The thing about blogging is that, when you write at all about your life, you have to decide what, and how much, to share – because it’s impossible to write about your entire life (and even if it was possible, I for one wouldn’t want to).  It’s a delicate balance that – if done wrong – can result in the blog coming across as either whiny (if the blogger errs on the side of sharing all the warts of life) or too perfectly curated (if the blogger is on the more private end of the spectrum).  I personally don’t like reading crabby blog posts, so I tend to err on the keeping it positive side.  Mostly, that’s been good – it’s encouraged me to look for the best in every situation.  But it has resulted in me keeping quiet about a Very Big Life Thing for awhile now.

Three years ago, we packed up our northern Virginia lives and moved seven hours, and several states, north to Buffalo, New York.  The main reason for our move was that Steve had a wonderful professional opportunity – one of those “crazy to turn it down” chances.  Even knowing that it was a golden opportunity for his career, we agonized over the decision.  We’d lived in the DC area for a decade and we had long considered northern Virginia our real home.  It was the place we’d planned to plant roots and raise our family; the idea of leaving was almost impossible to imagine.  We wrote pro/con lists, debated endlessly, and ultimately decided that the professional opportunity for Steve was simply too good, and we had to go.  We sold our beautiful house in Mount Vernon, packed our belongings and headed north on a new adventure.  And even though I firmly believed that we were making the right decision – I still believe that – my heart broke the day I turned my car north and left Virginia, and it’s never quite mended.

We settled into Buffalo and set about making it our new home.  We found places to hike, fun family activities, and new favorite cafes.  We spent time with our families – both of which were geographically closer as a result of the move.  We bought a house and planned to stay there for a long time.  Most importantly, we welcomed a new family member when Nugget was born.

But no matter how hard we tried – and we tried really hard – my heart still longed to be at home.  I reached my tipping point in January of 2015, after an awful day at work – all of my homesickness and sadness bubbled to the surface and I tearfully told Steve, over pizzas at Elm Street Bakery, that I couldn’t stand it anymore.  I wanted to go home.

We tabled the conversation for awhile, because we were just about two months away from welcoming Nugget to the world, we still weren’t unpacked in our new house, and it was all just too overwhelming.  I pushed my homesickness down – again – and decided to see if I could wait it out.  Nugget was born and we had a magical summer at home together, soaking up sun and exploring the best that WNY has to offer (which is a lot – don’t get me wrong; Buffalo is a great town and we like it here).  We made a trip to D.C. on our way to the Outer Banks for a summer vacation with my side of the family and tortured ourselves with visits to friends and places that we had missed so much that even seeing them again was painful.  I cried as we pulled out of Alexandria and headed north – again.  And at the end of the summer, I told Steve – nope, it’s just not working.

The more we talked about it, the more we felt we needed a change. I won’t speak for Steve, other than to say that he was feeling as homesick for northern Virginia as I was. We spent the fall debating options.  Moving back to the D.C. area was our first choice, but it wasn’t the only possibility we considered.  We briefly explored a West Coast move after I was contacted out of the blue with a possible professional opportunity in Seattle.  (That was never really an option – just a pipe dream we kicked around for about thirty seconds.)  More seriously, we talked about Denver.  We liked the idea of living near my brother and sister-in-law, and we thought Denver might hold some interesting professional opportunities.  We made a trip out there, mostly to spend Thanksgiving with Dan and Danielle, but also to scout the city for a possible move.  I met with an attorney while we were out there, and we checked out neighborhoods in case we ended up there.  When we got back from our Thanksgiving trip, we started sending resumes both south to D.C. and west to Denver, and we agreed that wherever the first job offer came from, that would be our move.

