52 New Things

It is completely unbelievable, but a full year has passed since we started our weekly adventure project. Overall it’s been a good year for the three of us. We’ve experienced so much together and have (mostly!) had a great time doing it; it’s been a year full of amazing memories that we’ll always treasure.

While I don’t think we’ll be documenting our weekly family time for 2014, we’ll definitely strive to carve out a few hours every week just to hang out together. The biggest lesson of this last year has been that even when activities don’t quite go as planned, just being together makes trying things worthwhile; we’ll always strive to do new things and whenever possible we’ll do them together.

A Synopsis – Looking back at the last 52 weeks we’ve done so many different things, most of them very simple, all of them lots of fun; here are some of the activities that we enjoyed the most:

• learning to swim (week 1)
• going to a dance (week 50)
• potty-training! (week 47)
• turning TWO (week 21)
• painting (week 11)
• getting a haircut (week 16)
• creating a time capsule (week 8)
• baking, baking and more baking (weeks 2, 13, 28, 36)
• going to the beach (weeks 29, 32, 33)
• skating! (week 52)

Of course we took photos every week as well! I think I’m more and more thankful for those as our baby girl gets bigger and bigger. Here are some of my favourite photos from the last year:

So that’s officially it for 2013! Thank you to everyone who has come along for the ride and followed our adventures. We’ve had a blast and hope we’ve inspired you to do things with your own family as well. All the best to everyone in 2014!

Fran, Brad & Alexandra

Hello and welcome to our blog! We are a family of three, mom (Fran), dad (Brad) and sweet baby girl (Alexandra) who wanted to start off this new year with a commitment to try to do new things together as a family. The idea was inspired by this very cool blog www.365thingsin365days.com/  about a young couple’s quest to spend a year doing 365 new things in as many days. With a toddler and two parents who work fulltime this isn’t really a feasible goal, but we thought why not try to do something new on a weekly basis, with the emphasis on new experiences for Alex more than for ourselves.

Over the last 19 months we’ve had the joy of watching our daughter discover what we, as adults, consider mundane with great joy and exuberance; it’s been a pleasure watching her react to things like lemons and splash parks and snow with such excitement and awe and so we look forward to introducing her to more of the simple pleasures that life has to offer.  To that end we’ve made a list of 52 new things that little Miss. Alexandra will be exposed to over the next year (see our “Alexandra’s Adventures” link), one for each week. Our list is comprised of simple things that we think she’ll really enjoy, and while we worked hard to compile this initial list of activities we are open to changing it if we think of things that seem like more fun or if we get some cool suggestions for toddler-appropriate experiences. 

If you’d like to come along for the ride and read about a really cute kid (I’m biased, but she’s adorable!) doing some fun things please check in with us on a weekly basis and see what Alex has been up too. Week 1 starts today, January 1^st 2013, and we’ll continue on through to December 31st.

So here we go, let the new experiences begin!

UPDATE as of December 30th, 2013– check out our latest experience…

WEEK 52: TRY ICE SKATING