Surprise! My husband Jeff and I welcomed our daughter, Vida Fox Yates, into the world on November 9th at 4:02 pm. She weighed 6 pounds, 15 ounces and was 20.5” long at birth.

Fox was my maiden name and Vida (“vee-da”) is the Spanish word for “life.” Her life completes our family.

Forgive me for keeping my pregnancy a secret until now. Despite telling personal stories on the internet to go along with most of my recipes, we’re a pretty private family. With rare exception, we only told family and friends the news as we saw them in person. We don’t take our good outcome for granted, but are excited to shout it from the rooftops now.

I will be on parental leave until sometime in early 2019. There’s no hard date on my return to work at this point, and I’m OK with that. The biggest perk of working for myself is the flexible schedule, and there’s no better time to take advantage of that.

However, I still have two more new holiday entertaining recipes coming at you this month, as well as a seasonal fruit recipe in January. So please stay tuned for those.

From my family to yours, happy holidays. Enjoy the season!