Sounds good to me. Do a little more kissing in 2013.

I'd love to hear what reasons you have for kissing (keep it PG please)? Do you kiss the one you love (or like)?

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Thanks for reading! Follow me on Twitter at @EPayneTheDad.

But where shall wisdom be found? And where is the place of understanding?

Job: 28. 12

This will not be a New Year's Resolutions post.

With that said, 2013 will be a year of restoration for me. Restoration because I am no longer fallen.

Fallen

For eight or nine months the year before my daughter was born I was 100% comfortable in the skin I was in. I didn't owe anyone a thing, literally, I had achieved the impossible task of living debt-free and I had my eyes set on the next car I was going to buy. This while slating out renovations on ny Queens, New York, 1-bedroom co-op that I was either going to rent or sell. I fancied myself with nice clothes, shoes and ate well. I cooked at home a lot and was enjoying this, my so-called life.

Then news of my daughter, my second child, came and soon everything changed. Once she was born I lost the ability to find meaning in the life I had been living. My job no longer made any sense to the point I began to make simple mistakes I never made, even as a trainee. It was as if the people there were speaking another language. My need for meaning became all-consuming, self-sacrificing and maybe even self-sabotaging. I switched jobs in this pursuit and did well for a while. Meanwhile, the woman who would become my wife was plotting her escape from New York and went to work creating a strategy that would help her to crack through the "glass ceiling" in the workplace she so despised.

So as I began to strip down to the blood and bones to find my soul my wife was beginning to pack on muscle. It was inevitable that trouble would soon follow.

In the years that followed, we moved from New York City to Atlanta, Georgia. She completed an MBA and found a game-changing, job and career. None of this was without its challenges, hurdles and slight degree of heartbreak. But she did it, by the grace of God and her own will. During the same time, I became known as E.Payne, the unwilling Stay At Home Dad Blogger. I became scholarly in the business of love, learning the most important lesson of all: Love is an action not a feeling.

My wife evolved into a one-woman dynamo and by all outward appearances I had become an emotional crackpot who couldn't get a job if one came and beat me with a bat until the snot came out of me. I probably wasn't as bad as I've just described myself but then again I may have been worse. Meanwhile, I was learning the tools of my new trade, becoming a little savvy in Social Media and not just using it as a tool become Internet Famous. Then a "dream job" came to me wrapped in a bow in December of last year. It was all glittery. But all that glitters ain't gold.

Winter's End?

In March of this year I told a Mormon friend of mine I had just come out of a "winter" that lasted for four years. She raised an eyebrow and told me she couldn't imagine how that was possible nor how I survived. But anything is possible when you are going through it. Little did I know that the deep freeze had yet to arrive. A mere two and half months after I sipped wine at a California vineyard during a blogger trip with my friend from Utah, I went into a meeting to find out how much my raise would be only to learn my position had been dissolved. I remember going to my car immediately after receiving the news and breaking down. I clutched the steering wheel and yelled out, "My family WILL NOT suffer because of me!" I hoped God heard me.