Goodbye Week. Hello Weekend. Lessons Learned: Take 76.

Goodbye celebrating the birth of our Savior surrounded by family and friends.
Goodbye honoring the Wise Men's gifts with lots of gifts of our own to each other.
Goodbye piled, unwrapped gifts that still need to find a place in our shrinking home.
Goodbye Chocolate Peanut Butter Pie that is sadly the reason for my weight-loss new year's resolution (no regrets).
Goodbye snow blizzard we shoveled off the drive to help with burning that Pie off the thighs.

 
Hello warm apple cider at my side each morning while I type and blog, thanks to my new Keurig.
Hello grandparents from New York, staying awhile and enjoying their company.
Hello conjuring up projects and plans for my new office space and making it pretty.
Hello sledding, and playdates, and hot chocolate.
Hello taking a wee-bit of a bloggy break to truly be present with my family next week.

My Waterford Crystal Champagne Flutes representing love, happiness, peace, health, and prosperity.

My lesson learned this week is that blogging takes A LOT of energy (but I know you already know that). So, in realizing this, I'm taking a week off, a bloggy break. If you don't blog yourself, let me tell you how consuming the whole process is. I'm not complaining, but it takes a lot more than snapping a few pictures and keyboarding a few strokes. It consumes you. Honestly, I find myself in a constant state of creativity and it begins to drain me. And, my kiddo has a week left of Winter Break so I want to really be "in-the-moment" with him, enjoy his and Super Hubby's company, and not be thinking what tomorrow's post will look like or what craft project I can think up using a coffee filter and some glitter. I blog 5-days a week and I'm happy, thrilled, and even consider myself blessed to be given the honor of your attention each day. But, right now, I need to be present for my family. Time is fleeting, and I won't let it escape just for 5-days of posts.

If you want to come back next week for 5 days, here's some old posts that really touched a lot of hearts. I'll link them here and I'll be back on January 7th:

The Discovery of You
Accepting Your Journey
Love and Patience: A Lesson From Nature
My Happiness. My Responsibility.
What If...? 
 

Let me, also, take this time to wish you all a most promising New Year filled with love, peace, good health, happiness, and prosperity. Welcome 2013!

As you can see from the picture of my champagne flutes, Waterford took 5 years, introducing each new year's wish leading up to the new millennium. Waterford cut the crystal with a symbol representing each: the heart represents Love, the bow represents Happiness, the dove represents Peace, the wheat represents Health, and the burst represents Prosperity. Each year we ring in the new year by each selecting the one wish we hope for the most. Which one would you choose to drink from when toasting in 2013?