Hello friends.
Hope you’ve all enjoyed the holidays. I love the New Year portion of the holiday season best; it’s the perfect foil for a holly jolly atheist like me…. I get to wish you (and random strangers) some good cheer without feel hypocritical.
Anyway, I wanted to pop in to share some thoughts about my hoped-for accomplishments and new habits I hope to cultivate in 2012. I’m not calling them resolutions, but they are bigger than tasks on a to-do list. Here we go:
1. Put my marriage first. Before work, before dishes and laundry, and yes, sometimes even before Kai. As of today, we’re no longer newlyweds, and having a little one and three jobs between the two of us means our attentions are necessarily directed elsewhere. I want to stay mindful of this and continue to cultivate our amazing relationship.
2. Enjoy Kai, and enjoy parenthood. The first seven weeks have been rough (cute as the little bugger is). It often takes a very conscious effort to not freak out about a myriad of things, big and small. He’s my little dreamboat, and he won’t stay tiny forever. I will eschew perfection in favor of “good-enough” in my parenting.
3. Get to know my new camera. My parents very generously gifted us with a DSLR camera for the holidays and I am terribly excited to finally use something other than my phone for taking pictures! It’s a basic DSLR (a Canon Rebel T3), but it’s still far more complicated than my analog Pentax SLR. I plan on making the most of this camera and am going to try to never use the fully-automatic mode. Do you have some tips to share or maybe a blog or article that can help me? Let me know in the comments! Here’s one of my first pictures:
4. Stem the stagnation of my Japanese language skills, and hopefully even improve them. Passing four semesters of Japanese eight years ago did not come without some serious effort, so neither will this goal. I may gift myself with Rosetta Stone, and once I get my speaking and comprehension back up to snuff I might even start working on my Kanji, too. This is mostly for my own intellectual satisfaction (but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t want to attempt a family trip to Japan in the next few years).
5. Real financial stability is almost ours, and it WILL be ours in 2012. For the first time since we’ve been together, we both have gainful employment for the foreseeable (and beyond) future. We’re finally in a position to eradicate our modest consumer and student debt and build our savings account. Besides the personal satisfaction of a rising credit score and a cushy cushion, we want to buy a house in Philadelphia at some point in the next twenty-four to thirty-six months. We want our own permanent address and home base, and where better than our favorite city?
6. Deal with my post-pregnancy body. In the interest of increasing my accountability to myself I’m going to tell you that I gained about fifty pounds during the 41 weeks I grew Kai…and I’m still hanging on to about thirty of them, seven and a half weeks after his birth. Except for the two kilometer round-trip walk to work in Toronto, I was largely sedentary for my pregnancy. Couple that with the unexpected cesarean section and you can imagine how weak, soft, and generally unhealthy I feel right now. It’s time to start taking a walk every day, getting back on the bicycle, maybe checking out Couch to 5K, or even dancing….which leads me to my last bullet:
7. Don’t forget how to dance. That’s maybe a bit melodramatic; it’s been over ten years since I started swinging out and I don’t think any passage of time could erase that muscle memory (and besides, feeling music is not necessarily a physical thing). That said, it’s been about a year since I’ve danced regularly, and it’s bound to feel a bit awkward the next time I venture out. Since Ben and I now live on the road permanently I’ll be able to explore some unfamiliar dance scenes (though perhaps not every week, since we are sometimes in some pretty suburban areas). I also want to attend at least one dance event in 2012. I haven’t had fun dancing at a big event in a long time (I’ll have to write a whole post about that one) but I really want to make an effort to get on the floor again. It brought so much richness to my life (not to mention simply incredible friends) that I just can’t give it up yet.
Happy New Year, dear friends.
