Goodbye 2011, Hello 2012 ... Day One

Happy New Year to you all and I sincerely hope it is going to be a good one for you too.

2012 has started off well for us already. Today is my great-granddaughter's first birthday so I'm celebrating here with my favourite snap taken in Rhian's first year. The quality of the photograph is not perfect but the tender moment caught within is perfect.

To make the day even better my grand-niece, Arihanna, and her lovely mother were allowed home yesterday - great news and a wonderful start to the year. Louise is still recovering from the affects of the pregnancy but hopefully she will be back to normal soon ... and Arihanna has lost a great deal of weight - she went from 6lbs 5oz to just 5lb in the week after she was born - but she is feeding better now and has started to gain weight again - what more could any of us ask for :)

For the EM and I, the last few months have been something of a trial what with the nasty accident he suffered in November, from which he is still recovering, the death of not just our SILs best friend but also that of a dear old friend of ours who passed away in rather tragic circumstances mid-December, and not forgetting the wee dog, Mac, who also lost his fight for life. For all those reasons we are more than happy to say 'goodbye 2011 and hello 2012' ...  we have plans, lots of them, the main one being a road trip taking us on a meandering route through Yorkshire, Derbyshire, Oxfordshire, into the Cotswolds and then on down to Wiltshire - we may even venture down to Devon, time permitting.  We could be gone some time so the Boss is not going to be pleased - she clearly equates the cattery with cat hell so will give us such an ear-bashing when we pick her up at the end of the trip ... ah, such is life :))

On the crafting front, I have lots of projects planned too. I'll be making fewer Christmas cards this year, but that's because there are so many other projects I want to work on instead ... e.g. scrap page layouts, digital and hybrid layouts too, photography, altered items, etc. I also want to use some of those stamps I have in my collection that have never seen the light of day, e.g. Clarity, Crafty Individuals, Lavinia and Sheena Douglas, Tim Holtz - bought because I loved them and yet have never found the opportunity to play with them :(

So what are your plans for 2012?  I don't mean resolutions ... they are a quite different animal altogether! I don't make resolutions because I know fine well I will never keep them beyond the second week of January ... so why set myself up for a fall. And, I'm quite capable of beating myself up for a host of entirely different reasons believe me ... I just don't need any extra self-imposed grief :))

Right, it's almost the end of day one, 2012, so I'm off for a cup of Horlicks before turning in. Unless, of course, you were up all night bringing in the New Year, when you will have been sleeping the excesses off all day today, I hope your day has been a happy and fun-filled one celebrated with family and friends. And for those of you who are poorly, I hope you are well on the road to recovery, and for those of you who went to work as usual today, you're our unsung heroes, without you the rest of us could not enjoy the holiday - many thanks :)

Whatever, you do in the year to come, I hope you all keep crafting, blogging, and following because otherwise I would be sitting here typing to myself and I would miss you all :)