Just 2 days after my last post I have to admit failure. Already I have 3 makan dates set up - a lunch on Sunday with my CYAN youth leaders, a dinner on Monday with my student who is in town on holiday from Hawaii and a dinner probably on Friday with my mami kakis from JI and dinner with Neen who has not accepted an offer of a hike in lieu. Sigh.... so much for the Battle of the Bulge. It didn't have a chance....
So it was a pretty good New Year celebration for my family. We went to D's brother's place for New Year's Eve. My bil organised an Ox-themed party as 2009 would be the Year of the Ox according to the Chinese calendar. It caused me a lot of grief in terms of finding appropriate wear and in the end D brought a ridiculous looking headwear which was essentially pom-poms mounted on a hair-band which I tried to make into horns and ended up looking the Statue of Liberty. My niece had better success with it by fashioning a pair of horns out of foil. But after all the groans before the event, we had fun as my BIL had put in quite a bit of effort and set up games along the Ox theme with the evening culminating in a 'treasure hunt' that ended in Clarke Quay where we could watch the fireworks.
R and J are in New York for the new year. Apparently it is an unimaginable -14 degrees celsius. They gamely went to Times Square to watch the ball descend largely because their mother was trying to do some vicarious living but then the cold and the crowds got the better of them so they came home to watch it online instead :) I am glad though that they are spending some time together. With both of them away in university in different countries with a 15 hour time difference it has been hard to keep in touch. And I think as they both enter new phases of life - work, study, dating.... - they will have to make time for each other or risk losing chunks of each other's lives. It has been interesting even to me to realise there are now larger and larger parts of their lives that I do not know about. Of course they strenously deny it and claim to tell me EVERYTHING but I know they can't really do that. I guess that's part of our children growing up and becoming adults in their own right.
Well, here's to a new year - of possibilities, promise and potential. Despite the gloomy economic prognosis for 2009, I am looking forward to it. I read somewhere that when you hit middle age you begin thinking of time as "time left" instead of "time ahead" and I realised that was true of myself. So I am choosing to continue to think of "time ahead" and I have been surprised at the change in attitude this simple re-framing has resulted in. So yes, I am looking forward to 2009. May it be a blessed year for you too. "The Lord is God and he has made his light shine upon us." (Psalm 118:27)
