a beautiful table looking over a crystal clear Manhattan evening. Even though the food was mediocre the experience was a blast. We even got a Japanese cheesecake nearby to take home and watch a movie.

Jenn continued to feel a lot better and was hitting her stride with the pregnancy and second trimester. That is until she fell and broke her elbow on the ice. On January 17th she was walking Frasier at Riverside Park and fell straight on the ice. She went to urgent care and told her to go to the emergency room to make sure both Elle and Jenn were OK. The good news is that after 6+ hours in the hospital everything checked out fine (outside of her elbow) and we walked out together at close to midnight with a sling and an otherwise clean bill of health. Ironically it was the next day that we went for our latest “detailed scan” of Elle which was a two-hour experience in the warmest doctor’s office room we’ve ever sat in. It’s always amazing to see Elle on the big screen and she’s growing so fast.

A few days later Jenn was off to her last team offsite before maternity leave. She flew off to Dublin via Air Canada and had a few days to let her body adjust before a grueling few days offsite. We wanted to get a small trip this year and decided to build it on the back of her trip and before my work trip. We met in Vienna (the most convenient flight we could find from Dublin) on Thursday the 25th. I arrived via a stop in London and Jenn arrived a few hours after I did. We met at the Park Hyatt Vienna and for the next three days fell back in love with this magical city. I’m going to do a full recap of the trip but long story short it was one of the best weekends of my life. I’ll never forget it. Jenn was glowing, and I could start to see the incredible amount of love and care she already has for our daughter. She spent every night in the bathtub talking to Elle like she’s been there for years.

We left on the 28th of January to London for my work week to start and thankfully for the first time in a year, Jenn joined me on the entire work trip. It was so nice to come home from work on this trip and have Jenn there waiting for me. It’s something that I will long for every trip I take after this. That brought an end to January. Consistently it’s one of the busiest work months of the year for both of us but we were still able to carve out time for the two of us to enjoy the last few months of our small family before our new addition arrives.

TV WE WATCHED

I’m shocked by how little TV we watched in January and I’m not sure why. I think it’s likely because Jenn was very tired most nights so we tended to go to sleep a lot earlier than normal. The main watches for January were Platonic on Apple TV + which we both thought was fine. The second season of Heartstopper on Netflix was just as (if not more) adorable than the first season albeit a few episodes too long. We watched a few episodes of the last season of Barry but I’m not sure we’ll make it to the end. And finally I watched most of For All Mankind’s 4th season which continues to be one of my favorite shows on TV.

BOOKS I READ (OR LISTENED TO)

It makes me so happy looking at these 5 books below. What a great month of reading. Only one 3-star read (Cribsheet), three 4-star reads, and one 5-star (Endurance). It was a great month of reading. I started with Cribsheet which I liked a lot but found to be quite repetitive towards the end. Granted I need to read her first book (Expecting Better) but it was helpful to sort of know a rough idea of what to expect when our daughter arrives.

The second book was my first trip back into the world of Kvothe and The Name of the Wind (my favorite fantasy book of all time) in many years and it was a great story. I only wish it was longer. Both Hello Beautiful and The Storied Life of AJ Fikry were just lovely reads. They were both great.

But my favorite book of the month was Endurance the true story of an expedition to Antarctica in the early 1900s that went bad from the start and their amazing heroics to survive. I have no idea how they managed all that they did but it made for an unbelievable read.

MOVIES WE WATCHED

We only watched two movies this month and they both came at the beginning of January. The first was Good Grief which Jenn liked a lot more than I did. I found it a bit melodramatic although still a fun and interesting movie. We also bought (not sure why) The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes. I hadn’t realized they released a prequel book, but it was a very fun/entertaining movie. Albeit it wasn’t one that I plan to revisit any time soon.

THEATER WE SAW

I’m sad to say this category will likely see a big decline in 2024. Not only with our daughter less than 6-months away but having Jenn sit in a small chair for 2-3 hours is sounding less and less appealing to her. We made our way to one show this month, Days of Wine and Roses: The Musical. It received a critic’s choice from The New York Times and is starring two of Broadway’s biggest stars. The title and the write-up had both Jenn and I interested and while we both enjoyed it we weren’t prepared for how depressing it would be. There were roses but there was a lot more wine, and the deep dive into the alcoholic lifestyle made for a rather dark and dreary winter show.

GAMES I'VE BEEN PLAYING

I probably played Madden and NBA more than anything this month which meant in the mornings on the weekend or a quick game at night while Jenn worked or took a shower. I’ve been slowly making my way through Spider-Man 2 but it just hasn’t been as captivating as the first game.