Skylar and Parker were worried that the Easter Bunny would not make it to our house because of the Corona virus pandemic. Luckily, bunnies are not susceptible to the same pathogens as people.
The Easter Bunny left lots of eggs all around the outside of the house. Some of the interesting items inside the eggs included trident gum, lollipops, stickers, buttons, individual tic-tacs, $1 bills, quarters, dimes, nickels, and paper-clips.
The first 2-3 weeks of the pandemic I remember as being rather blissful. All the crazy running around had stopped. There were no weekend sports activities, playdates, scout meetups, etc. We could sleep in everyday, 7 days a week and life slowed down.
Skylar would get up with me and do a lap around the block to get out of the hosue and start off the day with some exercise. There was a bush that had bloomed with all these yellow flowers, and I wanted to take a portrait of her with the bush in the background.
I got a little bit of a vacation with Basis in March to go to Puerto Rico for our sales kickoff. It was a short but nice time away from the cold weather back home.
The views were amazing and we did a food tour, which was my second food tour of Puerto Rico, but fun nonetheless.
We also rode dirt bikes around a famous farm where they had filmed several tv shows and movies.
For our creative Christmas gift to mommy in 2019 we decided to deviate from our standard format of creating a movie / story-line and focus instead on music.
Most of the footage was shot in downtown Vienna, the music studio, and the creek near our house. The highlight of the filming was when we went to Magnolia’s after shooting the scenes downtown.
Magnolia’s is a dessert / cafe / coffee shop that has the best decor and food. Skylar and Parker were so well behaved that they deserved a treat after all that work!
After wrapping up with the conference on Thursday we flew out from Oahu to Maui on Friday morning. By accident we ended up at an excellent snorkeling spot one beach down from our hotel while trying to kill some time prior to checking in.
The second day we drove up to the peak of the Haleakala National Park. It was no less than 20 degrees colder at the peak and everyone shivered as we walked around outside.
The landscape looked like the moon and I’m told that NASA sent astronauts there to train for the moon landing back in the 60’s.
On our third day we went to Black Rock beach and the kids and I enjoyed some amazing snorkeling spotting zebra fish, needle fish, and what I like to call bright yellow’s (I’m making all those names up).
We were about 300 yards from shore with only 2 boogie boards to float on and at one point I noticed the tide pulling us out to sea and toward a bank of cliffs.
Luckily, the kids had on their flippers and are good swimmers, because I don’t think I could have swam hard enough to get the three of us to shore otherwise.
Our bodies were so screwed up after leaving London (5 hours ahead of EST), spending one night in Virginia, and then flying to Hawaii (5 hours behind EST). The kids seemed to adjust fairly quickly to going to bed at 7:00 PM and waking around 6:00 AM.
Susan kept her East Coast hours, waking up around 4:00 AM and going to the hotel lobby to do work. And I varied between going out until 10:00 PM and crashing at 8:00 PM, while consistently waking with the kids around 6:00.
We ate at the hotel buffet every morning, which you can’t beat for convenience. Skylar and Parker primarily enjoyed the pools and did some fishing with Hadobogee.
I went to London for training with work. Each morning I would walk a little over 20 minutes from the Waldorf Astoria near Covant Garden to the diamond district where our training room was located.
I’d take a new route every morning stop at a different cafe for breakfast. The flat white is my new favorite drink – but forget buying one at Starbucks (they don’t know how to make it properly).
The coffee is sooo good! Part of the reason is because the people there love good coffee and they have expensive machinery and experienced baristas. The other reason is because the milk actually has flavor to it, unlike the ultra-pastuerized stuff that tastes more watered down in the U.S.
I enjoyed all my breakfasts except for the porridge, which is essentially oatmeal, and apparently Londoner’s don’t have cholesterol issues because I couldn’t find any place that had egg whites.
The people in London are exceedingly polite, and the crowd is the most international that I’ve seen in any city including D.C. or N.Y. I told Declan that if I’d traveled to London at age 25 I never would have returned home. The city felt like the home I’d never visited.
The size of the city is perfect, and unlike visiting NY, where I need a break after about 3 days of frenetic living, I never felt overwhelmed or rushed. You can walk or bike anywhere, and there is amazing history, architecture, and beautiful people of all types.
While visiting Josh and Sharon, Skylar and I found a baby gartner snake in the road. I picked it up with a jacket and took it to the park where the other kids were playing. It was great amusement for a solid 10 minutes.
We went to Tampa Thursday to Sunday for Samuel and Keelie’s wedding. Our hotel in Siesta Key beach had the softest white sand I have ever seen in all my travels.
The sand feels like walking on powdered sugar. The first inch of sand is super soft but underneath it the sand packs incredibly hard. I tried building a sand castle with the kids and after putting sand and water in a bucket it turned to concrete.
One of the locals saw me trying to empty the bucket and informed me that it would never come out, and I would need to take the bucket into the ocean and fish the sand out with water. So bizarre!
Skylar was a beautiful flower girl in Samuel’s and Keelie’s outdoor wedding at a local park on the water. The location was very serene. Ryland officiated the wedding and her speech writing was both funny and touching.
Parker has gone through some incredible growth spurts recently and he dominated on the soccer field this fall. Check out some of his action:
