A beary odd year

Ups and downs and lessons learned 🐻

You might be wondering how this made it to your inbox. Me too. A few days ago, I found myself with a rare, quiet moment and the strange urge to write a newsletter. I realized it’s been almost a year since I published honestly? 2025 is a bit intense in which I announced that I was ready to come back here.

And then I promptly…didn’t.

When I determined that 2025 was a thorn-in-your-side type of year in April, I didn’t know how prickly things would become.

I was mostly out of work, although I did a few small projects here and there. After five years of owning a business and working together nonstop, my husband started a full-time position in July. That left me caring for our baby over the long, hot, South of France summer. I counted down the days until September when she’d head to nursery school, and I could get a few minutes to myself.

The joke was on me.

For three weeks, I shuttled her back and forth after she didn’t adjust well. Then, once she settled in, she caught every cold, flu, and virus that a group of 10 babies can concoct and lovingly brought them home to me. I lived in a state of constant illness from September until December, when this storyline reached its peak: we both came down with a flu so bad that we spent our shared birthday week lying in bed staring at the ceiling because watching TV required too much energy.

What a way to ring in one and thirty!

If you’re a parent, you’ve probably been here. But these are the parts we don’t say aloud – at least not until someone else is going through it and we offer our sympathies: Oh yes, I remember how hard that was. But just like my OB-GYN told me she doesn’t tell women how their body will change after pregnancy so as not to freak them out, parents mostly keep the really gross stuff to ourselves (and anyway, no childless person wants to know about your kids’ bodily fluids.)

It wasn’t all rainy days, though. 2025 brought some really great stuff as well. In May, we took our baby to Greece, the first time any of us had been. And when my husband got a week off at the last minute in August, we hopped over to Romania and let our baby sleep for hours in her carseat as we drove through the mountains, stopping at little churches and lakes, and specifically not stopping on roads where bears (like, real, giant bears!) seemed to be hanging out at every pull-off.

A Romanian brown bear having a great day

Travel was our escape, but the biggest changes happened at home. I learned time management, patience, and the liberating power of saying this can wait (hence my year-long absence here.)

Most importantly, though, I learned to let go. I’m not the most organized person, and combined with the fact that I live in a foreign country and have a baby, I sometimes feel like the messy character in the sitcom. But you know what? It’s crazy how much less it bothers me now. I try to apologize when I make a mistake and laugh off the rest (like the time a French lady stopped me on the street – talking on the phone while holding a coffee – to tell me my baby was slipping down out of the stroller because I had forgotten to buckle her in.)

I clipped her back in and life went on.

See you soon.