Four Months

Time felt rapid and compressed for the past four months and I haven't found (made) time to post here, but I am about to embark on a two-week excursion to visit Buckland family in Warwick, then Taylors in Cape Cod and Maine. I have about 150 minutes before I leave without anyone home to distract me, so I figure this is my chance to put something down here before it becomes five months... I don't take a lot of notes on my daily activities so I'm looking over my photos from the past four months to see what happened and…

Then and Now

Life was different before kids! I lived for myself and the activities I loved, especially music, skiing, sports, travel and friends. Children can make it harder to find time for hobbies and passions, but they can also make those activities even more enjoyable as you teach and share your joy with a beginner. My career has been a training ground and now it's personal: I'm doing everything I can to instill a love of music in Ivy and Miles. I just really hope they are inspired by melody, harmony and rhythm. Likewise skiing. I absolutely need them to like skiing…

Thanksgiving 2017

The greatest of all holidays for me, with a focus on food and family, providing an impetus to feast in finest company. We congregated in Cumberland, Maine with the entire Taylor Clan, from Mimi and Papa to the littlest Lucy and enjoyed a modern traditional spread from a James Beard award winner and his stellar chef de cuisine, who crafted some insanely tasty deserts! The cousins are entering perfect social play ages, creative, joyful and exuberant, while the grownups relax and wax nostalgic. It is truly one of my greatest pleasures to spend time with my family, and when the…

Winning Winter

It has been months since I've been able to sit a write, partially due to a computer failure, and mostly due to a long stretch of work and life business. The high and lowlights from the Chill: • Patriots win Super Bowl LI with impossible comeback. Down 28-3 with 2:00 left in the 3rd quarter, it looked bleak (and that was being optimistic). But some textbook mental toughness and Tom Brady being the greatest ever, they complete the most fantastic comeback in Super Bowl history. Legendary. • I have been dealing with a Lyme disease diagnosis and have been through several rounds of…

Halloween

Tonight was one of my all-time parenting highlights; watching Ivy spend 2 hours handing out candy on our porch and 1 hour trick-or-treating around our block was absolutely amazing. I have never witnessed such a dense swarm of people, mostly kids, in our neighborhood like that; there were times when the line stretched from our porch 30 kids deep down our steps and walkway to the sidewalk, each waiting for Ivy to drop a piece of candy in their sack. It was a constant flow of candy from bowl to bags and we ran out way before we anticipated, even…

Back On Schedule

School commences! After three months of reduced work commitments and one month of none whatsoever, I was obligated to report to Poly Prep Lower School at 9:00 am on Monday for orientation. Today was the introduction for the new Head of School at the upper campus, and after a few rocky years within the board and administration, it felt like a greatly needed fresh start for the faculty. Audrius Barzdukas delivered a passionate and inspiring speech on the nobility of teaching and moved an audience that has been bracing for this transition with deserved skepticism. Hopefully, as he put it,…

Sweetness

Summer is accelerating quickly! We have been Capeside for our annual 4th of July family weekend, bigger and greater than ever with the two newest Taylors, Miles and Julian. We spent a weekend camping in Vermont, had some friends to The Land, and enjoyed some pool and beach time in Bellport. We are headed up to Lake George on Thursday for a reprise of last year's raucous weekend with 20 of our closest friends, then a wedding and a week in Maine. And so soon, in a short paragraph, my Summer is complete. But these few sentences don't really do…

Six Weeks

Miles joined us 6 weeks ago and it has been a wild and wonderful ride. Although we went through this process with Ivy 2 1/2 years ago, I seem to have forgotten (or blocked) how intense it is. Constant awareness is required and needs must be promptly satisfied or the abyss awaits! Most of the time he is a fantastic baby, quietly eating, sleeping, or chilling, but occasionally, he demands full attention with his primal siren scream -- a hideous wailing frequency that heightens the urgency of any request taking longer than a couple of seconds to complete. It is…

Looming and Reminiscing Excitement

We are approaching Due Day here, with a baby arrival sometime in the next three weeks. The anticipation is growing while the drama and mystery of when it will begin is becoming more real every day. Alaina is feeling aches and pains that I can not imagine and will soon go through one of the most intense physical human experiences. All I can do is watch helplessly and offer sympathy. She is the bravest hero I know and is doing it all for Love. Despite the imminent appearance of the newest Taylor, I risked a jaunt out to The Meadowlands…

Three Months Pass Fast

Wow. Since my last post 88 days ago, written in a moment of great leisure on vacation in Barcelona, I have been through a vortex of time and space. It has been a wonderful but somewhat delirious 3 months of my life and I have had zero seconds to compose an account of it, which I will finally do here and now, sitting in my new studio in my new home with free time that I now have since school ended last week. Things are different now: Alaina is pregnant again and we moved into an amazing home in Kensington,…