Hello to you, my dear, quite possibly no longer faithful few. I know, it has been an embarrassingly long time away. My excuse remains- my laptop is tethered to the wall by a cord until I can get the battery replaced, and my antivirus expired, so now it is buggy and agonizingly slow, and it needs to be fixed, so in the meantime I fill my computing needs by iPad, which is a giant pain in the butt to type on. IPad killed the blogging star, apparently.

So I decided, in the interest of things eco and, lets face it, procrastinatory and just plain lazy, to go paperless for this year's New Year's letter. Have I explained recently the sheer genius of the New Year's letter? Ya see, when all of the holiday cards start pouring in, I become tempted to run out and add to the craziness and rampant goodwill, but then I ask myself what the odds are of me getting so busy doing holiday things and not getting a boatload of addresses tracked down and stamps bought in time and oh, my. The stress starts to mount. But then I start to think logically. The holidays end basically at midnight on December 25. But when does the New Year end? January? February? March? Probably March, since the first quarter of the year is then past. Definitely June, because then you are closer to the next New Year's Eve than the last one. So as long as it is before June, I have just bought myrself a six month extension. And then, if I have other mass mailings in my future, like, say, a birth announcement,  I decide to wait and just send them together. (We won't talk about all of the two times I have actually followed through on this logic and got said New Year's letters sent out.) And then I even flaked out more this year because I started calculating costs of paper and ink and time to print and fold, well. You end up here, reading my New Year's letter on my sadly neglected blog. Which you may have found by following the link on the little scrap of paper that fluttered out of your birth announcement when you opened it.

Little Daniel Collins Koehn joined our crazy life and has been trying to keep up ever since. That's the big one. And I feel like I have a new, fabulous body, offloading nearly 30 lbs of pregnancy weight. I can move! Climb stairs! Fit through tight spaces! Stand for long enough to cook a meal! Looking back at the pictures B happened to take the day before I went into labor, I was one giant, bloated, miserable people (yes, people. Just because. I was plural at that point.) I had been advised to take it easy for seven weeks already, and was trying, honestly I was, but that didn't keep the small one from announcing, at 5:30 am on January 22, that he didn't care that my due date was still a month away, this was happening today. So, after briefly, foggily considering going back to bed and dealing with my broken water and eminent labor at a more manageable hour, we scrambled around, threw a few ill-thought out items into a bag (because where is the excitement in being prepared enough to have a hospital bag packed four weeks early?) and made our way to Scott City, where Little D's mama decided she wanted to go all drugless and his daddy tried to talk her into an epidural every time she acted less than tough. And at 2:31 that afternoon, an exceptionally healthy little boy made his appearance and made the whole two year journey of miscarriage and hormone supplementing and pregnancy and labor and childbirth worth it. We named him after his Grandpa Danny and his daddy, Bobby Dan. His middle name comes from his late grandma Judy Collins, who was not able to live to see her own little boy, his daddy, grow up.

They kept us there for three days, since the littlest Koehn kept turning yellow on us, and then released us into the wilds of first time parenthood. It has been an amazing and informational trip since then. I am a stay at home mother. I never saw that coming, and I am so incredibly happy that I get to experience it. I have time to do all that stuff I have always assumed would not be so easy while working- for example, I get to cloth diaper. There is nothing to make a mama feel more crafty than a pile of freshly washed diapers, all fuzzy and soft (cloth diapers have come so incredibly far since our mamas used them on us!) piled up in her nursery. Another thing I get to do, thanks to my amazing, overachieving body, which I am thankful for every day even though it apparently sucks at making kids from scratch unassisted, is donate breastmilk. Through this whole process, I became aware of the huge need for donated milk in NICUs where tiny 1 lb preemies are unable to digest formula and their mamas are not yet producing their own milk. So I found a mother's milk bank in Denver and am in the process of sharing my incredible good fortune, whatever little D does not need, with other babies. Don't kid yourself- I do it for selfish reasons. What could be better than knowing that you are helping give life and health to not only your own healthy, chubby baby, but to potentially hundreds of other babies as well?

