The Dust Settles

Today I was in the kitchen cooking a tofu curry with bamboo shoots and listening to Sinead O'Connor's "Nothing Compares to You" on repeat, and it occurred to me that the dust is finally settling. Our home is quiet and we are back to just our core three humans, thank you cards from Christmas are being written, and we are actually home now most nights out of the week.

The holidays were perfect - everything they should have been - with family, and good food, and memories and sugar overdoses. And now that the dust is settling, we want to reconnect with the friends we've been neglecting (and the blog I've been neglecting?), we want to clean out the junk we never use, and we want to kick off the new year with some improvements over 2010.

The day before my mom flew back to Hawaii was January 1st. We took a walk through the forest and talked through our goals for the year. It was really lovely to be out in nature and feel the energy of opening a new chapter.

Not that there was anything wrong with 2010; besides a few financial set-backs, the year was great for our family. Gigi was born in April, Barack was President all year, I started working at a job that I love which allows me half of my life to be a stay-at-home mom, Marcos found a new job that works perfectly with his stay-at-home dad routine, and the end of the year brought family close to us as we celebrated the holidays. We didn't step on an airplane all year, which we missed, but with a camping trip to the mountains, a summer trip to the beach, and Thanksgiving on the Jersey Shore it was exactly the refreshment we needed.

For 2011 we have some really ambitious plans, and I'm not talking about my goal to get back into knitting. We are thinking very seriously about putting Marcos' work on pause so that he can go back to school full-time. The clarity of "Yes, of course an education is the most important investment you will ever make" becomes very cloudy very quickly when we consider the debt we will likely have to incur, and the fact that Marcos is a really good computer programmer and he earns a decent wage right now without a degree. To keep up our motivation I might have to tape slips of paper to our mirrors with printed-out mantras such as "'Decent' pay is not a sustainable way" and "Education THIS year: You think it's hard now? Try five years down the line". Based on our preliminary planning, we are hoping that Marcos will finish up his Associates degree by December and jump into full time school at UNC next January, a year from now. I know that we can rock this, but it will take some serious concentration.

But enough about us: what about you? Have you made plans for the new and improved you for 2011? I know my readers, and I can't imagine that any of you have much improving to do, but forces be with you to accomplish with power and pizazz the things you are working on this year!