hot, happy and having a blast!

Those three words headline a profile of Reece Witherspoon in this month's edition of Glamour magazine, which I just got done reading and tossing across the room in a fit of boredom and overall apathy (which may just be a fancy way of saying 'boredom,' but eh, there you go), but I think I'm going to go ahead and also declare them to be my resolutions for the new year.

In 2011, I will be hot! I will be happy! And I will be having a blast!

I'm going to do all those things in exactly that order, too. Based on the fact I wake up most nights in a simmering, lukewarm pool of my own sweat, I can safely say I'm (possibly too old to be reading Glamour magazine) already a third of the way toward meeting my goals. Huzzah! Check mark in column one of my Trifecta of Awesome! That was a hell of a lot easier than the time I vowed to not let little things annoy me, and cut back on sweets.

Oh, January 1. That was a good day...

Seriously. It's January 2, and at approximately 12:37 p.m., CST, 36+ hours into a banner new year, I lost my mind at my children and my husband over two slices of leftover pizza and a few measly reheated chicken strips, then I scored a bowl of brownie batter and inhaled that. It's now 4:06 p.m., CST, no one is speaking to each other, and I have the shakes so bad it's a wonder I can type at all. It's hard getting that monkey off your back, friends.

It's also hard to get brownie batter stains off your shirt. Clearly you can see why being hot in 2011 is going to totally work for me. I'm either going to be (a) gorgeous or (b) get full-blown menopause. Oh, but hey! If option (a) works, maybe I'll end up pregnant instead! I know which one I'm rooting for...and which one(s) my husband fears!

I'm not quite sure how I'm going to accomplish the happy component of this plan, though I'll confess, the brownie batter went a small way toward helping it. Maybe some therapy would, too. And having a blast? What constitutes a blast? I'm almost afraid to find out.

It's possible I have my work cut out for me this year, so my final resolution for 2011? It's flossing my teeth every night before bed, but only because I've already been doing this religiously for the last four months and I want some small victory to enjoy at the close of this year when I've failed miserably at the Three H's.

Trust me. It's hard to look hot when you have questionable brown stains splattered across your bosoms, but as the great Howard Jones once said, "Things can only get better."

Wow wow wow oh, wow wow wow oh oh oh oh...

(FINAL final resolution for 2011 - do not say 'bosoms' again. At least not until March)

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I hope you all had lovely holidays. My husband's mother passed away Christmas morning, and this last week has been a blur of grief and all the other things that seem to go along with death. It's been a difficult time here, but I truly believe, thanks to my faith and my mother-in-law's very, very strong beliefs, that she chose Christmas day as her last here on Earth for a reason. We gathered as a family to celebrate her 80th birthday three days prior to her death, and it was clear then that she'd made peace with God's plan and was ready. I think that's given my husband, our boys, and his family some sense of joy during this sad time. It's never easy, but there is still joy to be had in what we have here. I hope you all have some of that joy, too.