Another Start Line

 

Does anyone else have PTSD about facing a New Year?  OK, I admit, I'm painting it a little bit strongly.  But only a tiny bit.  Once upon a time I used to face a new year with a sense of adventure and goal setting.  I've always struggled with the post-holiday blues, and I would gird myself up to face it by focusing on all the good things that I had to look forward to during the year.  And then 2020 happened, which was kind of like getting the beat down of all beat downs on optimistic new year expectations.

I didn't have any expectations in 2021, what I had were desperate hopes.  Desperate hopes that with a vaccine and a year's worth of spread through the population that covid was on its way out.  Well, I never was one of those hopelessly deluded people who thought covid would just disappear.  But I thought it would move to endemic status, something we just live with-- like the flu.  Nobody shuts down travel and businesses and life over the flu.  Not on a widespread scale.

Unfortunately, reality has not lived up to my hopes.  Ugh.  And at this point, I am almost too jaded to even make a list of the exciting things or milestones that may just happen this year because who knows if any of it will actually happen.  (Can you tell the post-holiday blues are winning right now?)

I can celebrate the milestones we actually reach though, and one of those is today.  It's K's 13th birthday, which means I've been blogging for more than thirteen years now.  (That's just crazy, but yes, I remember blogging about his arrival.)  I could focus on how strange it is to have another teenager in the house, but really, it just feels like we've been teen-ville for awhile now and this will be more of the same.  K, of course, will present a new set of teenage challenges, though.  He is the first of our kids to be eagerly interested in dating (he set a goal this year to talk more to girls, and he apparently has a list of girls he likes) so I expect we will have romantic drama in our future.  Yay :)  He is also celebrating the big ONE-THREE by drinking Mountain Dew (caffeine is off-limits in our house until you're a teen) and getting a Discord account (social media also being off limits until thirteen in our house).  Now we get to see if he starts eating us out of house and home-- that happened with J about this age, and K is clearly hitting a growth spurt.  So fun stuff ahead, right??

Happy January everyone, and may beat the winter blues and enjoy the milestones you reach!