The thirteenth year of the 2000’s

I don’t know what happened. Honestly. And I have no doubt that because I am getting older time is getting faster, and I am turning into one of those old ladies who exclaims “Oh my, where did that year go?”.  Where did it go?

364 days ago I got up in the morning and jumped 14,000 feet from a rickety little plane held together with duct tape. It was one of the most magnificent things I’ve done. Like flying (if I knew what flying was like). Like letting go. Like facing every fear in one moment and jumping anyway (thanks to Attila, my instructor, who was strapped to me and was going whether or not I wanted to).

Check out my face. Smiling!

And then, when I woke up the next day, it was the thirteenth year of the 2000’s. And here’s what happened in a nutshell.

I could go month by month, but just trying to do that via my photos made me nauseous. So I’m just going to say it.

Birthdays  in 2013 – our daughters turned (in month order!) 8, 10, 17, 5, 10, 3 and 12. Here’s a sample of some of the birthday cakes I knocked out and/or ate. My guy and I also had birthdays. Much lower key….

Not a bad effort really for someone who was never inducted in the world of the Woman’s Weekly cake cookbook.

Those girls did so many things – netball and gymnastics, dancing and swimming and art and school and synchronised swimming and exams and volleyball. They are all, one by one all seven, magnificent.

In April my big girl left to go live with her Dad, sad and angry at me and life. As the months went by my daughter came back bit by bit, by text, by phone, and finally in December in person. All of her. Came home. The next step is the one where she leaves home as a grown up, but this time I’m ready for that. It sees like the natural progression from here.

My guy and I got really good at some things, and learnt some new things about each other, and at times struggled with each other and the kids and the comings and goings. Sometimes I write about that, but mostly I don’t, but what I do know is that when I wake up each day and he’s there my life seems all that much sweeter. We brought our house, and I got divorced, and we brought too many cars, and our driveway is always full. We love our troopy. He loves the big black Landcruiser. I’d say she’ll still be around next year 🙂

Marina, our Spanish au pair arrived in January and stayed with us until August, when Pepsi arrived from Sweden and is with us still. Marina turned 25 while she was here, and Pepsi turned 19. She gets to go skydiving on New Year’s Eve morning for her birthday.

We’re lucky I think, to have the opportunity to have new people in our world. Not just for the help with the house and the kids, but for the beautiful, funny, and dysfunctional  and unique bits they bring our family.

I graduated with my Diploma of Professional Coaching in March and completed my training for NLP Practitioner in December. I facilitated and spoke at 7 seminars, and coached and mentored in all about 40 people through the year. It just became something I do (like flying), and the next step is to find more ways to do it better. I still think people are amazing. I wrote my blog more than once a month, and found that I could.

We lost a couple of old red hens, and got 2 new tiny baby chickens, one with funny feet who may never be “normal” and 2 new teenage chickens. The dog got fat, then fit, then a bit fat again. She ran on the beach and chased the ball, and ran in the dunes and ran away during storms a couple of times. She cost $200 to get home. The cat came home for food twice a day, licked his ass in the kitchen a lot, and often lay like a dead cat out the front of house trying to give me a heart attack every time I came home. Notice his photo is typical cat style. Whatever.

We went to two beautiful weddings, 3 funerals for 2 great grandfathers  and a great grandmother, and work and school and family and friends BBQ’s and the beach a lot, and to Bali to walk on hot coals, and to various towns up and down our coast with various combinations of kids. We saw our families, we missed the ones we didn’t see, we saw them on Facebook and smiled a lot. We rode bikes, and played basketball, and swam and surfed. And through all of that my 3 girls came and went each week to their Dad, and my guys 3 girls came for weekends or we went for weekends, and I think in the end the weeks and weekends just came and went , one by one, until one day it was (almost) 365 days later and the fourteenth year in the 2000’s is nearly here.

There’s more, there is so much more, but here’s cheers to that. Wishing you all that’s possible for 2014…..