WHAT A DIFFERENCE A YEAR....

Generally people measure their year with a Calendar.  That’s why, by and large, we make New Years Resolutions and/or we predict that the coming year will be different.  That it will be better.

Unless of course you are me.  You see, as we spent a large chunk of New Years day in at the local Emergency Department getting the 3 years olds wrists put in plaster, I couldn’t subscribe to that theory for 2010.

Perhaps it’s better to look at the year in retrospect.  Perhaps it’s far too much pressure to believe that a turn of a page on a Calendar will make it all good.  Because nothing is always all good.  Nothing is ever wonderful 365 days of a year.  The best we can hope for is that things aren’t all shit all of the time.

Take this time last year.  I was saying goodbye to my mother.  I was awaiting results from a dodgy lump in my breast and my son fell off his fathers’ shoulders and ended up looking like this:

Not long after, Sam fell off the monkey bars at school and basically broke his arm so badly, the Doctors were unsure if he would ever use his arm again.  He proceeded to get a bad staph infection under the plaster and spent a week on intravenous antibiotics in the hospital.  At this stage, Phil and I were pretty sure we hadn’t just run over one Chinaman, we’d taken out the whole of Shanghai.

Fast forward 12 months. 

I am fine; the lump was just one of those things I have to watch.  I am receiving more and more opportunities with my writing and I hope to get better at it.

  

Phil, through necessity, has started to work for himself and is steadily getting busier each week.   His lazy bastard  winter cricket team won their grand final. 

Maddison has made her first best friend. The kind that she talks to on the phone each night for hours on end.  We’ve also been invited to attend the School Captains assembly this Friday.  The message on my phone went like this “Mr and Mrs Morley, we’d like to formally invite you to attend the final assembly this Friday.  Oh and please don’t tell Maddison about this phone call”.    School Captain, House Captain or otherwise, my level of excitement, on her behalf, if off the charts.

Sam’s arm recovered and he can now bend it like Beckham.  Ironically, he can also write better with his right hand than ever before.  Not only that, today I witnessed him interacting with loads of friends when I went to pick him up early.   And that display made my heart sing.  He has friends.  He is coping.

Jack is Jack.  He is street smart, unstoppable and quite the challenge.   Luckily his wrists and face are fine now after his fall.  Here he is tempting fate one more time:

I am happy to report, no further broken bones have been acquired in 2010 thus far.    Apart from Phil trying to accidently blowtorch his leg into oblivion and Jack having a ride in an ambulance due to a dose of croup, our life has been blissfully drama free (touch wood).

Further to this, some exciting and wonderful things have happened to my friends and extended family in the last twelve months as well.

My brother has made Police Sergeant.

My two best friends had baby girls. 

My brothers’ girlfriends’ dog training business is going great.

My brother in law threw away his fears and went for a swim in the surf for the first time in 5 or 6 years.  Believe me, this is massive.

My other brother and sister in law have decided to move house.  This is very exciting for them.

Miss C at work has finally found a great guy.

My other friend at work bought a house.

 

Another good friend got the all clear from his cancer after having lymphoma some years ago.

I’m sure loads more positive things have happened to most people I know, they just escape me right now.

As for me, do I have a New Years Resolution?  Nah, I reckon I just hold on and hope I see the swings and roundabouts before they appear.

Has it been a year of improvement for you?  Has it been good, great or complete rubbish?