Back Into the Swing of Things

So it’s just me and the kids again this week. We’ve been fortunate to have Jason home with us for 6 weeks, while they worked on their project from here. Now it looks like he may be jumping back into the frequent flyer club. After 12 trips up there, from May-December, I have found myself getting a little more comfortable with holding down the fort on my own. At first, I was heading to Tyler, to hang out at my parent’s house, for a week or more at a time. Now that this is all kinda familiar, I’m staying at home, taking the kids to playgroup, hosting Bible study, and keeping things running as usual. Yeah, we eat a lot of left overs and more frozen dinners and fast food than I care to admit, because the chef is out, but we are even getting better about that too. I made a meal plan for this week, so I won’t get discouraged and unmotivated to cook.

Hopefully that’ll help keep me on the right track with my focus word for this month too, Health. As I may have mentioned, or not because I’ve kinda been a slacker blogger lately, my New Year’s Resolution for the year was simply one word. Focus. I have a lot of areas of my life that need improving, but I think to succeed at any of them and not get burnt out and fed up with it all by mid February, I have to focus on them one at a time. So after thinking about the changes I wanted to make, and grouping similar ones together, I came up with 6 words to be my focus for the year. One word per month, twice a year. So although I intend to attempt everything on the list, the focus word of the month is my fall back plan. Failing all else, I WILL FOCUS on this one thing. It’s worked for the most part and I’m excited that this month’s word is health, because with 2 weeks of winter storms and 2 weeks of flu all around, I’m ready to get back into the swing of things.

So far in this journey I’ve had:
January:Education – spending more time making and following lesson plans for the kids, kinda home pre-k if you will. Plus, learning some new things myself! I did pretty well with the pre-k thing and developed a system for putting my plans together quickly that allowed flexibility during the week. I also took the belly dance class I’ve wanted to take for a while, which was a lot of fun! 
February:Productivity – the idea was to get into the habit of doing my FLYlady routines around the house, and generally declutter some things. I jumped right on board with de-cluttering and spent the first 2 weeks going through baby clothes and toys and listing them on craigslist (I’ve made over $200 so far!) My one track mind was so focused on that, though, that I didn’t do any cleaning to speak of, which was the whole point really. I kinda felt like I failed the mission on that word and got into a major funk about it and didn’t feel motivated to do anything. Which is why I’m so glad it’s finally MARCH! The warmer weather, the spring flowers popping up, and a fresh start on everything is making a huge difference. I’m actually better with my cleaning this month than I was last month when it was supposed to be the focus.

I think for April I may go with Devotion. I really want to start doing a pre-school aged Bible study with the kids, get better about praying at every meal and throughout the day with them, and doing the same for myself. I want to dig into His word and grow in our fellowship with the family of our new church we’ve just joined. Being that Easter falls in there some where too, that’s probably a good motivator  to stay on track too.   That would leave Discipline (focusing on using love and logic tactics with the kids and getting penny into obedience class finally) and Companionship (date nights, shared hobbies, weekday mornings together as a family, dates with the kids, etc) for May and June before I start all over again.

This post is kinda all over the board I know, but it’s where I am now, and where I plan to be. I’m excited that I’m back in the swing of things in so many areas right now… home maker, home school teacher, athlete (just ran a solid mile, this week, for the first time since my high school knee injury!!!), wife, bargin grocery shopper, and most importantly, child of God.

And now for a few parting pictures!

Jonah and his friend, Lincoln, on the tire swing.

I finally found a bedding set for Jonah’s room that I liked!

“Riding” the elephant at the Dallas Zoo

Carly feeding the giraffe was pretty cool.

A fun but LONG day (for Carly) at the zoo.

And because I am making a lot of scrapbook pages these days, here’s a few others I’ve made since my last post! Enjoy!

ABCs of Me

I new challenge popped up on the Scrapbook Challenges website, that really got me thinking. It’s going to be a 26 week challenge of scrapping the ABCs of me. I don’t scrap about myself very much, so it’s probably a good exercise. This way, when my kids are older, they’ll be able to know a little bit about what I was like as a person, instead of just their view of me as their Mommy.

This week’s word prompt was attitude. I certainly have some of that sometime, and poor Jason probably sees the worst of it. I feel bad about that, but I can’t seem to hold it in around him. He lets me be myself and I know don’t have to play “nice and friendly” for him to like me. So maybe it’s a compliment, that he’s really the only person I’m 100% open with.

This is my page for the letter B. I was going to go with “Busy”, because I am that… but with so many letters left in the alphabet, I thought I’d go with something a little more specific about myself. I can talk about hobbies, errands, playgroups, and projects some other time on some other letter.

For the letter C I decided to make a page of confessions to my kids. I started off with some silly ones that I don’t mind sharing with everyone, but the really juicy ones in the middle are for their eyes only… so that they will one day know that I’m not just being mean and that I don’t understand because I have been there done that, and I already know how it turns out! I know they still have to make their own mistakes, but I will still be there to help them through it because I love them!

When they gave us the challenge word “Diet” for the letter D, I wasn’t sure how I wanted to document that, but the next week they didn’t give us a word to do, it was just whatever E word we wanted to do, so I put them together since they will face each other in the book anyway and came up with Diet & Exercise!

For Diet, they required 3 pictures for the challenge, so I used a shot of my teeny tiny cereal bowl, my stash of 100 calorie packs, and a screen shot from the iphone of my ap that I use to journal food and exercise, called MyFitnessPal.

For Exercise there weren’t any challenge requirements, so I just kinda went with the same idea and did 3 photos… My belly dance hip scarf (because I don’t have a decent picture of me in it), our new Wii Fit, and the screen shot of the C25K (Couch to 5k) ap that I use to train for running the Warrior Dash. The tape measure butterfly is from a kit called A New Me… thought it worked well with the colors on this page.

For the letter F this week, they gave us the word Faith. That’s an easy one to do because it’s what we’ve been talking about in our ladies Bible study the last week or so. The chair is from another kit I have, called Waiting for New Moon.

I’m not much of what you’d call a girly girl, but I do occasionally get the itch to be a pretty pretty princess.

The prompt for the letter H was to use a picture of yourself doing something that makes you happy… I had already been thinking about doing a Hosting page with my letter H, so I found a picture of me being a happy hostess.

I still need to get Jason to take the pics of my kick for this one.

For this whole project, I’m mostly using the Feels Like Home Kit by Sarah Bennett, the Tag Sale, Feathered Nest, and The Y Chromosome kits by Raspberry Road Designs, and Splendid by Shabby Princess. The titles are made with Stop, Drop & Roll (wireframe) Alpha by Ziggle Designs.