Today our sweet little girl turns 15 months old. It’s hard to believe how fast she’s growing, especially now that she has such a vibrant personality. She’s getting about one new tooth every month and is constantly outgrowing outfits and shoes. She’s such a happy baby that complete strangers often make a point to comment on it. They also usually tell us that we probably won’t be so lucky with our second child, but we’ll have to wait and see.
Ava’s new favorite word is "yeah" and she loves to say it whenever you ask her a question. She can tell by your tone when you’re asking a question, but the trick is to only ask questions that you want a yes answer on. My usual question for her, especially when Mom is at work, is "Do you want to watch the game with Daddy?" She always says yes so I guess she’s fine with it 😉
Today was also my first day as a full–time employee at Amazon and it went really well. I had orientation for the first half of the day and got a chance to meet several people who were also just getting started. There were about 100 people in my orientation, and the crazy thing is that they do them at least once every Monday, sometimes twice! That means that approximately 100–200 new people start working there every week. I guess when you have annual revenues of $61 billion and you grow at about 30% per year you need to hire a lot of people just to stay caught up with business demands.
After orientation myself and another new member in our team had lunch with our manager. I feel really lucky to have landed the team that I’m on. It’s a brand new team that will be focusing on creating new technologies for the people who package our customer’s orders to use in the warehouses. I’m the first web developer on the team, and we’re looking to hire more, so I’m going to have instant seniority. I’m also doing my first work trip next week, which is sooner than expected. My manager asked me today if I would be willing to go to Southern California for two days (one night) next Wednesday to meet with a bunch of representatives from different Amazon fulfillment centers. I didn’t want to say no and Jessica was able to make it work with her schedule at El Gaucho. I knew there would be some travel involved with this role but wasn’t expecting it to be quite this soon. I was flattered that he asked me though so I’m glad I’ll be able to tag along. I’ll only be gone one night so it won’t be a big deal.
Tomorrow I have to spend the whole day doing orientation specifically for developers, then I’ll be able to start working on my own stuff by Wednesday. I’m really excited to be up and running so quickly. This is going to be a great position that I feel so fortunate to have. Hopefully we’ll have some new pics of Ava up here very soon.