1*1*11

It's 2011 and my calendar is clear.
The end of the first day of January and after hosting our dinner today, I can finally sit back and not have anything looming on the calendar sucking up my brainpower.
Seriously, I feel like I've gone from moving to trips to birthday parties to houseguests to holidays with one thing after another eating up my time. And any other break has been filled in with more house stuff all along.

[Side story: We dropped off my parents at the airport Thursday night and on the drive home Ryan says, "Kids! We're having more people over this weekend! Guess what that means!?!!" all excitedly and the kids were all "What Dad? What does it mean?!?!??" just as excitedly.
"It means it's time to paint something! Yeah!"
Um, yeah, that's about how it works around here.
We painted the dining room that very night in preparation for our New Years Dinner today.]

Anyway.
We rang in the New Year.
We had our big little dinner.
It's been a good year so far.

And now, as I sit here tonight, I finally, since when I can't even remember, have nothing -absolutely nothing- on the agenda.
There's no looming deadline or visitors on the horizon.
I can take my time and de-Christmas-fy my house and try and find our new normal around here.
And I can catch up on blog posts. I have dozens started and never finished. House pictures, house projects, and of course the annual end of the year reflections and the official recap of our New Years Dinner.

But I'm running on four hours of sleep last night, followed by about 8hrs of party prep (don't worry- the dinner itself wasn't 8hrs of prep, it was the putting the dining room back together) and then 5hrs of entertaining and then of course clean up. I'm beat.
And I have nowhere to be and nothing to do (other than everyday life) so blogging will happen eventually. :)

In the meantime, I hope y'all have been introduced to 2011 well.
I have faith that it's gonna be a great year!