Matthew is getting so big!!!

Anna Came to Visit! Yay!

Anna came to visit this past memorial weekend. It was awesome to catch up! Thanks for making the drive!

I’m currently reading the early memoirs of George Kennan. What struck me most is how he describes learning Russian. Of course it helps that he lived near native speakers, but the amount of consistent effort into his field of study is inspiring.

He describes taking a very intense master’s level examination for translation from Russian into German and vice-versa. He passes this brutal test. But then in the very next paragraph he says his first act after passing this test is to go out and get a Russian tutor and study some more!

It’s never enough to just be “good enough”! (Inspiring... and not a bit tiring). :-)

Matthew at 7mo

I'm uploading pictures and came across this one at Matthew for 7 months. He's grabbing everything these days - including my little paper cut out "7".

Boston Lot Lake

With the weather being so nice we've been making more of an effort to take Vaxy and Matthew up to Boston Lot Lake behind Sachem. We will miss having our own personal hide-a-way lake! The hike is good for Vax and gets him exercise. Ger took this picture but unfortunately his head got cut off a bit. We have a lot to learn about photography!

Ms. Brooks

My time at Tuck is coming to an end - and one of my last memories will be dinner last night with Debbie Brooks, co-founder of the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson's Research. Debbie had almost 10 years as an investment banker for Goldman Sachs under her belt before being tapped to start- from scratch- one of the most influential and powerful scientific research organizations.

Over dinner she shared some war stories about how she landed the job - and what she did on Monday, Day one. One of the most important things I took away was how powerful a business mindset could be in the non-profit world, and importance of "high impact philanthropy". Very inspiring!