Thursday, January 8, 2009

Breathing, again

I looked at the date of my last post and thought "wow"...but in a good way. I can't believe so much time has gone by without posting...but I haven't been a bad blog-mama, I've been a good Coffeemomma by taking care of myself, hubby and Toast. :) You see, we have been going along just fine...taking the days as they come. And the days are getting easier. Then (as some of my pre-christmas posts may indicate), we put up the Christmas tree and it was so hard. I didn't know it was coming...at least not that bad. I didn't realize that our first Christmas without the Tiny man would be full of little landmines and triggers of good memories that would make me sad and purge me of all christmas spirit.

So we went on vacation.

Okay, we didn't go because things were difficult, but as it turned out, the change in scenery was EXACTLY what we needed for this first Christmas without our Tiny man. Hubby's family has been doing the holidays in Florida for years and years, and when our dating became serious, we started alternating...one year in Fla. and one here in Michigan. We missed 2006 because we didn't want to travel that far with Tiny Man, so it has been awhile since we worked on our Christmas tans. It was nice to be away from home, but still be with family. The sunshine did wonders for all of us, especially me. Let it never be said that the winter blues have nothing do to with lack of light...for me, at least, they really do. It was a noticeable difference.

So in a nutshell: We flew there and back, and Toast was great on the plane. I was so happy about that! We did two Disney parks: Epcot (which included the fine tradition of eating our way around the world) and Animal Kingdom (if you haven't gone here because you think it will be lame, really: check it out, it's very cool). We looked for Hidden Mickeys. We did lots of shopping (I LOVE after christmas deals) and swimming, and reading, and playing and walking and relaxing.

So for the new year? Well, I don't make resolutions. They are too easy to break. There's all this pressure to tell people about them, then you feel guilty when you don't keep them up. I never keep them up. Maybe that says something about me. Anyway. I do have a few goals for the new year. One is to do something crafty every day. Crafting makes me happy. I love the knitting, of course, but I really want to do more scrapbooking in the new year. I didn't do a whole lot last year, and I miss it. To that end, I'm trying to take a picture every day and create a weekly spread. I got the idea from the Creating Keepsakes kit "365", which encourages you to scrap every day. I just want to take a picture every day, mostly to document what life is like...not the big events, but everyday life. Someday I will look back on this time and love that I was so fortunate to be able to spend time at home with Toast. I will want to see how he changed over a year. I will want to remember what we did every day. I don't think I will be able to scrapbook every single day. But I want to have a record of what life was really like, not what big events happened in our year. Because you always remember the big stuff!

So I also have a new crafty obsession: embroidery. I know, it's not 1863, get with the program. But have you seen this website? I got one of her kits for christmas, and I'm obsessed with the designs! I'll have pictures later of my first few creations.

So that's it! I'm recovered from the holidays...I've returned home, cleaned up the house a little, dug through all the mail, returned the phone calls, written the thank-yous. I've caught up on the web stuff, the email, loaded up the pictures and posted some to flickr. With this blog post I'm officially not on vacation any more. Now to finish the laundry.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I love Sublime Stitching too! I have big plans for kitchen curtains :) Just thought I'd let you know that right now they are having a 20% off sale! I am tempted to stock up, but already have a bunch of half-finished projects floating around.