My New Years Wishes

(Siu Jeun makes the weirdest faces, but it's hard to capture them.)

I could call them resolutions...but I've never been a very resolute person, really. I'm sort of a "I really wish I could be this way, so I'll fake it until I get there" sort of a person.

Let's start with taking stock of what I am now. When I was young, I wanted to be a Kindergarten Teacher when I grew up. (Why? I loved to grade papers and hand them back. Sound logic, right?)

When I realized that there might be more to life than grading papers and handing them back, I changed my aspirations to Mommy. I wanted to be a mommy and stay home and...do whatever mommies did.

To prepare, I started teaching myself to be a little Domestic Girl. (That doesn't sound quite right, but you know what I mean.) I've been collecting recipes since I was 8. I've been collecting kitchen gear since I was 10. (Oh, and I even managed to convince my younger brothers to play school with me around that same age...so I was able to correct and return their papers to them. Score! Check off one life dream.)

As I got older, I began cooking - the harder the recipe the better. (The fact that I was a high school student with no job and my father's well-appointed pantry at my disposal didn't hurt!) I read Martha Stewart Living like a novel on the bus to and from my university. I gathered around myself a stalwart little band of taste-testers and guinea pigs and subjected them to cream puffs, spritz cookies and rousing Murder Mystery dinners, complete with costumes.

(What all of this has to do with being a Mommy, I'm not really sure - maybe I should have edited my goal to read "Play House".)

I took a small detour when I was 21, and served a mission for my church in Hong Kong. Little did I know how that would prepare me for my life of Mommy ahead!

When I was 23, I met and married a wonderful young man, and (10 months later), my dreams came true - I became a mommy.

Hmm...it wasn't quite what I pictured. There were no lavish dinner parties, no endless afternoons in the kitchen. What I did have was a continuous round of sleeping, nursing, diapers, dinners, bedtime stories, baths and slobbery baby kisses. None of my recipes, kitchen gadgets or pretend spelling tests had prepared me for this. However, Life had prepared me for this - from the example of my mother to countless hours spent babysitting my own siblings and other children in the neighborhood, I had been prepared for this.

Now, I am a mommy of two. At times, this seems so much easier than I imagined it. (Those "times" are the precious moments during the day when both kids are asleep!) Other times, most times, I can't imagine why I thought I could do this.

This brings me to the point - it is the second day of a brand new year. My calendar is empty. (Heck, I don't even HAVE a calendar this year! I completely forgot to buy one, so I'm going to try out an online calendar and see if that doesn't work for me.) My shoppe is languishing. I haven't cooked a meal in weeks. I talked to some friends a few weeks ago about taking on their children as piano students...but now I'm not so sure I can handle that.

(A Very Happy BBJ.)

The point is, at this moment I am a Mommy...and nothing else. I feed my son, change his diapers, and put him down for naps. I entertain my daughter, change her diapers (yeah...we're working on that one) and try to do the impossible - reason with a two year old. So, what do I want to add?

It seems that Housekeeper is the next logical step. I will figure out how to take care of two children AND get meals on the table, and (this might be quite a stretch for me) keep the floors and windows and bathrooms moderately clean as well. I want to be able to bake bread and not feel like I've completed some Herculean task. I want to bake bread AND dinner in the same day and not pass out from the effort, physical or mental.

After that...Blogger is the hat I miss the most. I want to chronicle the little happenings and adventures of my little band. We're evenly split now - two girls, two boys. Adding my son hasn't diminished our adventures - just yesterday, we spent nearly 5 hours at the outlet malls. If THAT isn't an adventure, I don't know what is!

I want to be a Crafter, even more than I was before. A few days before Siu-Jeun was born, I made a dress for BBJ. I took a dress that fit her in the summer, and recreated it in cozy fleece. I love it! It needs some tweaking..but there was something so satisfying about showing that dress to Lo Gung and hearing him say how much he liked it, and how well it turned out. I want to create something out of the little Nothings that are around the house...and I want to have the efficiency to be able to make an extra Something here and there to post in the shoppe. I love the thought of my little creations making their way across the country, to people I've never met, to brighten their days.

Apart from the hats I want to polish up and put on, I want to have Patience. Patience with my two year old, patience with myself, patience with Life...just patience. Anyone who has spent any amount of time with me knows that I have quite a temper. (Anyone who has spent only a small amount of time with me has hopefully been spared any of these displays!)

So...my wishes are as follows:

1) Learn to manage my house again, with the addition of one small and very sweet baby

2) Learn to master my free-time so I can begin Creating and Crafting again.

3) Learn to master my temper before BBJ and I duke it out to the death.

Hmm...sounds do-able to me. (All except that last one! Maybe my father is right - maybe there is pre-school in my daughter's foreseeable future!)