A Mixed Bag

New Year’s Day was lovely – if colder than I’d really like – and filled with assorted prep work for some assorted projects. Then Caitlyn decided that she’d really like to start the year with a stomach flu, so my Day 2 of 2011 has been spent sitting with a feverish girl who begs for water after throwing up all the nothing that’s left in her tummy. Two days old and already the year is reminding me: Balance, Pace Yourself, You Are Not Always in Control.

I don’t generally make Resolutions for a New Year. While the change in the calendar makes a nice starting point, sometimes it feels like waiting for January 1 is both a form of procrastination and an assurance of failure. Maybe if resolutions didn’t kick in until mid-January, when the cleanup from the chaos of December was done and life had returned to What Passes For Normal, maybe then they wouldn’t feel like Unreasonable Expectations.

I am, however, attempting to state some goals, in no real order.

  • Make a real effort to do something creative on almost every day. It doesn’t have to be a big something (progress on a large project counts) and it can be in almost any medium: fabric, paper, pixels, text, paint, food. At the end, there should be Something where there was previously Nothing.
  • Make some progress on the long-term project of cleaning and purging our lives of the stuff we’re done with but haven’t figured out how or where to let go of it.
  • Everyone’s Perennial Favorite: Exercise more for overall health.
  • Be more present in the various moments of my day. Listen to the people who are talking to me instead of nodding while planning dinner in my head.
  • Be a better, more patient and less short-fused parent.

There’s also the garden and the p-patch (first seed catalog arrived last week), my work, assorted potential travel plans, community involvement, food storage, home improvement. And books to read, meals to make, outings to plan, projects to support, dreams to enable.

May 2011 be bright and bountiful, for all of us.

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