December is our family’s busiest month, by far, with the usual end-of-school-year events, three different family Christmas celebrations, family birthdays, and holiday catch-ups with friends squeezed into four dizzying weeks. It’s exhausting but good.

New Year’s Eve is my husband’s birthday, and some people will drop around, including good friends we haven’t seen for a while.

Thank you for reading my sporadic blog posts and articles in The Catholic Weekly this year. I was glad to help put together another FRANKLY magazine as well. It was nice to reconnect with The Catholic Weekly and other archdiocesan staff during the last quarter of 2017, and work with four great interns there.

I still hope to write my own books or a useful blog series or series of columns, so stay posted for news in the new year (probably later, rather than earlier, in 2018).

Also, please send me requests! If you’ve been following my work for a while I’d love to know what you’d like to see from me – topics covered, questions answered, etc.

The writers who most inspired me during 2017, who crafted their life giving/life changing work in the midst of intensely busy lives with huge responsibilities were:
Sally Read (Night’s Bright Darkness)
St Teresa of Avila (her collected works published by ICS)
Barbara Dent (The Marriage of All and Nothing – I got a Kindle version)
Ruth Park (Fishing in the Styx – part 2 of her memoirs)

Only Sally is still around to be interviewed. Perhaps that can be my first New Year’s resolution.

Other things on the horizon:

Our eldest will be preparing for her first overseas trip, to Mexico then Panama for World Youth Day in January 2019
Our #2 starts high school
Our littlest one will start kindy in February (!!!)
I’ll help my mum organise her house renovations
I’ll co-host the third mother’s retreat at the Mt Carmel Retreat Centre in August

Happy New Year everyone, and may you know all of God’s blessings for you in 2018!

(Pic at the top is of Lily – one of three kittens born at my parents-in-law’s place recently.)