I started to get bites almost immediately, and between January and March I made four trips to D.C. for job interviews.  Meanwhile, we took our first step toward a move, putting our house on the market (which we would have done anyway; it wasn’t a good fit for us), selling it quickly and moving into a townhouse on a six month lease while we figured out the next step.  By Memorial Day, I had a fairly good idea that a lead I had was going to work out, and I was cautiously optimistic that a move home was in the near future.  Still, I was shocked when I got a call (on June 1st, only a day or so after we got back from our cross-state trip) from another firm – not the one I was expecting – telling me that I could expect an offer package within the next few days.  I was incredibly surprised, because I’d thought my interviews there had gone well, but it had been almost a month since I’d last heard from them and I’d moved on to what I considered a more promising lead (a small boutique firm where a good friend of mine worked).  I now had to wrap my mind around the concept that I’d be going to work for a firm that was on my short list of dream firms, in a job that I had barely imagined I would actually get when I first tossed off a resume and cover letter over the winter.

I made one final quick trip down to D.C. and found us housing, but even as we checked items off our pre-move to do list, I was reluctant to share the secret that we’d soon be moving home – because it was a dream come true, and I was afraid it would all turn out to be just a dream.  We landed a fabulous rental that is near all of our old favorite places, I accepted the offer package and cleared conflicts and reference check, and we lined up movers and told our current employers we were headed home – and yet, it didn’t seem real.  To be honest, it still doesn’t.

For three years, I’ve yearned for northern Virginia.  I’ve watched from afar as friends have welcomed new babies to their families – babies I should have been there to rock and hold from their earliest days in the world.  I read the Parish Life from our old church every week without fail and followed the search for a new pastor.  I decorated our home with art pieces from the Torpedo Factory and festooned our Christmas tree with reminders of Mount Vernon.  I longed for our beautiful house, our overgrown green backyard, and our quiet street with friendly faces waving from all of the front porches and stoops as I made my way home from a run.  I’ve enjoyed my time in Buffalo, and I will always have a place set aside in my heart for this windy town on the shores of the great Lake Erie.  But, as a wise colleague told me when I broke the news of the move, my heart is longing to be at home.  And a week from today, we will be driving south to start the rest of our lives in the town where we belong – the home our hearts never left.

These days, it seems like more and more often we are having outbreaks of violence and tragedy and heartbreak, and sometimes I barely recognize my country.  Last week we were buffeted, this way and that, by the news – first two more police shootings of men of color, and all the questions.  So many questions.  Why does this keep happening?  What is broken in our law enforcement system that allows this?  Where is the oversight?  My heart broke for the families of those two men.

And then there was Dallas.  And more news that is so hard to watch and to read about and to understand.  The heartbreak – more heartbreak – for more families, compounded by a sickening sense that our gun laws are out of control, our justice system is out of control, and our country is broken.

I don’t normally write about national tragedies on this blog.  Mostly, that’s because this is not a news blog or a current events blog or a legal blog.  But it’s also because I always seem to find myself silent after big national tragedies – not knowing quite what to say, feeling that everyone else is better than I am at expressing their feelings on these events, feeling that I have nothing to add or that my thoughts might be unwelcome because I can try to understand but I can’t really live many of these situations, so I will never know.

Still, what is that saying?  Evil triumphs when people stay silent?  (Something like that.)  I think we have come to a watershed moment where we all have to speak up for what is right and true, and we have to shout down the voices of hate with a stronger message of love and tolerance and kindness.

Most of all, though, we have to listen.

I can’t live the experience of a person of color, who is profiled and prejudged based on his skin color.

I can’t step inside the shoes of the mother who has to teach her son how to interact with police so he won’t get shot.  My son is white, so he will probably never be summarily shot by police (it does happen, but it’s far more rare than in communities of color) and he won’t be profiled because of his skin color.  I don’t have that worry, and I can’t imagine what that’s like.

But I can listen.  I can acknowledge that I have had advantages and opportunities that others don’t get, and that the reason is my skin color, and that this is unfair.  I can work to fix that by advocating for diversity and inclusion in all organizations of which I am a part, and I try to do that.  These are things that might be hard to say and to hear, but I have to say them.  And when people want to tell me about their different experiences, I want to listen and I must hear.

And while I can’t ever say “I understand,” because I don’t and can’t, I can relate.  I don’t know what it is to worry about my son being shot by police, but I already am worrying about teaching my daughter exit strategies and how to protect herself and get herself out of dangerous situations that she might find herself in by virtue of being female.  So I am listening.

