When the dust settles

This post is all words. No pretty pictures or graphics this time (except the wild Kazakh stampede above). Looking back, the past year of our lives has been like a stampede. I have found myself reflecting a lot about what went on last year in Kazakhstan and right after we returned to life in the US. I can be a nostalgic guy, so I chalked it up to that at first. Nothing wrong with a bit of nostalgia, from my perspective. But the more I find myself returning to the events of the past year, to roll them over in my mind and wonder at them, the more I realize that it is more than nostalgia that motivates this new attention. If I think about it, this is the first time I have engaged in any serious reflection about what happened when we hopped on a plane to Almaty, KZ last year, because this is the first time I have had the energy and mental space to do so! It has been a wonderful but crazy year. To think that a bit more than a year ago today I was still a grad student, Susan was still an assistant professor, and we were just beginning to imagine what our lives would be like if we had ONE baby in our house! I could go through and enumerate the crazy twists and turns of the past year to illustrate why there hasn't been time for one stray thought, but most of you already know how it has been.

So, now that the dust has settled, you may catch me spending a bit too much time reminiscing about what has happened, and wondering what comes next. Humor me...I'm still new to all of this!