Happy friday my friends!! It feels good to be doing my first "week's worth of odds & ends" of this new year. And it's been a good week too. A lot got done and I feel like as a family we've already managed to ever so slightly shift ourselves into a better rhythm. First of all we have cooked three meals a day practically every day which is a huge feat for us. Papa bear made us a lovely soup on monday and I made pasta on tuesday. Speaking of pasta I used to be obsessed with the Food Network back in my college days. I would gobble up show after show but Ina and Giada were always my favorites. In fact, I own all of their cookbooks. There was one episode in particular that always stuck with me, as has the recipe. In the episode Ina gets some help from the chef at Nick & Toni's restaurant. He teaches her how to make their famous "Penne Alla Vecchia Bettola" pasta sauce. By the end of the episode my mouth was watering and I knew I had to make it. And so I did and I've been making it for years now. I know all of the ingredients and the recipe itself by heart and since it takes so long to make it forces me to slow down and take my time and really enjoy the process. It's always a treat to make and it's papa bear's favorite so it's a total win win. 

Our days have been busy but instead of zooming by they have lingered and it's been nice to soak them up. We have work time and play time and down time and family time and we're somehow balancing it all. It's taken time for me to get accustomed to this sort of "piece meal" life as I'm a naturally obsessive creature thriving on uninterrupted time of whatever it is that I'm doing at the moment. However, as anyone knows, once you have a baby there's rarely a moment when you are not interrupted and you simply have to learn to work around it. So I work a little bit, I play a little bit, I cook a little bit and I clean a little bit and somehow in the end it looks more or less finished and that's something I'm rather happy about these days. 

We also tried out a new neapolitan pizza place in town that gives 2Amys in DC a run for their money. I'm a total thin crust pizza girl and this place has quickly registered itself super high on my "happy place" scale. We also replaced christmas decorations with fresh flowers and I've rearranged a few things around the house. It's a habit of mine to change things up at the beginning of the new year because if I don't, all I see is a gaping hole where the tree used to be and it makes me want to crawl in a corner and cry so instead I take the lamp from the living room to the nursery and freshen up the kitchen shelves. It's no christmas tree but it works. There's been a lot more books being cracked open around these parts as well and that is always a welcome change. We have a stack of new books as tall as the dining room table demanding to be read so I'm reading two at once! 

Oh my gosh and before I forget!! Drumroll please... We signed up for a gym membership! I've never, ever done this so it's all very exciting/scary/exciting to me! I figured I tried the "I'll do it myself" route last year with little success so it's time to make a real commitment. I'll be taking spin and yoga classes and papa bear will be doing whatever it is that people do with those weird looking torture devices. I swear walking out of that gym I felt as if I had bought a car or something. I felt so... adult?? So wish me luck my friends!! I'm really hoping to get in better shape by - worst case scenario: summer and best case scenario: next week? Remember? Perpetual optimist! But seriously any advice would be much appreciated!

Wishing you a lovely, hopefully less cold, weekend!!

xo