Vacation Days

Happy New Year, friends! I hope you had a lovely close to 2013.

For the last few days, I've been thinking about how very different my life is now compared to this time last year. I desperately wanted to be pregnant, and we were desperately searching for a house to buy. Both were more difficult to achieve than anticipated! There is something strange - and wonderful, of course, so, so wonderful - about getting the things you want most. Things felt somewhat lonely and sad last winter, wishing for these things to come into my life that turned out to be quite out of my control.

I can't say that I'm grateful for that time, or that I learned lots of profound lessons. Really, I just wish I could go back and tell myself to be a bit more zen about everything. I'm trying to carry that message into this year, and have been thinking a lot about patience, and how much I'll need to cultivate it in the coming months. Patience with our slowly evolving house, with myself during the rest of pregnancy and new motherhood, with finding my footing professionally during all this change, with Peter and our new baby.

Last night, we went to our dear friends' apartment in the South End for a small New Years party, just like last year. The food was incredible, we played games right up until the ball drop, and then we toasted each other at midnight with Champagne. Today, I'm making corn bread and hoppin' john while forging ahead on back issues of the New Yorker and my big stack of library books, just like last year.

But everything looks different in this bright new light.