My baby turned three today. Three, y’all. Oof. (She’s still “the baby” though).

A few years ago, my oldest daughter turned 5 and we were going to go to Build-a-Bear for her birthday and so I didn’t have a gift to hand her that morning but I still wanted to give her something. So I wrote down five things I love about her and hid them all over the house. Each one had a clue on how to find the next one. She smiled and laughed the whole time. She is a words of encouragement kinda girl. I’d honestly forgotten about that until we were at Disney and she mentioned it when we were talking about all the different ways we’ve celebrated birthdays.

We celebrated most of “the baby’s” birthday two weeks ago when we did the big January birthday celebration. (We have 3 January birthdays in our family. I somehow managed to only get one dinky little picture of Marshall.) And we celebrated a little more at Disney World last week. But today we made pink cupcakes with pink icing and let her pick the meal (which she hardly touched). We saved out one toy from the celebration for her to have today. A Little People Cinderella with her coach to go with her favorite toy ever. I never dreamed I’d have such girly girls…
After we’d given her the gift we saved, her big sister proclaimed, “I have one more gift!” And she proudly led her around the house on a little scavenger hunt like I’d done for her.
Just look at these sweet notes. Oh, my heart.

1. You are my favorite sister.
2. I love how you sing.
3. I love what you play.
My heart is so, so very full.
I typically choose a word of the year when the school year begins but when August rolled around, I just didn’t feel done with my word. I still haven’t conquered ‘illuminate‘ as well as I’d like and it’s completely possible that I’ll come back to it in a few years. I really love all the meanings hidden in that bright word. But my heart is yearning for a change and I’m really trying to simplify all aspects of my life, including my word of the year. So this time I chose something I know I won’t be able to do or be at all times but something I want to be reminded to do or be at all times. It’s not a big word or a fancy word. It’s not even a very pretty word in my mind. (Yes, some words are prettier than others). It’s something that even the “baby” understands the basic idea. This simple word is: kindness.
I don’t expect living up to this word will be easy. Especially that part about wanting and liking to do good. It can be easy to fake-it-til-you-make it with one of those but not both (at least not easily).
As Thanksgiving drew near, I made a conscious decision to soak in all of the holidays. I promised myself that I’d leave my head and heart open to the things around me. I wouldn’t stress about all the things I “needed” to do. And one of the biggest decisions I made was to ignore my “rules” for eating. I haven’t always been the healthiest of eaters, but in the past year or two we’ve made a decent number of changes to how we eat in our house. We still eat out too often. There are still days when we eat cereal for dinner. And I still drink too much Diet Coke. But over all, we eat a lot of fresh, non-processed food that has been simply prepared. I lost a decent amount of weight since we started eating that way and I certainly love the way my body feels when I’m eating properly. But I decided that over the holidays I wouldn’t stress over what we were eating. And you know what? I gained 4.5 pounds. But, truthfully, I don’t even mind. That’s 4.5 pounds of happy memories. It’s from making snacks with my children for others and sampling as we went. It’s from enjoying goodies gifted to us from friends. It’s from (collective) hours around the tables of friends and family where we lingered a little too long…sometimes long enough for second dinner. It’s from drinks and chocolate and laughs and (good) tears. My pants may fit a little more snugly than they did before the holidays, but my heart is also full to the point of bursting wide open with the happy.
And the most interesting part to me is that now that the holidays are over? I’m not dreading a return to our regularly scheduled diet. I’m craving fruits and veggies and whole grains. Bring it, 2014. We’re ready! Starting with this: