New Year!

I have been pondering New Year’s resolutions lately, mostly because I don’t feel compelled to have any this year. Over at Faith and Family, I wrote about the trend of claiming a word for your resolution and I rather like this idea. But what word? And how big (or small) do I want to aim?

Something about pregnancy makes me feel like I get a pass on all this planning and aiming. The years when I am not pregnant I shoot the moon. Right now, I feel like my very existence — the act of growing a human — that this is way more of production than even the loftiest of goals when I’m not pregnant. I’m thinking that “giving birth” is all the resolve I need.

The phrase I keep mulling is “grace,” maybe even “Amazing Grace.” It’s not that I am confident in my ability to display grace so abundant that all are amazed, but mostly because that is what I’m asking of God. All I really want is so much grace that I find it amazing. Is that too much to ask? I hope not.

In other news, my Christmas tree was the absolute pits this year. We bought the one tree on the lot that needed spine surgery. We got the thing home, Paul stuck it on the tree stand and it was splayed so far to the right I thought it was trying to tell me something. “What’s that, you want to go back home to the tree farm? It’s THAT direction?”

The other problem was with the hole the tree farm bores in the trunk of the tree (so we can get it home and plop it on the stand). The hole wasn’t nearly deep enough, and we initially figured this was a large part of the problem and the cause of the strange angular view I was getting. So my dad and his handy self came over the next day and helped us get it remotely straight.

That’s when we noticed the problem was mostly due to the tree having scoliosis and we (being ME because no one else seemed to notice) would have to live with it. I had Paul lay underneath the tree that night and we twisted the base until I found the one-twelfth of a degree that afforded me a view of a straight tree from my primary vantage points.

Christmas Eve we pulled the tree closer to our furniture and when I tried to put it back after Christmas I could never find that nice little straight view again. So on Sunday, after a week of looking at my tree in all its crookedness, I took it down and had my boys haul it out to the backyard. I won’t go so far as to say Good Riddance, but it made me sad that this tree, unlike so many other trees we’ve had, did not make me sigh with love and joy every time my eyes fell upon it.

Happy New Year to you! We are enjoying our last few hours with Uncle Josh before he heads back to the land of Freezing Cold (and also plentiful snowboarding and skiing). It has been a great visit with all kinds of fun family time.