As is.

We're just a few hours from a brand new year now. I've spent the evening cleaning the kitchen, watching The Kids Are All Right (which was marked as a comedy in Video on Demand and most certainly is not a comedy but good nonetheless), and mopping the dining room floor. The kids were in bed criminally early tonight, because they needed to be.

I spent the day mediating fights and wiping tears and enforcing discipline and exercising remarkable levels of patience as the girls pushed each and every button I possess. Wayland worked, came home, played games with the girls and helped Mad build an ant colony. I started the book "The Orange Eats Creeps," and it's pretty incredible.

Yesterday I ran four miles for the first time in forever and rode that high for the rest of the evening. Wayland and I had dinner out, which was good despite terrible service. I read all of "I Am Number Four," which was pretty good.

It's nothing remarkable, is it? But: yes, actually. Highs and lows and marching on. It's what we do! We tangle with our lives, trying to sort out strands and make sense out of things, give ourselves a purpose, find something that makes us feel noble or useful or grand in some way. Oh, life. It's a tricky thing! Our highs and lows and marching on: it's what we have. This is the noble thing, right? The useful thing. The grandest thing of all. Look at us all, tending to our shoulds, the little pieces of our lives that stack together and take an amazing shape even when we're too mired in it to recognize how amazing it is.

I try to think of how to sum up 2010 all succinctly and I'm at a loss: Wayland and I both started new jobs. I am working full-time in an office and miss my girls acutely. Wayland worked so hard toward a new career that had to be sidelined a bit while he stuck to the support-his-family-pay-the-bills job, which sucks, but again: how grand. Madeleine started play therapy, Violet started physical therapy. We floundered a bit financially, gained some ground, floundered, gained again, floundered.

It's all in flux, a great big question mark. 2011 is on the horizon and I want to see something grand for the year, I want it to be the year our lives change for the better, the year things settle, the year we are all content right where we are, and all I can think is: those things do not go hand-in-hand. Content right we are does not mean our lives have to change.

Maybe it's boring, but what I see for 2011 is highs and lows and marching on, everything the last two days have been, everything this year has brought us. We unfold pieces of our lives as we go and maybe we'll uncover something we never saw coming, good or bad, and it will become a part of us, of what we do, add texture to what we've been doing all along. Just living, and finding joy in it, just like we did at 5 or 15 or 25 or thirty-freakin'-one, something we've been working at our whole lives.