An Epic 2014!!
So much has happened in 2014 and in celebrating the new year I had time to reflect on what an amazing journey 2014 has been for me! To name a few events: my parents moved to CA, my brother moved in with me, my husband and I bought our first house, and found out we were pregnant with our first child!!
My family has been calling 2014 one of our most epic years as a family! It started in January when my dad interviewed and got a the job at the Diablo Nuclear Power Plant down by San Luis Obispo. This meant that my parents would make the move from Granbury, TX to San Luis Obispo, CA and finally be only a few hours drive away from me for the first time since I moved to Cali over 9 years ago!! I am incredibly blessed that my family is such a tight-knit group and I was completely overjoyed that they were willing to make the move!! With a little added stress because I wanted to make sure they were happy and liked it 🙂
As I’ve mentioned before, my brother is like a best friend, and the two of us have always dreamed of living in the same town and raising families near one another. To get this kickstarted my husband and I decided we wanted to help Nick (my brother) get the fresh start he was looking for and have him come live with us!! Nick is an amazing story teller and artist and had dreamed of getting his masters degree in video game design. So the plan: come live with me and my husband while trying to get into school and we will help support him through his studies! In June my brother and I had a blast making a road trip from Texas to California with my dog Mallie and his dog Aeris while pulling a large trailer behind us! Not going to lie, living with a sibling is tough sometimes, and brought on unanticipated challenges; but we work hard to be open and honest with each other and discuss issues as they arise. So far so good!
Try to picture this… my brother decides to make the move and live with his extremely athletic little sister who loves to go on hikes, bike rides, and many other adventures. The week he moved in was the week my husband and I found out we were pregnant!! It was hard to keep it a secret, but my husband and I wanted to wait to share the news. Meanwhile, I felt like I was hit by a Mack truck. I was exhausted! I’ve read a lot of pregnancy blogs, and therefore had heard of extreme fatigue in the first trimester, but honestly I think I had assumed that from being an elite athlete that I knew fatigue and had assumed (wrongly!) that there was no way it could be worse than hard training. Well… I soon found myself taking 4 hour naps almost daily, and being absolutely wiped just from taking my dog around the block! Meanwhile my poor brother has no idea whats going on and didn’t want to complain about his unexpectedly lazy little sister, lol!
A few weeks after my brother’s arrival, my husband and I got the exciting news that our offer on a house had been accepted! We had been searching for a house in Danville, CA for around 8 months, and had finally found the place that seemed perfect! ‘Perfect’ to me means a house that is structurally sound and a layout that I like, but has many updating/small remodeling projects that I will get to design and work on! We stayed in our rental an extra month while the house interior was painted, and new carpet was put in, and by September 1st we were done with the move!! I will do a before and after blog of all the things I have done to the house!
So after only a month of living with us, my brother had to pack up again! We moved as much as we could ourselves and then hired movers for a day to move all the large furniture. I felt bad taking my brother from bustling Berkeley to the Danville suburbia but he is making it work, and it was simply perfect timing for me and my husband and the new coming baby!
Now we are all getting settled in, Nick and I have finished the fall semester of our school programs (Nick got accepted to Academy of Art’s Graduate School of Game Design and I completely my third semester of Interior Architecture and Design at UC Berkeley), my husband got an amazing promotion at work, and we are starting to feel prepared to welcome our first child into the world! It’s hard to believe that I am 8 months pregnant today!
Well, I could honestly make this the longest blog I’ve ever posted, it was just such an exciting year! My parents have come up multiple times to visit and we had a fantastic Thanksgiving and Christmas in our new house! I want to do a blog on the pregnancy, my announcement to my family, designing the nursery, more on training while pregnant (check out my interview with FitBump.com), and many more so check back soon!!
Thanks for reading!
Dana