I don’t know what it is to be targeted and harassed by racists using an ostensibly neutral hashtag like #AllLivesMatter because I have not lived that experience.  But I know how demeaned I felt by #NotAllMen.  So I am listening.

I don’t know what it is to fear the police because of my skin color.  But I do know that I often fear them too, because I fear unfamiliar men, and these unfamiliar men have guns.  So I am listening.

I don’t know what it is to feel the desperation of a community that has lost man after man after man to senseless and unjustifiable violence.  But I know what it is to feel desperate and small after seeing yet another rapist escape with a slap on the wrist (and a report of his athletic achievements), while another woman’s life is ruined forever.  So I am listening.

I hate the violence that we have seen over the past week; this country is unrecognizable.  And I am so, so sad for the families that have lost loved ones this week – all of them.  If we are to move forward and create something better out of this national tragedy, which I hope we can, we must listen.

So talk to me.

(Boring end note: the opinions in this post are my own and do not represent my employer.  Nothing in this post should be construed as legal advice.  Respectful comments are welcome, but any comments that are disrespectful to any individual or group, in my sole judgment, will be deleted.)

It’s no secret that I’ve appointed myself the Family Memory Keeper for my little unit of four.  One of my favorite tasks as a mom, wife, and family member, is preserving and keeping our family memories.  I love to research options for the best way to showcase our adventures and travels, and even those memories that seem small and everyday now, but that I know will mean more to me than anything just a few years down the road – the little footprints from Nugget’s first Valentine’s Day, for instance, or the first picture Peanut drew of me (I was shaped like a lima bean).

There are certain memory-preserving techniques that I return to over and over again.  My beloved Shutterfly books, for instance – I keep a running list of works in progress and books I want to make.  (Right now I’m working on Nugget’s first year book and a family yearbook for 2005-07.)  And my gallery wall – I don’t have one at the moment, but I can’t wait to hang it back up in our next place, whenever and wherever that happens to be, and one of my first items of business will be to update the snaps in there with another order from Social Print Studio.  And then there are the meaningful souvenirs I bring back from our travels – everything from a new original art piece to a handful of perfectly formed seashells.  Seeking out those things, and deciding how best to display them to make our home a really personal showplace for our family culture, gives me such joy.

But while I love my memory-keeping and memory-preserving duties, there’s a time of year that I inevitably find myself taking a step back from preserving, and turning my attention to doing.  Because after all, you have to create the memories you are going to preserve.  For me, summer is the season of doing.

Don’t get me wrong – we make memories all year round.  Picking apples and pumpkins in the fall, hiking through snow-sprinkled forests on crisp winter days, listening for the first birdcalls of spring… And I don’t take summer entirely off from memory-keeping tasks, either.  I blog our adventures all year, and I always have Shutterfly projects on the go – at least a few.  But I’m much less likely to be sitting before my computer, working up a big family album, or dreaming of new memory-keeping projects, during the summer months.

No, in summer I want to be out and about.  I want to be doing things all day – running, hiking, kayaking, splashing with my kids in the community pool, roasting marshmallows over a bonfire on the beach.  I want to stop browsing TripAdvisor and actually go on a trip.  I want to fill up my camera roll with pictures of hot sunny days that I know will warm me up when the skies start to darken and the chilly autumn rains begin to fall.

In order to keep memories, we have to make them.  Summer’s a good time for doing that.  It’s the season for doing.

Do you have a season when you take a step back from memory-keeping, and focus on making memories?

I sat down to write this post, intending to share all of my successes (and a few failures, because keepin’ it real, yo) in chasing after my hopes and dreams for 2016.  When the new year dawned, as always, I was full of big plans.  Get in shape, and get my confidence back!  Make progress on some of the big memory-keeping projects I have on the go!  Read challenging stuff!  Embrace a slower pace!  Write a project off-blog!  But when I looked over my – admittedly not that taxing – list of goals, I haven’t accomplished any of them.  I haven’t even really got any progress to show for six months of the year.

