wary of hope. with all the urge in the air to be rebirthed, to become new with the changing of the calendar, i find myself wary of 2006, wary of hope, wary of the tendency to plan out my new self and all the activities or changes i expect to occur in the coming weeks and months. after all that has happened in the last twelve months, i cannot convince myself that striding forward with arms full of designs for the new year is really the best way to approach the matter. better to use caution. after all, it was but a year ago that i decided to join life here, high as i was on newfound second-trimester energy. i decided to get out and commune with the people i'd met here by going to meetings and talking about that which interested me most; that which at the time most consumed and troubled me - birth. so it was in january last that i attended five different local birth meetings and the night after the fifth and final meeting, as i was driving home late at night from the restaurant we'd regrouped at to be the chatty, judgmental bunch we were - as my car rounded a curve, the clouds parted and a great godly hand dropped a semi on me. it is because of that turn of events that my every move through this life, it seems, is filled now with great anxiety and trepidation and why i find myself yet making "to do" lists out for the month of january yet feeling ever hesitant about finding joy and confidence in my steps. i find myself feeling quite nervous about having hopes that they might soon enough be dashed, and i wonder how much heavier a weight might it take to do all that smashing of confidence.

in the meantime, my children march forward without a hint of my anxiety or hesitation. sebastian is spending all of his days absorbed in trying to move about and will, i am sure, in one of these early days of january succeed in crawling, causing me all sorts of unforeseen headaches. aleksander too moves onward, readying himself to actually understand numbers and their values, having already counted a number of objects at least once in recent days. he's also taken to tacking the word "remember" onto anything he wants to tell me about whether grammatically appropriate or not: "heather has to stay here at my house; heather's not going to go bye-bye, remember?" oh yeah, i remember.