In the middle of all of this, I was also finishing up my year of school at the Institute for Integrative Nutrition. Now that the baby project is both more and less manageable, I am ready to start marketing my skills and knowlege and working, but not too much! toward my dream career of guiding people to better health. My dream is to start a community garden and incorporate a health coaching business, so that I can provide not only the mental tools necessary to help my clients find a way of healthy eating that works for them long term without making so many sacrifices that it becomes unsustainable, but I can also provide for them the fresh, healthy, organic produce that this area is so void of. But I can only start the health coaching thing right now, due to lack of funding for a community garden. There are grants that I need to look into, but honestly, as long as the garden doesn't exist, I get to work mostly from home. Not that I would mind driving into town every day to garden, but until my plan starts making money, it isn't terribly feasible.

And while I scheme and dream, Bobby has been working himself ragged. He worked ridiculous hours all year, until suddenly, poof! The manure up and disappeared. This was mostly due to the drought we are in the middle of, the manure turning to dust and the dry wind blowing it away. After the big feedlot he was working out of got all cleaned out, he suddenly has had farmers calling but no product to spread for them. The timing was fortuitous, since this happened right before little D joined us, but it has us hoping that more work will magically become available soon.

In the meantime, we have gotten the most amazing bonding time, the three of us here together in this house in the bottom of Ladder Creek Valley. Grandma Sandi and Grandpa Kevin make up wild excuses to come over, often in the evenings when their own busy days are winding down, to get their cuddle quota in. Our little boy has stretched out and turned into a solid, heavy baby, if still a bit small. His eyes are lightening from slate gray to his daddy's violet blue, and his hair is lightening to a decidedly reddish tint- not actually red, but not exactly brown, either. We credit the Collins side for that. He has been a talker since day one, and every day he carries on more of a running commentary of grunts, yells, and other poorly controlled voice exercises. He refuses to cry for any real length of time. If he is hungry or unpleasantly surprised, he will definitely cry, but after a short session of the most heartbreaking wails, he will stop long enough to reconsider whether or not the cause really merits the effort he is putting into it. We, of course, think his every move is sheer genius.

As for things under the surface, it has been a lovely, relaxing (for the most part) year for us. We have done of lot of focusing on learning to love more unconditionally, on less judgement and more honest support, of seeing beauty in everything we look at and choosing to believe. Whatever that entails. Mostly, that every individual is beautiful in his or her own right and that their motives are pure. Even when we strongly suspect that may not be the case. We have dug deep into the sources of what makes us who we are and dug up both beautiful and ugly, and have tried to embrace the beautiful and let the past stay there. There has been next to none of the things that defined us in Colorado- activities, recreation, enjoying nature, that is all harder out here. Here, it is all about the social stuff. Here, you are who your friends and neighbors think you are, and the yardstick by which this is measured is a bit of a foreign one to us. We often talk about how best to live true to ourselves no matter where we are or what the pressure, doing the things that give us the most fulfillment and the most inner peace, no matter what is expected. When we have started to truly dissect our motives and our reasons, we have found that under all the rocks one turns over of social expectation and doing what one has always done or what one was taught or what one has always accepted as right, there are the most delightful little treasures to be found. Little truths that can turn one's whole outlook on life around. And in all of this, we have made the most bizarre discovery- that we are actually kinda happy. Life is pretty freaking awesome most of the time.

Until next New Year...our love, Bobby, Susan and Daniel

Here is the birth announcement, in case yours got lost in the mail. The hat little D is wearing was knitted by his grandma Sandi. The blanket was crocheted by his aunt Marci. The sled is the same one his great grandpa Jim pulled countless squealing kids over frozen cowponds on, and the picture and card itself is a product of his aunt Wendy, who owns a photography studio in Leoti.