Happy New Year 2022

It has been more than a year since I wrote in my blog. As usual 2021 has been a very busy year. I feel like the time is just flying by and I am barely able to keep up.

I took up a full time job in February of 2021. A remote job with a nice small company. The timings are mostly flexible and the team is awesome. I am loving the work and since I started I keep thinking about why I didn’t do this earlier. I tried my hand at freelancing and it wasn’t that great. It was nice when I was in Seattle, but after we moved to California it didn’t go as well. It was hard to find clients and the amount of effort I had to put into admin work and marketing didn’t feel like it was worth it. So, I am really glad I took up the job 🙂

We also bought a house. Buying a home in the Bay Area is not an easy thing to do. The prices are scary and the houses are old. We started our house hunting in May and God knows how many houses we saw. We went every weekend to see multiple houses. Initially the kids were excited, but after a couple of weeks, they were not happy. When our offer finally got accepted, the kids were so happy that we didn’t need to go house hunting every weekend 🙂

We are happy to have found a house in a nice community close to good schools. The kids have already made friends in their new schools and we met some amazing families as well. So, far we are liking it.

The not so good part of the year was that we couldn’t travel to India and neither could our parents visit thanks to Covid. I am super thankful for the vaccinations and now that all of us are vaccinated, I feel better. The kids started going to in person schools in the fall. I was super worried to send Sanjay as he was not yet vaccinated, but both the kids wanted to go in person. Virtual school was not easy and we felt like they really needed to be in the school with other kids. They thrive well in that environment. They have to wear masks all day and they don’t complain at all. It is amazing how much they adjusted to everything the pandemic threw at us and emerged stronger and more understanding of the world around them. I am so proud of my kids for all the patience they have shown.

There were definitely times when they needed some reassurance and some help to keep going. Being patient and talking to them, letting them know that we understand and acknowledge their feelings definitely helped. Online school was as much fun as it was exhausting for both us and the kids. They did an amazing job of navigating it all.

As we enter another year, we are still not out of the pandemic and it is still scary to get out and do stuff normally. We had planned to trip to Denver during the winter break, but ended up cancelling in the last minute because of the Omicron variant. The kids were super disappointed. Luckily, we were able to take a smaller trip via road to meet their cousins in LA and that cheered them up. We also went to Yosemite for an impromptu day trip. Unfortunately, the park was closed. We ended up playing in the snow outside the park entrance and that was super fun.

There was a time when I diligently made New Year’s resolutions every year. I probably kept them for a while and forgot about them after that. Now I have stopped making resolutions. I do have some goals for myself this year and I hope I can spend the time and effort to achieve them.