Ringing in the New Year

First of all, I loved 2009 overall, it was stressful but amazing overall. The big news to end the year was my promotion at work. I am now an Executive Secretary for the Vice President of my division, I'm both excited and a little scared and nervous but this will be good, it's a pay increase and it will keep me busier and more mentally stimulated than my old position did. Our first holiday season as a married couple went well. We divided up our time between our families because we live directly in between both of our families. His family is 30 minutes south of us and my family is 30 minutes north of us, which is both good and bad. It's good because we love being close to family but it's bad because it's close enough that we can't get out of any events due to distance. My family is really good about the holidays though, they love to see us but also understand that we need to spend time with my husband's family as well.


(Here is where I start to rant, you can skip ahead if you'd like to. I didn't meant to turn this into a rant at all, but here it is:)

/rant

However, my husband's mom is very controlling when it comes to the holidays. I should say first that I love my new family and my new mom and dad, they're great and I love spending time with them. What I don't love is being guilt tripped and told we're being selfish when we want to spend time with just each other. I understand that all her kids are now out of the house and holidays are really important to her, but they're important to everyone and now that we're married we need to balance our time out between both of our families and between the two of us. This year we spent Christmas Eve and Christmas morning with my husband's family, then went to my parents for the afternoon. We hosted Thanksgiving at our house and had both of our families over to get us out of the situation completely of having to divide that day up. So by the time New Year's Eve came around we were partied out and wanted to spend that holiday together with a nice dinner, champagne, the Twilight Zone marathon and ring in the new year more quietly.

My family doesn't make a big deal about New Year's Eve or Day, however my husband's family does, they always did some kind of family thing together the issue is everyone is growing up and people are all over the place and everyone had just gotten together for Christmas a week ago, so it's not logical to get everyone together again a week later when one of his brothers lives 8 hours away, his other sister lives 5 hours away and then there's three of them that live within 45 minutes of each other here, but one of them was driving to see the other brother and up until two days before hand my husband was going to have to work New Year's Eve and then the 2nd, so it didn't make sense for us to drive the 8 hours to his other brother's place. So basically taking all these factors into consideration everyone was doing their own thing this year and so we decided we wanted to spend New Year's at home quietly and this made us selfish and meant that we don't have a commitment to his family which makes me so mad. Okay, I get that you're upset and that you wanted everyone to spend it together like they've always done, but that's just not going to always happen and she needs to get used to that. You can feel disappointed and upset, but what you cannot do is start calling us selfish when you're the one being selfish in the situation and not taking into consideration how difficult it is for people to get time off and travel, when they had just done that the week before. I love her, but she needs to let go a little bit on the things that aren't as important, ie. Christmas is an important holiday that everyone should be together on, New Year's, not so much.

/end rant


On to something exciting. My Christmas gift from my wonderful husband! He bought me a gift certificate to my friend's tattoo shop so I could get the bird tattoo that I've been wanting for three years now to cover up this small moon that I got my freshmen years of college that I have hated and that more importantly looked awkward with my tree tattoo on my other side/back. I went on New Year's Day to get it done and it turned out amazing!

Here's the before:



Here's the after:



Here's my full back:







I thought it was the perfect way to commemorate the beginning of a new year! 2010 should be a great year. New job, newly married, new tattoo, we want to buy a house and start a family. We both really want to buy a house soon however we need to save up money for this and I don't want to overextend ourselves just to get one. We're going to be talking to financial adviser as soon as we can find one in our area, which has proven to be more difficult than we thought it would be. We found one at the bank i use, but she specializes in retirement, which is great, but not the information we need right now. I hope we're able to do it because I'd love to start making a real home for our little family. I hope to continue updating this more regularly this year as things level out a bit more and we get into a new rhythm and routine now that the wedding, the holidays and the career changes are done.