2012

Oh 2012, I’ve never been so sad to see a year go. You were a fabulous year, my best yet. 

2012 saw me transformed mind, body and soul. I started as a single entity, lived three quarters of the year as two beings melded into one, will end it as a mother watching the best parts of me living independently in that squirmy, smiley little girl we call Olive.

Here are the highlights of the past 12 months.

                                    The Best of Sweet Madeleine: 2012

• I made New Year’s resolutions, and kept most of them…for a while anyway. I wrote this list a full six weeks before I knew I was pregnant, yet wrote this about October 2012 (Olive’s birth month),

  “October: Whatever. Who Cares. I don’t care about October. October is a such a MEH month to me. In the context of my resolutions October will be a gimme month, a time to adjust to my wonderful new clean-eating yoga-doing gardening dancing social amazeballs creation I have become.

  And maybe to put time into creating a fabulous Halloween costume. Okay yeah, Halloween Costume. That’s it.

  November & December: TBA.  I’m leaving these two open because I can’t think of anything else (as evidenced by October) and I don’t want to just fill the months for the sake of filling them. These will be updated as needed.”

• Needless to say, October was not a “meh” month, will never again be a “meh” month. I was unusually prescient in leaving these three months resolution-free. Had I known what was coming, my resolutions would have been “Shower once or twice a week. Try to not look like a homeless zombie person some of the time. Attempt to limit photos of Olive to less than 120 a day.”

• I turned the purchase of a secondhand couch into an existential rumination about happiness

• I tried to tease apart and make sense of the KONY2012 movement and resulting backlash (oh god, remember that?)

• I called my husband “Couch Satan” and lost two followers. Totally worth it.

• I finally broke the news to you that I was pregnant, and started my weekly update posts

• I discovered this picture, drawn by a 17 year old Adam. Then I died from the laughing.

• I struggled with happiness

• I felt the first kick from the baby who would become Olive

• 6 months pregnant, I bought a romper. Adam made fun of me for it. 

• Pregnancy hormones got the best of me

• I discovered I had gestational diabetes and freaked the fuck out

• We sold our business. About 183746 pounds of stress lifted off of our shoulders

• I found out that instead of my hippy-dippy home waterbirth, I’d be having a cesarean section (and freaked. the fuck. out. Obviously.)

• My grandmother died. I miss her every day. I still cry when I remember that she won’t ever get to meet her first great-grandchild. She would have loved her. She would have pronounced her “divine”.

• Adam and I celebrated our three year wedding anniversary, and our our ten-year “being together without strangling each other to death” anniversary.

• I got ginormous

• We finally got to meet our sweet, funny baby. We named her Olive

• I wore giant disposable underpants and Adam nicknamed me “Trudy”

• I struggled with feeling trapped, stilted, with a new baby

• I started researching baby toupees

• We began to see the first inklings of a Olive’s smile

• Olive slapped Adam with her poop hands. I got to write “poop hands”.

• We took Olive to meet Santa

And that brings us to today, as we sit spending the last dying hours of an incredible year.

I can’t thank you enough for coming along for the ride. I have no idea why I do this, why I sit here and hammer out these words day after day, except to say that it stretches and deepens me in a way that I can’t properly put words to.

Thank you for reading.