New Year, Fresh Start

Happy belated New Year, everyone! Our ringing in of the new year was extremely uneventful. The kids didn't nap that day, so they were all in bed by 7:30! Ted and I read from our library books a little, then had hot tea while watching M*A*S*H episodes on DVD. Not particularly a very spiritual way to celebrate the new year, but we did have a time of prayer when we went to bed, which was before 10 p.m.! Such party poopers we old married folks are!

Today was the last day of Ted's free vacation time. He didn't have to officially take leave last week, just checked in twice so they knew he was still in the area. It's been nice having him home--in fact, I hear much merriment upstairs as he chases and zerberts the children! They are doing "puppy piles," which is what Ted calls a "dog pile" with the kids! I love hearing and watching them play together. The kids definitely get a different type of playing with Daddy than they do with Mommy! Mommy is just not really into puppy piles. :-)

Even though Ted was off today, the kids and I attempted to have a "normal" day, starting with school time right after breakfast. During breakfast we had read our Bible stories and our weekly reading from Right Choices, which gives us our Bible verse to memorize. Then Charis did some handwriting (capital P today, learning about the pumpkin!), and we reviewed telling time until I felt she really did know what she was doing with the Math-U-See clock set-up. Now we are working on transitioning to a regular clock. We got the toy clock with the see-through face that shows the gears working and practiced on that. Then we did a couple of pages in Phonics Pathways, and then it was time for Tobin's school. Charis played with Arden upstairs, quite well, I might add. Tobin worked on some handwriting pages of his own, and then we reviewed letters A-K on the www.starfall.com site, which Tobin adores.

Following this, we all piled on the couch for some Sonlight reading, and Ted came home from getting the oil changed in the van and a Home Depot run shortly after that. I took advantage of his being home to meet my friend Sarah for a 3-mile run! We've been running together off and on as our schedules allow since maybe November-ish, and it's so encouraging to have an accountability partner for exercising. I had gained 7 pounds after we moved here, and I've lost 3 of those pounds just from the past few weeks of concentrated exercise. I feel good about being able to run so far, and my goal is to run 3 days a week and do toning exercises 3 days a week, with Sundays being my rest days.

I guess that kind of sounds like a New Year's resolution, eh?! But truthfully, I'm so glad that I made the decision back in December to just DO this, because now I feel that it's more of a change in my thinking as opposed to a "resolution" that will probably be broken in a month or two. My goals are different than they were when I exercised years ago...now, I simply want to be strong and healthy for my kids! In previous times, I would have been obsessed about maintaining a certain size, but now, as long as I'm healthy and not outgrowing my clothes, I'm OK with where I am--for the most part!

I haven't really made a list of resolutions this year, though I am normally all over that. In fact, I pulled out the list I had from last year, and it can pretty much remain the same! They are habits that are fairly ingrained, though I do need to work on some of them to be more consistent.

However, one thing I have vowed I would pursue is keeping our schedule based on Managers of Their Homes, which I have blogged about before. The past couple of weeks are proof enough for me that our children NEED a schedule, as do I, and we accomplish far more when we are working to that end than we do when we leave things to chance.