I definitely don’t have my old confidence back.  Before I got pregnant with Nugget, I was in the best shape I’d been in for quite some time.  I had just blown my half marathon PR out of the water – twice – by thirteen minutes each time, cutting my time by twenty-six minutes (that’s two minutes per mile!) between my first and third 13.1s.  I’d ridden in several long-distance bike races, climbed two Adirondack high peaks, and completed three Whole 30s.  This year… I haven’t done anything like any of that.  Instead, I’ve learned that my limitations are very different with a preschooler, a baby, and a high-pressure job, than they were when I was a stay-at-home-mom with one easygoing toddler.  Who knew?  I still want to get back to the same level of athletic performance that I was enjoying pre-Nugget, but I’m learning that the road there is going to be a little different.  I do have some plans, but haven’t been able to set them in motion just yet – although I’m hoping that Nugget’s recent stretch of sleeping through the night will be our new normal, and that I can start getting up earlier to get some workouts in.  More to come, I hope.

I also haven’t done the best job of memory-keeping.  I think I’m doing a darn good job at memory-making, but the keeping part has been eluding me recently.  I have always taken a step back in the summer, but when I made the goal I had a long winter stretching ahead of me, and I envisioned evenings spent working on Nugget’s baby book, catching up on some old family yearbooks, and getting a head start on our 2016 book.  That hasn’t happened.  Again, I have some plans on this front, and I hope to set them in motion soon.  Starting with Nugget’s baby book, because it’s really quite shameful, the state it’s in.  He’s a much-loved little guy, but the fact is, I was a lot more organized about memory-keeping for his sister.

As for my bookshelves, for awhile I was doing pretty well at reading diverse books and ticking categories off the Read Harder Challenge list, but I’ve sort of fallen off the wagon on both of those goals.  And the Classics Club wagon rolled out of the station without me.  I blame podcasts, and one in particular – Tea or Books? – which has exploded my TBR list with mid-century middlebrow British fiction.  And you know what?  I’m not even sorry.  Although I do want to make a little more progress on the reading goals I set myself at the beginning of the year.

Embracing the slow might be the only one of my goals for the year that I can say I’ve actually done.  And that’s mainly because there was nothing to do on that front, but get my arms around slowing down.  Right now, I’m in a stage of life where my weekdays are very full and hectic, and I’ve pretty much had to simply buckle in for the ride.  So I have been making an effort to slow down my weekends.  It probably doesn’t seem that way, because we’re always on the go – I struggle to balance the need for rest with my desire to have ALL THE FAMILY FUN.  But one thing that’s great about kids is they force you to slow down and appreciate the little moments.  Ain’t nobody rushing them out of the sandbox.

I could probably use some of that sandbox time to work on my off-blog writing project, on which I have done exactly nothing, so the less said about that, the better.

As for my word for the year, for 2016 I chose HOME.  At the time I picked it – or really, it picked me – we were preparing for another move.  We downsized our house and moved into a townhome while we worked on answering some big questions about what living situation is right for our family.  The first six months of the year, HOME has probably seemed a little absent from this space – and I know, I know, I said it was going to infuse my writing and my living this year.  Well, my word might not be coming across in my writing, but it’s always on my mind.  Answering those questions – what is a home, what does the concept of home mean for me – is still the over-arching theme of my year, even if I’ve held it a little closer than I meant to.  When the time is right, when I feel ready, I’ll be here to talk about it.

How is your 2016 going?

A few weeks after the temporary receptionist at my kids’ school started work, he asked me what I do for a living, and when I told him I’m a lawyer, he nodded knowingly and said he’d figured it was something like that.  “I see you every day with that huge car seat, and you’re so tiny” (I’m five feet tall, I get that a lot) “and juggling both kids, and you always look so busy!”  I laughed, agreed that it was “a busy season,” and proceeded to wrestle my wiggly anklebiters into their car seats and drive home for another evening of cooking dinner, bribing Peanut to eat, officiating elaborate bedtime rituals, cleaning the kitchen, and crashing on the couch.  And thinking longingly of a day when I’m just mildly busy.

