Welcome

I love the new year. I feel so hopeful, so focused, so refreshed. On the eve of this new year, I sat with my kids at our dining room table. Will was the writer, June the folder, and Clara the taper. We filled a flower pot with all our goals, wishes, aspirations for the year ahead. Jeff, my husband, mustered one or two. Clara just shouted "camping!" and "swimming!" (She is prone to brevity, in a loud tone, to get her point across quickly.) June's goals mimiced Clara's: "swimming and camping!" Will was typically thoughtful. His goals involved athletics, reading, and mimicing his parents' perpetual request to be polite at the dinner table. I was the geek mom who kept pouring out aspirations, hogging all the resolution paper. Most of mine are repeats. I have the same ones year after year. But starting, and keeping this blog is a new one.

"Welcome That," the name of my blog, is actually a phrase I stole from June, my third child and my three-year-old. Whenever she does something that she thinks deserves some positive recognition, she says, "Welcome that." What she means (I think) is, "You are welcome for that wonderful thing I just did for you." She doesn't care if anyone said "thank you" first. That's irrelevant in her confident, forward-looking world. But in that June-ish spirit, I am starting this blog, with an open heart, and maybe even a positive and hopeful one, too. My resolve is to practice a welcoming spirit, and to reflect that spirit in this blog.

I am a former many things. A former musician, a former teacher, a former physician's assistant, a former DC-ite, a former socialite, a former loner, a former athlete, and even a former attorney. And now I'm a mom! M-O-M. And everything I used to be has been jumbled, tossed around, elevated, deflated, and elevated and deflated again. Now, I am present. I am honest. And I feel like "this is it." It's all out there. This is where I want to be my BEST. I mean, I have always wanted to be my best, but when you have four little bodies depending on you and looking to you every day, every hour, every minute, it inspires a different kind of focus.

My"best," I think, is somewhere wrapped up in that spirit of welcoming. Welcoming chaos. Welcoming (and seeing) beauty. Welcoming lots of nature. Lots of creativity. Welcoming all sorts of music. Welcoming harmony, as well as dissonance. Welcoming how small my world feels sometimes, and then how huge the whole world feels when I get an hour to go hiking after being with my kids the previous 336. Welcoming the possibility of getting better at things, like keeping order in my house. Welcoming a feeling of control and of total lost control at the same time. Welcoming my deep feelings of love, for my husband, my kids, my sister, and my world. Welcoming my deep feelings of anger at my husband, my kids, and my sister, and my existance in the world. Welcoming the feeling I have when my littlest boy curls into my shoulder, puts his soft cheek on my face, breathes his warm, uneven sweet baby breath, and my heart flutters and I fly off my feet and feel almost lost - like oh my God, he is so perfect that I have to be depressed because I can hardly take it all in with my other kids screaming in the background and I can't bear to screw up with him and then see him sad and then I'm going to die some day!

I sometimes think that I am a crafty person, thought I am admittedly challenged when it comes to finishing anything. I also would like to think that I can take decent photographs, though I take so many that they get lost in my un-systemized system of filing and printing and backing up and not backing up and calling on my techie husband for help. Anyway, my original resolution within my resolution of having a blog was to track at least one creation that came out of each day, big or small, beautiful or random. I may try to stick with that idea. We'll see.

I also have been contemplating who this blog is for. Is it for my kids when they are older, so they can see all the magical things they did and know how much I love them? Is it for me, so I can process my life? Is it for my sister, to save on phone bills and my babbling, so I can just say "Check out my blog"? Is it for the world, to find connections and maybe to share sone goodness or find goodness or, wait - that still sounds like it's for me. Really though, it may be for my husband, so he can know what goes on in our household, even when we're too tired to talk at the end of the day, so he can know what goes on in my head and know that I am staying afloat, so it can spark more sharing and love, and so we can package up an open spirit towards the little world under our roof, and the big world beyond. WELCOME THAT!