New Year's Day

Happy New Year to all our Family and Friends! We miss you all and are looking forward to seeing you soon. Hope your memories of 2008 are wonderful and 2009 leads to many more!

The day started with completion of this year's 'Red Book' plan (details on the Red Book in an earlier post). Steve and I sat down together in the early morning with coffee and watched the sun come up and talked through the things we want to do in the coming year. Our main categories were the same, Relationship, Kids, Family (UK & US), Travel, Finances, Business, Houses/Cars/Boat, and Personal / Skills Growth, but the focus on the individual categories has changed or the approach to a category has changed. In Relationship, for example, the approach has changed from how do we make sure that we have a relationship when we're living in two separate countries and running around like chickens with our heads cut off to how do we keep the relationship special and not take each other for granted when we're together 24 hours a day. The business is shifting to a more property oriented one with kids involvement and we do want to spend some time in Europe this year so we've fit that in.
We're going back to England in February because I GOT MY UK CITIZENSHIP!!! So we'll spend about two and a half weeks over there visiting with Jess in Windsor, having a family party the weekend of the 21st - Italian Night, everyone is invited and for those whose gifts we couldn't get over there at Christmas (Claire and Chris, Ellie and Louis) that's where they'll be! Then it will be back to the US and we'll do the crossing over to the Bahamas (we're enjoying the Keys so much that we're going to 'gunkhole' or 'pootle around' a bit here between the time that Jess and Matt leave and when we go back to the UK). Eileen, we've really aclimatised to the Florida temperature and Steve shivers when it gets down to 60 so I suspect we'll be keeping the house very warm!

The plan came together relatively quickly this year, but I think that was because we had an initial pass at it during our Croatia trip where we talked quite a bit about what we would do 'after'. Although it takes a while to come to agreement on what we want to do, once it's agreed, that's what we both work together on doing rather than constantly trying to negotiate things while 'in the moment' during the year - much less stressful and easier on the relationship!

We then packed a picnic lunch, Jess blew up the kayak and we took the kayak, lunch and dingy over to Wisteria Island. We did a bit of kayaking around the island, had lunch on the beach and Jess tested out her snorkle. We saw a stingray swim by about 2 feet away and then very carefully did the 'stingray shuffle' back to the beach. Lovely day and we all got too much sun.

Jess's entry into the cocktail competition is deferred until tomorrow night because we used up all the ice last night and forgot to make more. She did do a very nice un-iced cocktail, but the judges decided it was an unequal playing field and allowed another submission.