My mom has told me that, even as a kid, I was always busy.  And I remember that being the case – I’m sure I did utter the words “I’m bored” from time to time (I was a human child, after all) but I honestly don’t recall ever really being bored.  There was always something to read, something to do, someplace to explore.  These days, I’m still busy, although it’s often the crushing, anxiety-inducing variety of busy and not the bustling, contented form of days past.  But one thing I know is – I’ll never be bored.  I often find myself daydreaming about all of the things I’d do if I had spare time, and while some might find that depressing, I find it comforting.  Years from now, a day will dawn when I’m not overwhelmed and my kids are a little more independent, and while I’ll miss the sweetness and snuggles of their baby years, it helps to know I’ve got a list of things to occupy my time and attention when that day does come.  Things like…

• Improve my photography.  On the day when I no longer have a baby in a front carrier, I’m going to be really sad, but I will take some consolation in having free hands for my dSLR again, and I’m going to really learn how to use it then.
• Take up birdwatching.  I love birds and have for a long time, but haven’t been able to devote the time or energy to learning to identify many of them.  And there’s also the baby in front carrier problem (see above) that prevents me from using my camera at all, let alone my zoom lens.
• Decorate my house.  I’m assuming that I’ll have one again someday, and maybe the third time will be the charm when it comes to creating a serene haven filled with personal touches, family pictures and memories of our adventures together.  I’m a homebody without a home at the moment and I hope to fix that.
• Finally run that marathon.  Right now I can’t imagine being separated from Nugget for more than thirty seconds voluntarily, but that might change when he hits the threenager stage, and then those long training runs might be a bit more appealing.
• Go on dates.  Steve and I are in a phase of life right now when it’s really hard to get away for dates.  We do manage to make it out from time to time, but when we do it’s a really momentous occasion.  We’re both low-key types who like hanging out at home, so it’s not like we’re wilting away over here, but it does feel good to get out and about sometimes.  At some point, we will work through the guilt around leaving the little ones and find ways to slip out more consistently and spend one on one time with each other.
• Keep my house clean.  I am laboring under the delusion that someday I will be able to walk through the living room without tripping over Peanut’s stuffed rabbit or Nugget’s beloved green car.
• Hike more.  And in different places.  I want to wander through canyons in Zion National Park, climb more Adirondack peaks, and trek the South West Coast Path in England.
• Read books.  I know I do that now, but the TBR stack is growing faster than I can scan pages.  Maybe one day I’ll finally read Trollope?
• Make stuff.  There will come a day when it won’t take me eight months to knit a hat.  And I really want to learn how to weave, but when exactly?  I’m always looking at looms online, but HA.  I miss making stuff with my hands.
• Travel again.  I mean really travel, and without worrying about car seats and pack ‘n plays.  I love the baby stage – some people are baby people, and I’m one of them – and I can often be heard dreading the day when Peanut won’t want to snuggle in my lap, and Nugget won’t need to hold my hands as he careens around the living room.  But one major consolation will be the ability to take them globe-trotting and introduce them to our favorite places.  We’re going to poke our heads into every corner of Europe, and we’re going to visit all of the national parks, and we’re going to kayak with orcas off the San Juans, loll on the grass at Green Gables, and spot penguins in Antarctica.  Just as soon as they can carry their own backpacks.

I’ve never been bored and I never will be.  How can I be, with all of these things to do, someday?  I’m storing each and every plan away against the day when I can take it out, dust it off and do something about it.  That day isn’t here yet, so for now you can still find me muddling through my days and holding tight to my little guy as I bury my nose in his sweet smelling baby cornsilk hair at night.  So when I’m crying about my littlest baby growing up, would you kindly remind me of my to-do list?

Happy February!  It’s the month of love!  I try to find something good in each month and in February I’m all about L-O-V-E and sharing it with my family – especially my sweet babies – and friends.  I’m already plotting adorable crafts for Nugget to do for his first Valentine’s Day.

