Life was different before kids! I lived for myself and the activities I loved, especially music, skiing, sports, travel and friends. Children can make it harder to find time for hobbies and passions, but they can also make those activities even more enjoyable as you teach and share your joy with a beginner. My career has been a training ground and now it’s personal: I’m doing everything I can to instill a love of music in Ivy and Miles. I just really hope they are inspired by melody, harmony and rhythm. Likewise skiing. I absolutely need them to like skiing if I want to continue devoting family time and resources to chasing the perfect turn. Our days on the hill are shorter and offer considerably less vertical than my days of yore and there is close to 100% chance that they will melt down at some point, but I love being on the hill with them! Red Sox! Patriots! They have acknowledged some local ostracization and I fear they may yet turn to the dark side, but for now they cheer hard for my hometown Boston sports teams; it’s been fairly easy to convince them riding on back-to-back World Series and Superbowl wins!
I think travel is the greatest education and I can’t wait to get into some wild adventures with these two. In the fifteen years before they arrived, I tried to spend at least a month or two every year in a foreign environment. I need to constantly reevaluate comfortable and normal. Having kids has basically fulfilled this need by proxy, changing needs every day and introducing a chaos at home that I crave in unfamiliar settings. But still, there is no substitute for seeing a different scene and interacting with foreign culture. So Alaina and I left the kids with Grandma and joined 8 friends in Puerto Rico for a quick vacation to this beautiful island. Beaches, pools, rivers, food, drinks, dancing mixed with culture in the city and hiking in the rain forest for 69 fantastic hours. It is a special place and I will return, maybe even one day with kids!