Happy New . . .

Photo by Zsuzsanna Kilian 

We just returned from a third birthday party.  I can't believe this little girl is three already.  Oddly, her birthday is hitting me harder than my own children's.  It doesn't help that she is a highly adorable, very petite, monstrously cute little smudge of a girl.  She's permanently stuck in my brain at about eighteen months of age.  Although, talking with her today, I've really got to hit that mental fast-forward and give her her dues.  She is every bit of three, going on thirty.


As I get older, New Year's Eve becomes less and less of an event.  This year was a complete dud.  Our little town ended up not having the budget for the super fun New Year's party they normally throw in the historic downtown business district.  We've gone for the past few years and thoroughly enjoyed ringing in the New Year with our kids at 9 PM, then heading home and racking out.  Hey, we celebrated.  We sang.  We made noise with various and sundry noisemakers.  We counted down.  We cheered and hugged and kissed.  It was officially the new year for the kids and the tired parents.

This year, the four of us huddled with our noise makers and counted down with a lame countdown from You Tube.  We cheered and hugged and kissed, but it wasn't the same.  We went to bed and it was definitely still the old year.

This birthday party is another New Year's ritual.  The new year really takes off when the birthday girl proudly holds up the right number of fingers on her hand to show me her new age.  This year it is three fingers, which, for those that may have forgotten, is one of the hardest ages to show in fingers.  Most three-year-olds cannot wait to be four.  That's easy to show on fingers.

Leaving her party, I felt the new year had finally begun for me.  Which means, it is time to look forward to the things I want to accomplish.  If you remember, I don't like resolutions (you can reread last year's New Year's Rejections by clicking here).  But I do like to realistically look at what I would love to see happen and what I need to do to make it happen.

Except, this year, the list is crazy long and very daunting.  Perhaps I'm not quite ready to jump into that yet.  Perhaps, I'll just stay in review mode.  I can say that in the past year, I submitted writing to a magazine and was summarily rejected (however, due to the information age, my rejection was an email, which makes it harder to follow Stephen King's cool example of keeping them all on a spike on the wall).  I finished a third manuscript.  I managed to keep up with this blog.  I wrote, maybe not daily, but enough to call myself a writer.

This year . . . ugh.  A great deal of this year is out of my control (which I hate because, yes, I am a control freak).  But, I can say that I'll still keep writing about writing, about the causes that I love (I'm walking the 3-Day again and will make it for The Bright Night no matter where I live), the books I read, and whatever else falls in my path (lemon pound cake would be nice).

To a new year.  To a new writing year.  Because just like my little friend, my writing life is also three years old.  Or, as she says, "fee" years old and then she proudly, if not awkwardly, shows me three blessed little fingers.

Yes, to "fee" year olds everywhere.

Happy.  New.  Year.