(Written, not as an entrant to Bowerbird’s Contest, but because what she was asking of people struck a chord with me, and made me want to write something. )

What I am planning (or at least hoping) to do to challenge myself creatively in the next year:

Well, in two months (to the day, though due days come and go I hear), our first child is going arrive into the outside world, which I’m well aware is going to bring a million and one changes to our lives, and is going to turn my creative life upside down for a fair while, so my first plan is to ‘carry on being creative’ in whatever way I can. Including parenting.

Especially parenting.

I want to carry on being a good partner to W, and try to carve out some time, just him and I.  I don’t want us to forget why we like each other – especially after the amazing most recent couple of years we’ve made for ourselves.

I want to keep my two businesses afloat. I like them both. They make me happy, and they have the potential to grow (a bit) and establish (a bit) and hopefully turn into something more lasting.

(By the way, don’t read ‘how to start your business’ books. They are very scary.  Start businesses that can be started with very little money, and grown quite slowly, where possible. Mind you I’m not in this to make a million, or even 50,000. I like being little.)

I’m pretty sure it will be a major challenge to sort out the time to get some work done – no I don’t expect to get much done while the baby sleeps. I think I’m going to have to become an expert in eatting the elephant one tiny piece at a time.

Actually I’m going to put that right up there:

Next year, I’m going to learn how to eat the elephant one tiny piece at a time.

The knitting and the spinning (yes – and there are posts in the wings), are luckily things that can also be split to fit into tiny snatches of time, so it would be useful to keep a project on me, ready for a row or a round in a spare minute or two. (Like Elizabeth Zimmermann on the back of Gaffer’s motorbike.) They are likely to continue to grow – I keep finding things I want to do, make, and learn. So hopefully I’ll do, make and learn in whatever time I can find.

But specifics?

I want to spin up one bag of the alpaca roving into 2ply during the Olympic Games. (I want  to spin the rest too, but I’m not sure I can spin 900g in 16 days, and get sleep, and work done.)

I want to spin half the yarn for a striped jumper for W. (I might even dye the roving…)

I want to dye the yarn for the baby blanket and get that all knit up.

I want to knit myself a useful cardigan or two for my post-pregnancy self.

The rest I don’t know about, because it hasn’t lit a fire under me yet. But it will. It usually does.

Most of all I want to keep looking for joy. To keep breathing, and smiling, and moving. I want to keep my sense of hope, and smile and nod at all the bullshit, and let it pass me by…

Oh and take baby-h to some track cycling before the end of the season, since that’s something I’ve been thinking about for the last four years.