This winter has been very strange weather-wise which is how my son ended-up barefoot at a Lake Tahoe beach marveling at a river of frozen ice. 10 points if you know the title reference.

A few cool things happened last week. The first being that Rick Bayless saw my cookbook project and gave it a shoutout on Twitter! Nice, right?

   @Rick_Bayless

 Besides sharing a name,Emily Bayless & I share having made evry recipe n Mexican Everyday (n 1 yr)!Check out her recap: ow.ly/8vwLR

Too bad my poor punctuation gave him the false impression that my name is Emily Bayless. I feel bummed about that because Rick and his colleagues are so nice. Not only did he tout my project, he also dm’d me congratulations directly at the midpoint of the project… and both the producer of his television show and one of the photographers/testers who worked on the cookbook e-mailed congrats through the blog.

Can you believe that? These are immensely talented people and they were so kind to take the time. After spending a year in that cookbook I have so much respect for everybody involved in making that TV show and those books. Now that I know how much it takes just to cook all the recipes (and simple ones at that!) I cannot even imagine the effort it is to produce a quality cookbook and to get social media pats on the back from the people who made it all happen? It felt awesome.

So once again, I must thank you guys! Thank you for all the encouragement. Thank you for the tips and advice. Thank you to my friend Dahlia who helped me to do some food styling when I couldn’t stomache taking one more crappy picture of the delicious food I was turning out. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you! On Monday I’m launching a new food project. If it turns out half as fun as this one, it’ll still be a raging success.

Last year Arnold and I committed to go out on a date once a month. Thanks to our kind and generous circle of friends we were able to make that happen! It was hard at first to leave our little guy at home but once we got over our separation anxiety we had a great time. When it was just the two of us we took for granted our endless hours of freedom but now that “dates” are a limited commodity we take them seriously. It was a veritable sushi, froyo, musical, movie explosion

This year I hope to continue our monthly dates but I’d also like to add some quality time “playdates” with the other special guy in my life. I’m not thinking of elaborate activities, just setting aside an afternoon a month that is just devoted to us spending time together, counting the blue cars and perhaps eating some ice cream.  Two monthly dates might be more to balance, but I now get how the happy times together help you get through the rough days. And besides, with a face like his, how could I not?

2010 was a rough year and I was glad to bid it and its tough life lessons goodbye. When the clock struck midnight on January 1 2011. I was so worn down from trying to get my head around the past year all that I decided on one very simple resolution “Have more fun.” Seriously. That’s it.

Most people would excel at this, but I’m assuming most people also don’t prefer to spend the night alone with a DVD and their label maker. It’s not that I’m not “fun”, I think that in general I am a very fun person, it’s just that I have trouble storing responsibilities for later. My mind is constantly thinking of what I need to do next, the dishes, the laundry, the (insert boring here). I can’t blame this on parenthood either, I’ve always been like this. For 2011 I didn’t want to think of all the to-do, I wanted to stop and have some fun. I wanted to take a vacation day and spend it in bed reading ( I did this once a month). I wanted to lie down at the park and watch the clouds roll by with my little guy. I wanted to stop thinking about all the obligations and just chill out for a sec.

Guess, what? I totally rocked my resolution. A plus for me! Yesterday Arnold wanted to go to the city for the day to “eat and have fun”. Honestly I didn’t want to go. I thought about the cost, the gas, the bridge toll, the expensive city food etc. I thought about how I need to go back to work today and there was laundry, stuff to clean etc. etc and if I don’t do it I’ll fall behind. And then I thought screw it, let’s not leave behind the lessons of 2011 so quickly. So we hopped in the car and drove to the city. We ate good. We wandered aimlessly. We walked across the Golden Gate Bridge. We hugged our son and reveled in his amazing emerging personality. We sang along at the top of our lungs. We had F.U.N!

Life list item #13-Watch Fireworks with Elian.