2023

It's been quite the year at the McNaughton/Ashby household! But seeing as we haven't written a holiday letter since... *checks notes*... 2020, there are a few things to catch up on before we dive into this year.

We hunkered down with Cricket for the first two years of the pandemic in our tiny one-bedroom apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, both of us working from home the entire time. But in 2021, after watching many of our friends "give up" and move to New Jersey, we, too, answered the siren call of slightly larger living spaces with slightly more reasonable rent and moved across the Hudson River to a two-bedroom apartment in Jersey City.

In late 2022, we traveled to Chiang Mai, the largest city in northern Thailand, for the beautiful wedding of our friends Nat and Gigi. It was a glorious week and a half of hanging out with elephants, geeking out over local plants and architecture, eating as much mango sticky rice as possible, and celebrating our friends' union.

Which brings us to the really big event of 2023.

Sarah gave birth to Madeline ("Maddie") McNaughton Ashby on the morning of May 30th at Mount Sinai Hospital in NYC. Maddie spent her first few days in the world with a lovely view of Central Park before coming home to Jersey City.

Maddie is a delight. It's honestly difficult to talk about her without coming off as absolute braggarts; she's an observant, bubbly child who sleeps through most nights and giggles much more than she cries. She's already sporting her first tooth and might be crawling by the time you read this. (As of this writing, she can go every direction except forward.)

One of the loveliest parts of life with Maddie so far has been getting to experience early parenthood alongside so many of our friends in the neighborhood, several of whom also had children within the last year. Having these fellow new parents to swap stories, tips, and many, many hand-me-downs has been sanity-saving through these early days.

In more mundane news, David is still at Sagesure as a Senior Staff Engineer, working on a number of internal applications in the Go and Java programming languages. He met a bunch of his coworkers in person for the first time during an ice storm in February in Austin, Texas at a tech-group all-hands meeting. The Papers We Love (PWL) meetup group David helps run participated in the last Strange Loop conference in St. Louis this year, and the PWL team is working out what form the group's meetings will take going forward.

After nearly 5 years with World of Good Brands (formerly Leaf Group), Sarah decided to leave her job in November. More than a decade spent working for large digital media companies has been equal parts fun and challenging, but now Sarah wants to build a different professional life for herself that offers more independence and flexibility. She's planning to set up her own content strategy and search-engine-optimization (SEO) consulting operation in the new year. (Put a different way: She'll help make sure the things you see on Google are as factual and helpful as possible.)

Cricket is settling into cat middle-age; he's a little less rambunctious than he used to be and is still mostly keeping a safe distance from Maddie. He does, however, show some signs of begrudging big-brotherhood by chirping and rubbing against our legs whenever Maddie cries or shrieks, as if to say, "Hey, can you get that strange, squirmy, mostly-hairless kitten to stop making so much noise?"

Christmas this year was a quiet affair at home in Jersey City; Maddie isn't quite old enough to be fully vaccinated for flu and COVID season yet, and Cricket still hasn't worked out how to open cat food cans on his own. (Thank goodness.) Our NYT crossword streak is closing in on 2000 puzzles; even with the chaos of being new parents, we still try to find time to enjoy our hobbies. We are thankful, as always, for our friends, our families, our health, and each other.

Although the past few years have given our family many bright and joyful moments, we do want to take a moment to acknowledge that hasn't been the case for many, many others. The pandemic, wars, genocides, climate disasters, mass shootings... the list, unfortunately, feels endless and heavy, and heavier still when we think of what Maddie's world might be like in a decade or three. But this also gives us all the more reason to continue to live our values and make this planet more equitable, peaceful, and just.

We hope you're doing well and send along our best wishes of love and gratitude during the holiday season and the year to come.

– David, Sarah, Madeline, and Cricket