I made bunches of resolutions this New Year.  Don’t we all?  Buoyed by hope and dreams of success.  Laden with rest.  Stars in eyes we plot the course for the future.  Isn’t that how December 31st planning goes?  So sweetly hopeful.  I am usually a total New Year’s under-achiever.  I kind of cower in the corner when people discuss their resolutions, because I am way too cynical, and while others dream, I am rest-assured that in approximately one month I will have broken every good intention.

I will be eating tons of sugar.

I will be looking through the pantry for every fatty and amino acid I can find.

I will have lost all the books on my reading list.  Or never found them in the first place.

I will have lost my temper, been ungrateful, and basically a scourge to man-kind in general.

And so I set out to not set out to have goals for myself.  Busy enough on a daily basis, I do not have to worry about laziness.  Busy combined with some OCD renders me able to manage the affairs of my life well enough that it seems enough to just….manage.

But not this year.  This is 2010, the Year of Resolutions.  I have quietly laid out 10 goals for myself. And am challenging myself daily to keep them.

This blog was one of those resolutions.  It is beyond me how anyone has lived without my jots and notes, but somehow the world kept turning.  Only I was lonely to get my spot back.  And so now I have.

Last we surfaced on the Web, we were 5.  Mom, Dad and 3 kids.  Now we are six.

Anna is seven

Josh is five

Emma, three

Will, 5 months

Sweet, precious, beautiful, wonderful Will.  We wondered, albeit sort of half-heartedly, whether we should have him.  We knew we wanted Baby 4, but just getting there scared us a little.

Now we are there.  And safe to say he has won all of us over.  He is undeniably the most rotten baby around.  One so entitlement-minded has never walked this earth, I am sure.  But he holds our hearts. And he knows it.  And I am glad he knows it, because that is what family is: a place to be held and loved.  And to know you hold someone’s heart.

Welcome back friends, from near and far, from back then and now.  It’s good to be here again.