Anyway, I’m doing something a little different today.  Usually I share a few reflections on the week that’s just passed and talk about what I’ve been reading and what I’m planning to read next, but today I’m going to link up with Anne over at Modern Mrs. Darcy and share what’s saving my life.  As Anne explains, most of us know what’s killing us, but how often do we take time to reflect on (and feel grateful for) what’s saving our lives?  Not often enough.  You already know what’s killing me – another move, an overloaded calendar on both the work and personal fronts, toddler defiance and newborn exhaustion.  I’m hoping that at least some of that is about to change.  We’re basically though the move, although we’re now living in a sea of partially unpacked boxes that I don’t have time to tackle, and I’m crossing my fingers for a slightly lighter schedule after about mid-February.  (Not too light, mind you – it’s always better to be busy when you work in a law firm – but at least more manageable.)  But with all that’s killing me, here’s what’s saving my life:

• Cuddles with my sweet baby.  I am hyper-aware of the passage of time (it’s one of my less attractive characteristics) and it makes me want to maximize every moment, because there’s always a voice in the back of my head saying “He’ll never be this little again!”  Nugget speaks directly to my heart in ways all his own, and I am soaking up every second of his babyhood.
• Peanut’s sweet, spontaneous “I love you, Mama!”s.  There’s a chance she is playing me, but I don’t care.  I love it.  Play me like a violin, Peanut.  Play me like a violin.
• Related: Laughing at the hilarious things Peanut says.  Recently, while dropping her off at school, I noticed that her classroom had a board titled “Helping Hands” on which they were displaying tracings of each of the kids’ hands and a quote from that kid about what he or she could do to help someone else.  Peanut’s quote?  “I can help Baby N stop crying by putting on a fashion show.”  So hilarious, and so Peanut!  I laughed at that one all day long.
• Rotating through my favorite scarves.  I have more filmy shawls, woven wraps, and infinity scarves than one person really needs, most of them bought from Lou Lou, a boutique in DC that my friend Nancy and I used to visit regularly on our lunch breaks.  I’ve been wearing them more than usual lately – staying cozy while I have fun mixing patterns and stripes (something I rarely do).
• My friend Zan.  Last week I mentioned that she came over and spent her entire Saturday helping kid-wrangle and pack.  She was so incredibly generous with her time, but that’s Zan.  I don’t always make friends easily, and I’m so grateful I’ve gotten to know her since we moved here.  She has made a tough transition a lot easier.
• The ladies who work in the cafeteria in my office basement.  I go down there for coffee every morning, and hit the salad bar or grab a cup of soup almost every day for lunch.  (I want to get back to bringing my own lunch to save money, but it’s just one of those things that has fallen by the wayside while life has been so crazy.) I joke that even if I did pack my lunch I’d still have to go downstairs to check in, because they would worry if I didn’t come down!  We chat, they ask about the kids, and they dole out hugs along with sandwiches and breakfast scrambles.  If I tell them I’m under the weather, I inevitably get a peanut butter sandwich and a “Here, honey, I hope it does you good.”  It always does.
• Fresh flowers from the Wegmans flower department.
• Scrolling through iPhone pictures and videos I’ve taken of the kids.  I can’t get enough of their sweet faces, and looking at them is my favorite quick reward during the day before I move from one task to the next.
• Podcasts!  I have been loving listening on my car rides to and from work each day.  I really enjoy the podcasts from Book Riot – the Book Riot podcast, All the Books!, Reading Lives, Dear Book Nerd and Oh, Comics! – and others like Bookrageous and Tosche Station Radio, but can’t listen in front of the kids, because occasionally they say words like “sucks” or “crap,” which I don’t want Peanut repeating at school.  So I’ve found a few family-friendly podcasts to mix in, including Sorta Awesome, Read Aloud Revival, and Travel with Rick Steves, and the kids and I listen to those, and then I squeeze in my grownup podcasts when I’m alone in the car.  (I’m particularly obsessed with Tosche Station Radio.  An entire podcast about Star Wars?  Come ON!  I want to be friends with Brian and Nanci.)
• My other car listening – definitely not when the kids are in the car – is the “Hamilton” soundtrack.  It’s pretty much playing on repeat in my head at all times these days.  (“The man is non-STOP!”)  And the show is now on my bucket list, right up there with “Book of Mormon,” which I still have not seen.  I’m following Lin-Manuel Miranda on Twitter and loving all the cool tidbits he shares about the show.
• Supergirl.  I’m not a big TV watcher, but every so often a show comes along that Steve and I both fall immediately head-over-heels for, and Supergirl is one.  In a season in which we’ve been like ships passing in the night a lot of the time, at least we can count on a weekly hour curled up on the couch together watching Kara and James and Creepster McFriendZone and Alex and Hank and Cat.  (Who else kind of loves Cat the most?  After Kara, of course.  I just can’t help it – I adore her.  She’s so snarky and fabulous.  I mean… “That handsome little hobbit who has more cardigans than you do.”  Dead.)
• Revisiting my summer pictures.  I recently pressed “order” on our 2016 family yearbook (after several evenings creating and editing it when I should have been doing other things) and looking back over our summer pictures made me so happy.  We had such a great one.    There are a few pictures in particular that I can’t stop going back to over and over.  A picture of the ocean I snapped on vacation in Hatteras.  Peanut picking blueberries (kuplink, kuplank, kuplunk).  Nugget asleep in the Ergo at East Aurora Food Trucks ‘n Fire Trucks, his little “happy” hat turned backwards on his head.  I look at those pictures, and I feel warm all over.
• Good books, as always.  Disappearing between the pages – there’s nothing like it.

