HAPPY NEW YEAR!!

Giovanni and I are so excited for 2010! Already it's shaping up to be a great year. Gio's good friend Tyler from high school and his wife Amy came up to Utah from California and spent New Years with us. It was a blast! They brought some fireworks and HUGE sparkler-like things so we set them off at midnight to ring in the new year.

Today Giovanni and I were talking about the upcoming year and our hopes, expectations, and desires. We both had a hard year in 2009, so the beginning of a new year is exciting and hopeful for us! As we were talking about all the things we wanted to achieve this year, we decided to write them down and put them on the fridge to remind us what we are working towards this year. You could call them New Year's Resolutions, I guess, but we prefer to just call them goals. New Year's Resolution has a bad connotation because they are kept so rarely! We decided to each pick eleven goals and call them our 11 before 2011. We jointly decided to work on some main spiritual goals--following the counsel of Alma 34: to counsel with the Lord always, gaining more understanding of principles like faith, repentance, the Atonement, and the love of God. Then we each chose a few personal goals that we wanted to reach by the end of the year. Here's a few of them. Some of them we will both be working on even though it is in our personal goals.

Giovanni's Goals:

Get outside or take a walk each morning to bring peace for the day

Complete P90X (a really hard workout DVD series) by April

Go snowboarding as often as possible

Read one scientific journal article per week

Read one book each month

Tessa's Goals:

Learn to make one new recipe each week

Get down to 150 pounds (finally)

Try to go one month consecutively without watching TV or movies

Get better at Spanish

Compete in a sprint triathlon

Work on my hobby of sculpting by finishing one sculpture each month

Pay off all our debts

Keep a clean and organized home

Keep a log of 2010--written, photograph and video

So as you can see, neither of us have come up with 11 yet, but we're off to a good start. This year is going to bring some great new adventures, milestones, and big changes to our life together, but I think that the hardships of 2009 prepared us and strengthened us. This year Gio will be starting medical school in Kirksville, Missouri, so we will be making our first cross-country move and settling in to a new life in a new town (a tiny town at that!). We're ready for the new year and as always we're excited to spend it together!

Here's a picture for your viewing pleasure....we both look like weirdos, but I had to post it because I laughed so hard when I saw it! Celebrating the New Year...