This was one of my favorite years ever. Get ready to hear me brag.

One of my challenges I gave myself last year was to read at least one book a month. I succeeded and posted a very small book review once a month.

One of my other big goals was to meet new people with similar interests and go to more events and meetups. I went to some Design+Tech meetups to meet designers. I went to more Des Moines Paleo meetups to eat and "play-out" with my paleo pals. I also learned about Startup Weekend, a weekend long event where you join a team and build a brand new startup. I went to the one in Ames and my team won 3rd place with SpotVendr. My team was great and I am still in regular contact with 3 of them. I loved it and highly recommend it. A couple months later in June, I went to Startup Weekend Spencer with 2 of the guys from my team at Ames. Sean and Blake formed an app development team called RXA Technology and invited me up to Spencer to join their team and we created PushLoyalty, which won 1st place. RXA has also had me help with a couple of their other projects with logos, graphics and animation videos for their apps. I would've gone to Startup Weekend Des Moines but it kind of snuck up on me.

My wife graduated from Grandview with a degree in elementary education. I am very proud of her. She got perfect grades all while being pregnant! She is now a full time teacher at the daycare she works at which is only a couple blocks away from our home and her parent's home which is our daycare provider.

Me and my wife Alyssa had a beautiful baby boy on August 2nd. Ryker is such a good baby. He is 5 months old right now and he has been sleeping through the night for the last 4 months. By sleeping through the night I mean he will sleep on Alyssa from 9-10pm and then we put him in his crib and he sleeps until we walk into his room in the morning. From what I hear from other parents this is amazing. He is also so smiley! He laughs all the time. Alyssa can make him laugh more than me though. I have to work on that.

I blogged much more this year because that was one of my goals. The trick is to get more into photography. I went on a lot more photo shoots. Mostly on my daily lunch walk. I then edited one a day usually on my phone and then post them to my blog and all the social sharing sites that I can manage, which is too many. So most of my posts this year were photos, but I also wrote more. Which I kinda hate.

In late November my wife found a house she wanted so we spent most of December packing. It has 3 bedrooms, a finished basement, a deck, and a detached extra large 2 stall garage. We got the house on December 27th and got everything over in the next 3 days. It was only 2 blocks away so it wasn't that bad. We also had great weather the first 2 days. Yesterday we got our old duplex that we were renting cleaned up and the new house is about 75% setup.

There are too many choices of things to do today. The possibilities are endless. I am interested in everything so much so that I am spread too thin on everything I want to do. I need to focus on one craft eventually but I need to learn everything I am into and follow through in each of them first. I have been doing a couple animated video commercials lately. I would like to get more into video. I got a new camera this year so I could take some good baby photos. I also just got some lighting and audio gear as gifts. In the next 2 months I am doing a couple more flash animated videos and am shooting and editing a kickstarter video for 2bots. I also want to try to shoot some interviews and some live music and so I can learn how to get the best audio.

I want to be creative in every way and I get distracted at least once a month with something new. This will be perfect for raising my son. I want to do a book project for him every year and eventually work on it with him. He could do the story or illustration kind of like Axe Cop.

It was a great year for my family. We will spend the next month getting settled in to the new house. I still have to finish most of the basement, garage and backyard. We have a playset to set up and I want to do a garden behind the garage. This summer Ryker will be running around the backyard! I don't even know how crazy this year will be yet, but I am excited more than ever.

Happy New Year!