Happy New Year - 2010

Welcome to our blog and J’s commitment to communicating better in 2010. The goal isn’t just to do better this year but to form a habit of communicating with family and friends, so I won’t fall back into the “I’m too busy” mode again.

Check out our “About Me” section if you are wondering why I chose to name our blog “Van Eeden.” I am not trying to boast that our lives and household are perfect, merely that we wish our home to be patterned after what God reveals of creation as He intended it to be, aka Eden. I am excited to “blog” rather than email and hope that neither my enthusiasm nor yours over this blog wanes too quickly. I hope to post as least one thing per week here. If weekly updates are too frequent for you, feel free to visit as often as you like. If you email me personally about something, I will try to send a personal email back to you, but I can only make one promise at a time.

D and I find ourselves in relatively the same place that we spent most of 2009. We both continue to work our same jobs and experience the same joys and frustrations in those jobs. We enjoy our house and our cats daily and hope to continue enjoying our home blessings in the new year. Maybe we’re just introverts, but we love to be home and both find comfort and peace there. We have plans for more home updates this year, namely gutters and bathrooms, and I’m sure we’ll continue planting new things in our yard and garden too. Florida remains a tough place for an Iowa girl to grow things. The past few nights have dipped below freezing and my tropical plants are taking a beating, even though they were covered. RIP Papaya. Sniff. Sniff.

Like most people we feel the need to get serious again about our commitment to eating right and exercising in the New Year. I continue to do my low-glycemic diet and D has told me he needs to go on a diet too. I guess what he reads on the grocery store scale isn’t so exciting anymore. We are working our way back into the habit of going to the gym three days a week. I’m looking for something to spice up my gym workouts because they are starting to get mundane. Any suggestions? A friend and I have also started jogging and would like to try a 5K soon to see if we can do it. It’s slow going, and I hope you aren’t laughing too much at the mental image of J running.