hello, new friend

hello 2012, good to see you. i have held out a lot of hope for you, but you also make me very nervous. if you weren't going to make me face scans next week (as well as later this year), i would love you without any reservations. maybe you will surprise me and i will love you nonetheless. i know, that sounds pretty great to me too. let's plan on that shall we?

the card above is from the curly girl design which are some of my favorite cards ever. the card below is also from the same line. love. love. love. i found the card above a few weeks ago in a cute little shop by my house, knew that it would be the perfect card for one of my friends (she says i was right about that) and that i would share it in my first 2012 blog post.

so for this coming year, one of the main things that i am going to focus on (because as of right now i assume that i won't be focusing on kicking recurrence in the you-know-what) is healing. not that i will ever be fully healed by any means, but i do have quite a bit of healing that i need to start and/or continue to work on.

to help me focus on doing that, i am taking the one little word class by ali edwards. i have actaully wanted to take the class but never thought i would be able to make the time. that reason now seems so incredibly stupid to me, i should have made the time because i really wanted to do it. so i am doing it this year and you can probably guess - my word will be heal (bp - i saw you picked "hope" for your anthem for 2012, love that choice!). i am so excited to take this class, but am even more excited, to truly embrace the word and carry it through the year with me. i figure that even if this year doesn't go quite as i hope, there is healing that can happen.

some of the things that are on my list to help me heal through the year include...
- take a solo trip(s) for a few days which i will be doing next week if my scans don't mess up those plans
- take every other friday off from work, which are my actual days off, but i never take them off. i am going to this year. no one is going to remember me for always working on my days off, they will remember me for many other things, and those are the things that i will be doing on my days off. this sounds easy but will very hard for me to do. i usually give work everything that it needs when it is needed. so this one will take work on my end, but will be so worth it.
- drink more water
- walk in the 2012 shore run/walk which is on june 10th this year. when registration opens, i will let those of you that would like to walk me with know so that you sign up. i will also let those of you that would like to donate to fred hutchinson and their immunotherapy research (the type of treatment i had) know so that you contribute. last year we had a great day and a fabulous team, looking forward to another fun event this year.
- work on our photo albums in order for our lives together to be captured and for malena to know our story before and after she entered our lives
- take more pictures. both this one and the one above will require me to move past the hold that pictures have had on me. i struggled to take them/look at them because i always had a thought in the back of my head about whether i would be in pictures in the future. for those of you looking for a very cool on-line photography class in january, you should check out picture winter taught by tracey clark. also, for the ladies, check out these camera straps.
- read more books and get a library card. i love to read but have not read one complete book in years. i am going to put "a homemade life" aside for a short amount of time to read this book because i really want to see the movie that comes out later this month and i have heard through a trusted source that the book is really good. i already have my movie date lined up and locked in.
- sleep more (the nightmares will have to cooperate on this one)
- make more of the presents i give
- spend more time in my craft room
- play more
- get outside more
- explore new places around washington and the local area. though it was not technically in this year, to get the ball rolling i checked out the issaquah coffee company last week (tnx sv for the suggestion!) for some gluten free goodies in a great little spot. as you can tell, i devoured the scone. yum yum. would be a great place to go on my friday mornings off, and awesome scones are a good motivation:)

- cook more.
- try one new recipe every week. i figure that one new recipe a week is not an insurmountable goal, and will give me 52 new (if they turn out good) recipes by year's end. i know for sure that at least one - if not more -  of them will be from "a homemade life".
- write more letters. i have been reading this book on and off since last summer, each letter deserves to be read on its own. i found this book when i was in anthropologie (which i loooooooove) and the title caught my eye. when i flipped it over, the top of the back cover says "have you ever had something you wanted to say to a friend, but couldn't" and the rest of text sucked me in. i already know who is getting the first letter. but, i also think that there are more things that i want to say to other people in my life. since the diagnosis, i have been overwhelmed thinking about how much i love the people in my life, and all of the specific reasons why. i think that they know how much i love them. but how great would it be to make sure that they knew that and the reasons why? my own little love letters going out into the world.

there are more ways that i intend to heal, and probably more ways that i will discover as the year moves on.

"heal" - it's you and me stuck together this year my friend. let's do this.