Month: April 2013

It’s been nice having some more typical weekends … weekends where you work and play and even spend quite a bit of time at home. Yes, quite nice indeed. Friday the kids had their last swim lesson, an hour-long makeup. After that, we went to dinner and then spent a quite night at home.

Saturday was soccer, followed by grocery shopping and some blissful naps. Then the family came over for some grilled out dinner – the weather has been awesome!

Today was ZOO day. The kids were invited to a b’day party for some family friends. The trick was getting there. Unbeknownst to us (and our hosts!) the zoo had scheduled Dia de los Ninos and there were about a million Ninos and their families at the zoo. Parking was impossible – we parked about 6 blocks away and walked – and the lines were NUTS. Fortunately since we were with the bday party, we didn’t have to endure the lines at least. But about 4 families gave up altogether and it was a bummer.

But for our troubles, we got a behind the scenes look at some cool animals that the zoo exhibits on visits to schools and other field trips. Salamanders, parrots, a giant rabbit, cockroaches (seen with the kids above) and a hedgehog. He was huge and made us feel much better about Hedgie’s size.

The zoo put on a nice do and I’d definitely think about having a bday party there ourselves – but not on Dia de los Ninos. After the bday party stuff, we rode the carousel and checked out some elephants and by that time it was after 4 and we headed out to get some dinner with friends.

I’m always astonished at how quickly the weekends go by.

A few weeks ago, my company’s Marketing Manager announced she was going to retire. I had been asked to think about the possibility of moving into this position a few months back when we thought retirement would be in 2014, but due to some good luck in the stock market, her retirement got moved up an entire year to the end of April. Our MM is a dear lady and we all could not be more excited for her to be able to exit the rat race a little earlier than anticipated.

But of course, it meant some decisions had to be made. I had to think about things carefully. The job is more hours than I do now, no question. It is also different work than I do currently. I have a wonderful working relationship with the people around me and the idea of giving that up was a hard one to swallow. But the Marketing Manager job takes a lot of things I’m good at and enjoy and rolls them into one crazy wild ride.

So Matt and I talked a lot about the job and what it entails.  We talked about what it would mean for our family – the good and the bad. And we were good with it. So I submitted an application for the position and I was officially hired and promoted a last week, though notification only went out today. It is a great move career-wise but more importantly, I think I can really bring some good new ideas to the position and do some wonderful things to serve my organization. It’s really exciting and a bit overwhelming.

I’m currently learning my new job and training some other people on my job and trying to keep a lot of balls in the air but it’s very exciting and I’m really looking forward to the new challenge.