Hellobee

Hi everyone! I am SO excited to be joining the Hellobee blogging community as Mrs. Dolphin. I’ve been following Hellobee since I was pregnant with our oldest and have always been so grateful for the wealth of information on this site. I’m very excited to have the opportunity to share my own thoughts, tips and tricks, research, successes and missteps with this great community!

A little bit of background on the Dolphin family:

Mr. Dolphin and I met in law school at Notre Dame (Go Irish!) eleven years ago. We were introduced through a mutual friend during the first week of school and started dating immediately. We moved to San Francisco post-graduation, married, then trekked back to the other side of the country and have set up shop in the Washington, DC metro area.

Our wedding day in 2009. Photo credit: F.C. Wong Photography.

We had our first child, a beautiful boy in 2014. To protect his privacy, we’ve decided to use a pseudonym: Lion (he’s a Leo so we called him our little lion cub early on). Lion is now an active toddler who will turn two in August. Lion’s favorite activity is “cook with Mama,” but he also loves balls, choo-choos, running around the park, reading and having dance parties.

“Bunny!  Bunny hop!  Come here, Mama!  Bunny!”

Our second son joined our family earlier this year, narrowly missing the massive blizzard that hit DC and shutdown the federal government for several days. Because we had an animal associated with our oldest, we wanted one for our younger one, too, and settled on a panda, celebrating the birth of the panda cub born in DC while I was pregnant. Panda is nearly five months old now and though he was a preemie, he has quickly caught up and is actually bigger than Lion was when Lion was this age. Panda is just starting the baby-led weaning journey, learning how to sit, and loves to smile at the world. Lion and Panda are eighteen months apart and they just adore each other (at least for now!).

Panda sound asleep, two weeks old.

Life with two under two has had its challenges, but much to my surprise, has also been more rewarding than I ever could have imagined! At the end of the day, Mr. Dolphin and I are equal partners and try our best. We do so much research into parenting, but find ourselves making things up as we go along half the time.

I’m so excited to share our journey with you all and plan to share our experiences with travel (we love to travel, but have had to find some creative ways to do so with a budget that was wiped out by high daycare costs in our area), daycare (including Lion getting kicked out of his first daycare), living on the opposite side of the country from our families and having little support near us, strollers, cooking with young children, schedule juggling, and more!

“Hold hands! Friends!”