New Year's Resolution

This year for my New Year's Resolution I'm doing something I've never done before. I'm reusing last year's New Year's Resolution. Exactly as I used it last year. No change. No update.

Am I doing this because I failed at it so miserably? No. I'm doing it because it was a smashing success.

In a sense I guess I'm not doing something I've never done before - I'm doing something that I have already been doing.

So here it is: last year my resolution was to never say anything about someone behind their back that I wouldn't say to their face.

It was hard. But it was so good. If I'm honest, I just did it so I wouldn't get myself in trouble. But it went way deeper than that. I found myself not only striving to say things that are kind ... but I found myself feeling more gracious and compassionate. I spent a whole year really challenging myself - and not always succeeding - to think the best of people, to assume positive intent, and to not let pettiness get in the way of a more charitable worldview.

I didn't do it 100% of the time, but I still feel like I succeeded. So I'm renewing it for 2016.

The Holidays

Daisy is undeterred by a diagnosis of depression
in the house but super sad about those little antlers.

We had a good Christmas and Thanksgiving. That seems unremarkable, doesn't it? Or obvious, perhaps? But that is sort of a triumphant statement given the context. I had some moments where I thought for sure this holiday season wouldn't go well at all. 

We were completely sideswiped the last two months of 2015. Sergio was diagnosed with depression the first week of November. He writes eloquently and earnestly about it here. He is in a dark place that I can't even begin to imagine. All I can do is to crawl in there with him and try to bring him some light.

It turns out that what he's going through is frighteningly common. But that doesn't mean it's not new to us. It is still very new for us and still fairly unpredictable. We were right in the thick of it from Halloween on. Neither of us quite knew what to expect.

So when I say we had a good Christmas and Thanksgiving, it's remarkable to me. He managed to avoid the darkness enough to do well on the important days - like Thanksgiving and Christmas Eve and Christmas and our anniversary and our anniversary (observed).

And he did well on several "unimportant" days, too; but let's be honest - aren't those unimportant days kind of important, too?

Like the day that we had a pristine picnic in the park where Sergio soaked in lots of missing vitamin D while the girls and I played imaginary frisbee.

Or the day when we took the girls to see The Peanuts Movie, their first movie in a theater, and the girls had such a good time and we did too. And in the movie, Charlie Brown, who is clearly on his own mental health journey, is told by Linus - "maybe it's time you explore the wild possibility that you're a good person and people like you."

Yes, let's explore that.

Happy New Year

Visiting Santa!

Christmas Cuties

vitamin D

First Movie

grateful on Thanksgiving

celebrating 13 years - for better and for worse