Although Jessica has worked a couple private events for El Gaucho in the past month, tonight is her official first night back at work. It’s hard to believe her maternity leave with Elise is complete. Obviously her going back to work has certain benefits, but its more bitter than sweet. I’ve definitely gotten used to having her home every night over the past few months so its going to be a significant adjustment for the girls and I without her here. I’m equal parts happy and nervous; happy that Jess will be able to get out of the house and interact with adults, but nervous that I won’t have as much time for homework due to my Dad duties. I’m sure everything will be fine but right now I can’t help but worry a bit.
Luckily I’m on the tail end of a two week break from school as we transition into the Fall quarter. I just got my grades from Summer quarter and was pleased to see I pulled off straight A’s again. I figure if I can pull off those grades during the busiest summer of my life I should have no problem the rest of the year. Either way I’ve only got three quarters to go. New classes start up on Monday and I’m ready to jump back in.
I haven’t written many posts lately because I’ve been really busy working on the Family Recipes site. For those that don’t already know, my Uncle Jim recently had an idea about doing a Family Recipes website that we could use to share all of our favorite dishes. I immediately thought it was a cool idea, but then when I realized that this was the perfect excuse to develop a project using a JavaScript framework called Backbone.js, I was sold. I’ll spare you of the technical details, but we recently decided at work to use a popular web development framework called Backbone.js for an upcoming project that I’ll be working on. I didn’t want to go into that project with no experience working with Backbone, so I used this project as a way to learn the framework.
It’s been a really fun project that I’ve learned a lot from, and I’m actually almost done. My goal is to launch the site this weekend before I get back into school. I wouldn’t have been able to build the site this quickly if I was in school, but with this two week break I’ve been able to crank through just about everything. If you’re thinking about submitting a recipe, please do! This is a site that I’ll be managing for the long–term and there is no cutoff date for submitting recipes. Hopefully over the years it will become an ‘encyclopedia’ of our family’s cooking.
All else is well in our world. Ava is coming up on her second birthday and she’s doing great. I can’t believe how much her vocabulary continues to grow. She loves to count now and can usually count to ten with no problems. Elise is 2.5 months old and going strong. She smiles more and more everyday. I was holding her the other night and Ava came up to talk to her. She got so excited and had the biggest smile I’ve ever seen. It was funny because Ava kept saying “Good morning baby” even though it was 8:00 at night. I think it was their first real interaction and felt pretty special to see.
Keep an eye out for the official announcement of the launch of the recipes site. My goal is Sunday so we’ll see what happens. Keep the recipes coming!