Aaron Up and Coming Award

Aaron won the Raytheon Up and Coming Award for the second year in a row! It is for early career professionals who show the most potential. Aaron is doing really well at work, and I couldn't be more proud of him. We got to go the fancy award banquet at the Ritz Carlton. The speaker this year was a guy named Dan Thurmon who did a lot of juggling with knives on unicycles. He told us all about how the key to success in any ambition is that you need to be comfortable with throwing your life out of balance. I don't agree with his premise, but I did enjoy the stunts.

Aaron with Taylor Lawrence (President of Raytheon Missile Systems)

My favorite Engineer with his well deserved trophy

This is probably a good place for an Ashley Work Update. I'm still working online through Upwork. Aaron made me a website this summer, and I have gotten some great bookkeeping jobs through that. Things have grown far beyond the point I ever thought they would. Things got particularly hectic in December because I was catching up on work I put off while we were on the cruise and trying to wrap stuff up before leaving to spend Christmas in West Virginia. I also had a couple big one time jobs come through that I needed to squeeze in. I set a record for how many hours I worked since starting to work from home, but I also earned a lot of money for our fun fund. I quit one of my jobs, and will work on moving away from my lower paying jobs as better ones come my way while trying to keep hours to mostly Elliot's naps and evenings. 

While on the topic of the fun fund... we have purchased tickets for our first fun fund funded adventure! We are going to Disney World with my mom's family followed by SPAIN with Stephen & Claudia! More details on that to come!