What’s saving your life these days?

Well, here we are, almost a month into 2016.  How’s everyone’s year been so far?  I know there are some people who don’t really care for or about New Year’s – they say that you shouldn’t need a new calendar year to make positive changes in your life, if you want to, and they’re probably right.  Still, I am very much a New Year’s person.  I love beginnings, and possibilities.  I always liked the first day of school, and I love the dawning of a new calendar year for the same reason – there’s something so reassuring about a stretch of unblemished days ahead, just waiting for me to fill them up (hopefully) with love, and laughter, and learning.  And for the same reasons, I like making resolutions.  To me, resolutions are such a hopeful thing.  They’re not an admission of failure from the previous year, or a hopeless gesture – they’re optimism at its best.

There are so many things I’d like to do and accomplish in 2016.  Take up birdwatching!  Run another half marathon!  Make progress on my Classics Club reading list!  Lift weights!  Grow a garden!  Teach Peanut to read!  Learn to bake with yeast!  Visit my brother again!  More hiking!  Keep cut veggies in my fridge for snacking!  Finally write that novel!  Organize my photos!  Climb more mountains!

Of course life is full right now, and there’s no way I can do all of those things in a year – not even if I quit my job and devoted myself to keeping resolutions, which would be counterproductive because it would make it much harder to work on my ongoing resolution to have, like, money and stuff for when I retire.  Between work, parenting, and figuring out our housing situation, I don’t have much free time.  But that’s okay – I can still squeeze in little pockets of fun (alone time fun, fun with Steve, and fun with the kids – all qualify) and I get so much joy out of our family, so even if I don’t end the year feeling accomplished enough to meet Mr. Darcy’s exacting standards, I think I’ll be all right.

That said, it wouldn’t be the dawn of a new year if I didn’t make some resolutions.  So here they are (in no particular order, and not sorted into any kind of categories this year):

