2012

What. a. year.

It's been an incredibly amazing year. Filled with heartbreaks, milestones, excitements, surprises. Victories and tragedies. Scraped knees and spreading wings. The best kind of year, you know, one that you make it through.

I'm sort of at a loss of how to process this whole year. I feel like I'm at an amazing place in my life. Equal parts confident and anxious.

For the past few months I've been having this recurring dream where I'm flying. It's so realistic. I can take these running jumps and I just float on. There's no other way to say it, but it feels so real. And I wake up still with the thought that maybe, just maybe if I took a jump I could fly.

I told my uncle Max about this on our family vacation (more on that later!), and he said he's not one for dream interpretations, but flying in dreams is one of those irrefutable signs of confidence. He said that he remembered having flying dreams when he was my age. Twenty to twenty-five, he laughs, but not anymore!

For the first time I really feel like I have the world at my fingertips. My future seems so tangible. I'm imagining myself in five years in a way that I never did previously. (More on that later...but I never imagined Lena at five. Now I'm imagining her and us five years from now, ten even.)

I have some right to be confident, I've heard back from a few grad schools, all of which I've got interviews for in Jan-Feb. Since then I've had equal parts flying and anxiety dreams. (One the interview coordinator for Duke dies, and my email doesn't go through so I don't get any faculty to interview. I actually woke up and was very worried that my dreams killed this poor woman.)

L is going to be five within the month. Five. I want to shout this from the rooftops and freak out because five!!!!!!!!! 

And 2013 holds some exciting things for us. Kindergarten, grad school. Maybe moving to a new city or state even. I'm looking forward, but this doesn't mean I'm any less thankful for the past.

2012. At the beginning I never would have guessed it would have turned out this great. But it did! Funny how that happens, ain't it?