Happy New Year (1-1-2008)

My house is still decked with Christmas decor. I have piles of laundry from our trip to Montana. And I've got clutter everywhere that needs to be put away, thrown away or given away. But I don't care, because I enjoyed this last day of winter break by going with Chase and Tessa and the King's to see Alvin and the Chipmunks. Then when we got home, Chase and Tessa both went off to play with friends and I got to snuggle up with Lucas and finish watching the end of "Aladin" until he fell asleep with his little hand in mine. It was a great start to a new year.

It's almost the very end of this first day of the new year. I should be asleep. That was one of my resolutions - to get to bed earlier. Thank goodness there's tomorrow. Another resolution I made was to journal my life better. A few weeks before Christmas I came across some Franklin Planner pages from the year 1989. I had kept the pages where I had recorded specific events and journaling leading up to and a few months after Mark and I got married. Reading about my own feelings back then was such a joy. I'm so glad I have that small glimpse into my life at that time. My current memory has forgotten all the wonderful details. I'm sad when I think about all the memories I don't have written down. Thus the resolution to start writing again. I thought about whether to do it on the blog or to do it privately. For now I'm going to do it here, because it keeps it all in one place. I know there are a few who check to see if I'm still writing. Hugs and kisses to all of you. I think I started to feel that I just didn't have anything important to share anymore. I had even drafted my final goodbye blog, but I just couldn't post it. Over the last 24 hours I decided that this is cathartic for me. I'm doing this for me. I'm not going to beat myself up if I don't write every night, but I will be sad. This is my history. This is who I am and what I'm about.

All day I've been thinking about how it's kind of funny that I feel like January 1st is really a brand new start. Why is that? Why is this the only day that we can start fresh? I know it's just a traditional fresh start, but why did it feel physically different to me today? My mind actually felt like a weight from the previous year of "have to's" was gone, and here I am starting with a clean slate. The fact is I can start with a clean slate every day. I could even start fresh at any second of the day. If I want to keep progressing in this physical state, that's what I must keep doing. I must never give up. I can repent and I can resolve to change each and every day. Mark always used to get frustrated with the way I would look at things. I was pretty much "the glass is half empty" kind of person. I would get so focused on what we weren't doing right, that I couldn't see what we were doing right. That would make me feel like such a failure. I don't think I'm terribly alone in this type of destructive thinking. I'm really trying my best to turn these thoughts around. It's not easy. I've been doing it for a long time, but the fact is I'm more aware of it now. I'm going to try to be more forgiving of myself and my faults and try to focus on my good points.