Think Kit Dec. 1 - My Year in Photos

Think Kit is back.  30 days of blogging powered goodness from me, fueled by Smallbox Web's December daily blogging challenge. Day one prompts me to collect the year in pictures.  I'm a parent, so after taking a first pass at this collection I found them to be heavily oriented towards my children.  For those of you child free Internet denizens who love to complain about how annoying it is that social media and the Internet is filled with pictures of people's kids, email me at jonwillford@gmail.com for an expletive filled response about perspective in life, parenting, how I put up with your cat pictures, and so forth.  Nonetheless, 2013 was an incredible year filled with many milestones.

After nearly eight years (longest.jobstreak.ever.), I left OneAmerica for new challenges and a dramatically different work experience at Apparatus Consulting.

This happened 10 years ago this past August 30th.

My wife is really good at keeping the girls engaged with the various museums in town.  The impact is really exciting to witness.  Here's my oldest asking to have her picture taken in front of this Ai Weiwei piece at the IMA.

My mom retired after nearly 40 years as 3rd grade teacher (in the same school and classroom, no less). She's taught multiple generations of the same family in the small town of Pennville.  She has been a positive influence in her community for decades and continues to do so.  She's an amazing person and I'm really proud to be her son.

My oldest has turned into quite a little learner and it's exciting to witness. Early childhood development is also a little stressful at times in that there's so much cognitive and intellectual development, you wonder if you're keeping up. Here we are, developing an appreciation for the finer works of literature.

We went to Disney World and it was a wonderful, surreal experience.  There's a lot to talk about from a cultural/critical perspective as well as logistically that I think is noteworthy. It was a genuinely great family vacation.  More to come.

I'm pretty lucky.  My family has a small lake cottage on Lake Tippecanoe in northern Indiana.  It makes for a lot of fantastic Ford family time.  Here we are fishing at sunset on the end of the pier with grandma and grandpa Ford.

My oldest started kindergarten.  Here's a first day of school action shot.

My obligatory State Fair post, because I love the State Fair and am lobbying hard to be the Duke of the Indiana State Fair - a position that doesn't exist (yet).