wow

... a year gone! Well, a year lived. I forgot about keeping up with this blog. More honestly blogging became difficult for me. Life is so personal and the internet is so PUBLIC. Some things you want to jot down to remember mostly for yourself, some things you really want to share with family and friends and even strangers... I start thinking about who might read a mom blog and then I start to edit myself-- even though I'm SURE no one really reads it-- what if I offend someone or people think I am boring or ??? Well anyway it just turns into this cycle of me trying to write for a mostly non existent audience and it takes the joy out of the personal record keeping. I'm almost 30 and I keep wishing I could think (act??) more like an adult than my 16 year old self so well here I am, genuinely approching this from a new angle. Writing for myself now. Period (exclamation point)

In thinking about this year overall, 2011 was... kind of sad. Not really for us as a nuclear family, happiness writes white but I love my husband more (almost!) every day and we both feel so lucky to have two happy, healthy babes and each other and be doing alright financially and all that. My sister got married and that was very fun, and wonderful to see so many of my family members that I hadn't seen in years. But this year I lost an aunt, Libby, who was a reader of this blog, to her 3rd battle with cancer, and Simon lost a brother, Jimmy, also to cancer. These things are not isolated and I know this will happen more as I get older but both losses had great impacts on me... on how much more mortal I feel, I guess. Then the political/religious/socio/financial climate in this country has been such that we are very seriously considering emigration, as much as we've come to feel at home in Chicago. It's funny I never even wanted to move away from California but it's so different to me now, being from the Bay Area you kind of grow up in a bubble. I know we can't go home again, even visiting just doesn't feel right, so we've got our sights (5-10 year plan) on Vancouver. I'd love to live on the beach in Mexico, if it weren't for all the drug lords, but in any case I'm not sure my kids would know what to do without at least 2 defined seasons.. Amaya has been jumping out of bed every morning to look out the windows for snow now that it's December :)

I've been wanting to share something about holiday traditions and memories which was a part of the motivation to log back in over here so that will be what I will work on next hopefully before the year is up!

I am ALSO going to try to be more organized with my recipes household tips etc and maybe use an attached blog to store those. We just did a dairy free Thanksgiving and yeah everyone makes a FACE when I say that but Vinh is allergic and he deserves to eat too and guess what everything was DELICIOUS so I wanted to remember for next year. I love bacon as much as the next guy but I swear I can make a ton of amazing vegan food 3 years after being forced to go dairy free :)