Year in Review

Team.  I did what every other blogger on the planet is doing right now, and put a year’s worth of pictures of our family into a photo montage set to music to share with our extended family, and possibly a stranger or two somewhere in Des Moines.  Is the awkward photo montage the awkward Christmas letter of the Internet?  Anyway, in doing this I realized two things: 1. I can look at my kid’s face all day long, and 2. We only have pictures of my kid’s face.  Goal for 2011: Take a picture or two of something other than Asher’s eyelashes.

This montage is long, but you know, years are like that, and I’m making no promises on entertainment value, but if you like our mugs, and seeing an infant start to emerge as a little boy, you might get a kick out of this.  Also, a few notes on the music: The first song, Mykonos, by Fleet Foxes is not really family-montage-appropriate-music, but it is the song that Drew and I listened to as we drove the incredibly, amazingly, never endingly long 1.7 miles to the Birthing Center to bring Asher into the world, and it gave me peace like no other music has.  It is galvanized into my brain as our Family Song, despite it’s very heavy undertones.  The second song, Home, by Edward Sharp and the Magnetic Zeros, has been played so many times that people will probably be thinking, oh no, not that again! but here’s the thing.  The week that we brought Asher home, my friend Katie came to meet him, handed us a CD and said, listen to song number 6,  which was “Home” and I don’t think I stopped listening to it for 6 months.  It sounds like early morning feedings, and dancing with a little lump of love in the afternoons, and like our big future, and lots of love, and in my mind it will always sound like this year.  So there it is, you get to hear it again.  And the final song, Got to Get You Into My Life, by the Beatles, was the song that I hummed to Asher over and over as I waited for him to arrive.  Because that was true.

So there you have it!  365 days, 9 minutes, 3 songs, a thousand laughs, an equal amount of tears, two holiday turkeys, many grains of sand between the toes, one dog costume, two elf costumes, 3 birthdays and a partridge in a pear tree.  The Waltons are prancing into 2011 with our heads held high and sending you lots of lovelovelove.

Happy New Year!