• Get my confidence back.  I’d like to eat less sugar, lose the remainder of the baby weight (there’s still a little bit left, but I’m not too worried – I know that commitment to eating well and getting back into running will take care of it) and feel as strong and capable as I felt before getting pregnant with Nugget.
• Be a good memory keeper.  This one shouldn’t be terribly difficult, because I relish my role as the family memory keeper (and family fun forcer).  It’s mostly going to be a matter of tackling certain projects – some blog housekeeping, making my 2015 family yearbook, catching up on some old family yearbooks that are languishing in a partially-completed state, and figuring out how I’d like to preserve vacation memories from our two big trips of last year.  I’d also like to look into archiving video footage and old photographs – but I may not have time for that.
• Challenge my bookshelves.  I want to really expand my reading horizons.  Right now, I’m planning to participate in the 2016 Read Harder challenge, work toward my Classics Club goals, and I’m setting a goal of 33% representation of diverse authors (people of color, LGBTQ, religious minorities or other traditionally marginalized voices) on my reading list for 2016.  (Hit me with recommendations, please.  I’m already planning deep dives into Octavia Butler and Jackie Woodson, but any other suggestions will be very welcome.)
• Embrace slow.  Life feels very fast-paced right now.  Two small children, a stressful job, and another looming housing hunt often leave me feeling as though my head is spinning.  It’s one reason I think I gravitate toward slower-paced, more tactile hobbies: reading, knitting, baking, yoga. I’d like to really tap into those sources of contentment this year, because I think they’re key to my personal calm.  And if possible, I’d like to grow my skills – I’d love to knit some more complicated things, learn to bake bread, continue to learn about gardening, and start birdwatching and maybe even canning.  Who knows?  I just want to relax by using my hands more this year (for things other than typing and turning pages).
• Write something off-blog.  A few months ago I told a couple of friends that I finally had an idea for a novel – an idea that I thought had legs enough to take me more than 300 pages to tell the story.  (I always have lots of ideas, but they usually peter out after five pages or so.)  I am still working through the details, and the idea involves some historical research before I can start writing, but this is the year I make an attempt at it, or at least the beginnings of an attempt.

In addition to making a few resolutions (can I even call those resolutions? I’m leaving myself lots of wiggle room this year) I also feel compelled to pick a word for the year.  Sometimes I set an intention, sometimes I pick a word, and sometimes I just list goals, but this year, a word feels right and necessary.  I told a family friend that I was planning to use the word “forward,” as a way to remind myself to keep putting one foot in front of the other, but since that conversation a different word has called out to me and I think it’s the word I need to follow through 2016.  The word is:

HOME.

We’re preparing to (yet again) move at the end of this month, and as of the writing of this blog post we don’t know where we’re going.  (We should probably get on that.)  But aside from just the mere shell of a house, we really need to find a home.  I haven’t felt at home – really, truly, at home, at peace, at rest – since the moment I pulled out of my driveway in Virginia and turned my car northwards.  I don’t know what to do with, or about, that, but it’s the truth.  I still feel like a Virginian stranded above the Mason-Dixon line.  I’m constantly homesick for Old Dominion.  And the fact is – I need to sort out what “home” means to me, and find some way to be at peace no matter where we live.  There’s much more thinking and searching than a few paltry sentences at the end of a blog post can do, so expect more on this theme in the coming months.  At the moment I’m not planning any sort of regular check-ins, but I’d like “home” to infuse and inform my writing and my living this year.

What are you planning for 2016, my friends?

And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone about them: and they were sore afraid.  And the angel said unto them, Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people.  For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, which is Christ the Lord.  And this shall be a sign unto you; Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger.  And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising god, and saying, Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.  (Luke 2:9-14).

Tomorrow is Christmas Eve.  2015 is almost behind us, and I don’t think many people will be too sorry to see it go.  Our fellow Americans are being murdered at prayer meetings and at office holiday parties, our friends in Paris were savagely attacked, little children are being driven from their homes in faraway countries, and a candidate for the highest office in our own country has proposed barring the gates to people based on their religion.  (Oh, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson are turning over in their graves on that last one.)  In many ways, it’s been a crummy second half of the year – there couldn’t be further from peace on Earth, and as for good will toward men, well, we’ve got precious little of that going around too.

But tomorrow is Christmas Eve.  I’ll be busily wrapping up the last of the gifts, and taking my kids to see Santa (because Peanut requested to go this year – last year she was terrified of poor old Kris Kringle).  But I’ll also be hoping that a little of the spirit of Christmas, what it’s really about (and that’s not sugar, reindeer or the new play kitchen that Peanut will be finding under the tree on Friday morning) will trickle down and infuse the coming year.  We need some of the spirit of Christmas to last us a little bit longer in 2016.

So, tomorrow is Christmas Eve.  And Friday is Christmas.  Which is a day about hope and peace and loving our neighbor.  Let’s go be Christmas, all year long.