Happy New Year!

It has been not quite a month since my last post, but oh, what a month. It’s funny to think I started this blog off posting about moving things and people, as we’ve just undergone another move in which I tried to be more relaxed about my things and have been rewarded by having some of them go missing. As for people, well, we made good good-byes of it, I think, but my personal tally of people I needed to say goodbye to was…generously, seven or eight. Which is strange, because so much happened while we were at our last post, and yet very little of it happened at that post.

In 2014, I…

• got a dog
• attended seven or eight weddings
• spent a crazy day as an accidental wedding/reception director
• welcomed the babies of three dear friends, and many others too
• failed to finish the baby blanket for one of them (it’s almost done! I swear!)
• visited my sister at college for her birthday (wooo Mardi Gras)
• watched my husband finish up RCIA and become a full member of the Catholic Church
• achieved my life goal of chanting the Exultet at the Easter Vigil
• said goodbye to yet another home, another church, another choir
• officially celebrated spending more time with my husband than time apart
• attended my first Orthodox wedding
• ate a shocking amount of Chicago-style pizza, all things considered
• spent two separate weeks helping care for my dad’s parents
• spent a week helping my roommate get ready for her wedding
• got pregnant for the first time
• made new friends, and successfully had them over for multiple dinner and game nights
• put gosh I don’t know probably at least 5,000 miles on our car
• help lay my grandma’s last sibling to rest
• introduced my husband to my Montana aunt and uncle
• said goodbye to yet another home
• said hello to the home we’ll bring the baby home to
• started wearing maternity clothes
• watched my name creep closer and closer to the top of our chronological-by-due-date pregnant lady prayer list
• watched Notre Dame beat LSU in a bowl game (still somewhat stunned on that one)
• celebrated the new year with friends old and new

We were a little busy. I didn’t spend a single weekend in October at home. And while I absolutely loved the holidays–SO MANY PEOPLE, SO LITTLE TIME–I am very glad to be sitting now in my new recliner (that has illicit dog fur on it, so subtle, dog) looking out my window at my new (shockingly sunny if somewhat small) backyard, contemplating what a crazy wonderful whirlwind of a year it has been and what I want to do for this year, which promises to be equally exciting in a myriad of ways.

This year, I want to create more. (You’re creating a baby, isn’t that enough?) We’ve gotten rid of cable, which hopefully will help, and I’ve gotten back into the rhythm of knitting (another post), and I’m making this post–my goal, I think, is to ease up and go for a twice-a-week schedule, hopefully Sundays and Wednesdays, with the former being more religious/reflective and the latter being a little more practical/daily-life-y. (Clearly I missed yesterday, and clearly this is a more practical post. Shhhhhhh, don’t remind me.) But we’ll see! Obviously in about four months all my routines are going to go to pot anyway, but I figure the more I devote myself to establishing them now, the more I’ll miss them/seek to carve out time for them when I get a respite from baby-ing.

I also want to read more books, again. Last year I finally read Jane Eyre; right now I’m rereading Gone with the Wind, and hopefully this will be the year I tackle Huckleberry Finn. And of course we are reading The Hobbit to baby.

I’m taking my New Year’s Resolutions from the first part of the second reading on the Feast of the Holy Family; I also want to practice more silence and stillness. My husband and I made it most of the way through Meg’s Advent Boot Camp, and it was a really beautiful and restful thing; I think we’re going to take out a Magnificat subscription and see if that doesn’t help order us onto a more structured prayer path. Again, baby is going to change many things, so now is the time to lay the good foundation.

So, there you have it: a brief look back at 2014, which started with us celebrating our friends’ wedding and ended with us meeting their week-old firstborn son (which I just don’t know how you get more beautiful than that), and the tiniest hint of sketches of plans for 2015. It’s going to be a wild ride; hopefully this place will help me hang on through thick and thin.

Peace,
Jo