2024 Year in Review

Hello, family and friends! We hope everyone is doing well.

Keeping it briefer this year because, if you couldn't tell by how late this is, we have much less time on our hands than in prior years. All for good reasons of course 🙂.

Our newest family member, Ari, joined us on May 5! He spent 12 hours in NICU needing a bit of help breathing but was otherwise healthy. He is doted upon by Avery, who tells him constantly how much she loves him. Although now he is more mobile and grabbing at her toys she is starting to realise it’s not sunshine and roses 😏

The first few months were difficult as he was born at the beginning of winter virus season, so Avery infected him with every bug she brought home from daycare. The constant congestion massively impacted his sleep quality, and by extension, also ours. He was also briefly hospitalised with bronchiolitis when he was 4 weeks old, which was a little scary, but fortunately he recovered well. We sincerely hope that everyone who tells us “he’s going to have a strong immune system when he’s older!” are correct. However, warmer weather has brought a reprieve and now he is a total angel who sleeps through the night, making those first few months a delightfully hazy memory. He is a cheerful, easy-going boy and we absolutely love him to bits.

Avery is equal parts fascinating, funny, cheeky, and annoying. I re-read last year's update and laughed and laughed at this line: “We’ve dealt with tantrums too, but they are generally short-lived so have felt pretty manageable so far”. Turns out we’re not the best parents in the world, but just hadn’t hit the “threenager” phase which has been quite a rollercoaster! Toddlers are really quite something. She (mostly) makes up for it by also managing to make us laugh with the inane things she says or asks each day. Our favourite mispronunciations and sayings from this year include “kookabucka”, “lasterday” (for yesterday), “I’m flusting and I’m blusting” (when she wants to use the toilet), and “can I show you something MAGIC?” (whenever she wants to show us literally anything). We delight in many of our conversations and she constantly manages to surprise us with her thought-provoking questions.

She also started Little Athletics, joined a friend's (informal) soccer team, went rock climbing several times, and continued to absolutely adore being in the water as much as possible.

Not much new on the job front! Andrew got promoted to Product Lead at Airwallex, which was well-earned. Annika is still Director of Business Operations at Coras, but is currently enjoying 12 months of maternity leave 🙂

While travel is more of a rarity in this season of life, we did meet up with our good friends Dara and Andrew in Hawaii in February for 10 days which was amazing. It was so fun to see our kids interact and we are looking forward to re-creating moments like this moving forward, even though we have a fair amount of distance between us!

And that’s it! We wish you a wonderful 2025 and are looking forward to seeing peeps in SF in February (if I haven’t managed to reach out to you, and you are around Feb 15-28 or 21-22, let me know!).

P.S. Annual Kiki photo dump. She is…not thrilled about a new child, but continues to be our majestic queen. Unfortunately she likes to eat grass and bugs and throw it all up which puts Avery into histrionics, but what can you do? Cats are gonna cat.