Return from my Blog Hiatus

As you may have noticed, I went on a blog hiatus in October and my hiatus unfortunately lasted a bit longer than I intended. The days leading up to the election were absolute madness. In addition to my job and other volunteer activities, my political responsibilities began to take over my life. I was on 10-15 conference calls/week and spent about 30+ hours/week working on the Democratic legal steering committee for the state party. I am grateful that the general counsel trusts me with an increasing amount of responsibility to ensure that election day runs smoothly from a legal perspective – but at times I felt like I was drowning.

I’m normally a night owl and easily stay up working on various projects for work and my volunteer activities into the wee hours of the night. But, a challenging pregnancy + life with a very active toddler takes its toll on me and I’ve been working hard to be in bed by 11pm.  I never realized how crucial those extra few hours were to my productivity until I no longer had them b/c I was trying to sleep.

I will be the first to admit that I’m overextended with my commitments and have a very hard time saying “no” when someone asks me to help with something, but I can usually manage the balance. My mom always says “if you want something done, ask a busy person to do it.”  Unfortunately this year I made the dumb mistake of agreeing to serve as a committee chair for a charity auction for the Federal Communications Bar Association. The auction was Oct 28, the week before the election. Why oh why did I not realize how stupid this would be to do two big volunteer projects that came to culmination at about the same time? I have no idea.

After a lot of hard work by so many people, the charity auction raised over $130,000 for a non-profit organization called Project Wait No Longer which helps foster children find a “forever” home (an amazing organization!). And, despite the miserable results on election day and the loss of 3 Democratic House seats in Virginia, the election legal system ran reasonably well and my own Congressman won re-election (barely). We hosted a fundraiser for him at our home in September and raised about $15,000 for his campaign – his victory was the silver lining in an otherwise gloomy day for Democrats.

Anyway, after the craziness of late Oct/early Nov, I spent much of November catching up on other parts of my life. Brad and I enjoyed a wonderful long weekend in Las Vegas while Sam spent the weekend with my parents.

Watching La Reve (Cirque De Soleil show) at the Wynn in Vegas

I’m not sure who had more fun -- us, Sam, or my parents? Brad had a work trip to LV which we turned into a much needed mini vacation. I read 3 books, slept a lot, we ate great food, explored, and only ended up $10 down after gambling. We returned home well rested and rejuvenated. After spending 4 days with my parents, Sam learned how to say the words dirty, poop, tushy and how to burp on command. Lovely. They also fed farm animals at Maymont Park, played at Deep Run Park, had multiple playdates, ate lots of Indian food and played and played and played!

Cooking with Grandpa



Seesaw with Melissa, London & Grandpa

Feeding goats at Maymont Park

Stomping in Leaves


What a weekend! We are SOOO grateful for his wonderful Mimi and Grandpa Geller.  They also gave him his new favorite toy:

He is completely obsessed with this car.  He now has one car to play with at Mimi & Grandpa's and one car to play with at our house.  Thank you Mimi & Grandpa! 

As usual, we’ve had a lot going on in the past few weeks but I’ll save that for future postings. I’ve really enjoyed blogging, it’s a way to memorialize the important and not so important happenings in my life and share them with my friends and family. It’s been an interesting experience and I love receiving feedback on the posts. So with that, I’m back and ready to begin regularly blogging once again! Happy reading!