Super Summer Summit - the start of a plan

When I start blogging again after a long time off I always feel the need to explain why and offer excuses, so this time I won't. Life happened, I got busy and had nothing to talk about, so there it is.

Anyway, to get to the real purpose of this post. I am really excited about getting ready for this summer. Summer Vacation ahhhhh it has such an amazing sound to it, especially now that I am teaching again. I think that having some time off to recharge and prepare is good for everyone, students and teachers. However, I also know that kids forget, a lot, I mean massive amounts of things over the summer, so being the over achieving mother that I am I will be making lesson plans for my children over the summer. I know, I know, that's not the point, but I promise I'm not going overboard, it will be fun! And not too much of that boring learning type stuff.

To start this project off I am making an outline, I love outlines, they are almost as awesome as checklists, and I really love checklists. But, I digress, back on subject, outlines. Did I want to just have a lot of ideas and go where the summer sends me or do I want to keep a little structure in the day. To answer this question the girlies and I had a summer summit. Well actually we sat down on the couch and after a lot of tickling and giggling I asked them some really deep questions.

Me - "So Girls, do you want to do learning stuff this summer?"
AJ - "Yeah!"
P-nut - "Yeah!, jinx, you owe me a soda sister!"
Me - "Ok, sounds good, what kinds of things do you want to do?"
P-nut - "Art"
AJ - "Cooking"
P-nut - "Science"
Me - "Sounds good." (about to start walking away, thnking the summit was over)
AJ - "Mama, wait, we need a schedule!"
Me - "A schedule?!?"
P-nut - "Yeah like Art on Mondays and always do art on the Mondays, but we can sometimes do art on other days but we would know on Mondays was super fun art days."

And so the outline was born. Here is as far as I am now, but never fear, summer is still weeks away, I've got plenty of time to get this all together, plenty!

It's that time of year again.....

It's that time of year again, the time of year when people take stock of their lives and think about the changes that they would like to make or the goals that they would like to set for themselves in the next year. Last year I made very vague goals they were not measurable, which I guess is both good and bad. It meant that I was able to keep them in mind all year but it also meant that there wasn't ever a point where I could say that I was finished with them.

So this year I have decided to set goals that are more measurable and less general. So here it goes.

1) Get my teaching liscense renewed/valid for the state that I live in.
2) Start and complete one new craft project a month.
3) Try one new meal a month.
4) Continue to make health and fitness a part of my life.
5) Spend more consistant time in prayer and study.

I think that will be a good set of things to do for the upcoming year. At least tight now those seem like pretty realistic goals. I'll keep you updated.

So what were your goals for the year 2012?

It's the Busiest Time of the Year!

       Oh my goodness what a weekend it has been. I keep thinking that things are going to get better before they get worse. I love the holiday season but sometimes the constant go, go, go that it brings with it can really wear a person out.
       This weekend we kicked off our holiday season with four, yes four Halloween/Fall Festivals. Two of them were school carnivals and they were packed. The girlies loved every second of them even with the zoo that they were. They both loved playing all of the carnival games that were set up. P-nut was especially proficient at the ring toss games, and won some pretty amazing prizes. AJ was great at the skill games like bowling. Face painting was another favorite as were the balloon animals. Today we went to a kids party for my husbands squadron. That was an adventure to say the least they had it set up half inside and half outside on the lawn. The automatic sprinklers kept turning on, soaking all of the kids in their Halloween costumes and causing mass panic. Tonight was interesting, it was time for the Junior High Youth at my church to have a costume party and carve pumpkins. Surprisingly enough it was not nearly as scary as it sounded. The Youth were great, there were no problems, and the pumpkins turned out great.
       Next weekend we have more Halloween plans including a birthday party which should be lots of fun. Then some Trick-or-Treating on Monday night. After Halloween the festivities really start. I am hosting Thanksgiving this year for the first time all by myself and it is starting to panic me a little, so I am sure you will be hearing all about that as time goes on.
       Time for bed with a good book and a nice tall icy glass of water. Night all.

Think Ahead Thursday

I decided to do more dreaming than planning for todays challenge. If I were taking a vacation to anywhere in the world where would it be? Wow, that is actually much harder than it sounds initially. There are so many places that I want to visit in my life. I want to go back to England and live there and travel until I have seen every single castle and ruin, then I will extend my travels to Scotland, Wales, and Ireland. I want to see each and every state in the United States. I want to visit Canada and Mexico. Asia, so many places to visit, I would love to spend time in China, Japan, Korea, India. Australia that would be awesome, but I think I would choose New Zealand first. My choices are different if I include my children than if I don't. So what is my number one choice?

I want to take a cruise. I want to take a trip where I can visit more than one city at a time, and when I am done touristing I can have amazing food, spas, activities and shopping. I really want to take a cruise.

What to write about.... Hmmmm.....

I am at a loss right now. You see it's that time of night when my routine kicks in. Everyone in my house is in bed, it's quiet, it's my alone time. So I usually pour myself a glass of wine, or pull out some sort of snack and play some games on FB. It's how I unwind. So now I'm sitting here twiddling my thumbs trying to figure out what to do with my time. The way I see it I had a few options. I could

a) clean, do some laundry, something on that line. But I quickly threw that idea out the window... I do enough cleaning and laundry during the day I don't think it would be relaxing.

b) watch some of the old tele. Well, I am doing that, I'm watching American Idol right now. But I have never been able to just watch tv, I feel unproductive and bored (because we all know that games are productive.

c) work on some crafts. Before I became an addict I would spend all of my down time making things, doing crochet, cross-stitch, and making my shirts. I loved doing all of this, but I don't have anything going right now, and I am not sure what I want to start.

d) Resume my before bed bible study, meditation and prayer time. This is the one I should be doing. After all the whole point of this experiment is to improve my relationships with my family and with God.

So what did I choose to do? Blog out the list of things that I should be doing so that I would see that my only option is the final one. So now that I have dragged my rambling out as long as I can I will take myself off the computer and the internet and sit in a quiet place to have some quiet reflective time. Hopefully the change from internet games to prayer and meditation as a calming and centering method will have amazing results.

~DD

2011 It's a New Year!

Time to break out the resolutions, a new year a new you, and all of those other cliche phrases you see thrown around this time of year. The whole concept of resolutions is a good one I think, but honestly I also see a few problems with them.

I love that making resolutions causes you to re-evaluate your life and look at ways that you can improve. I think that personal improvement is something that we should always strive for. No one is perfect and there are always things that we can do to make our lives, and the lives of those who are around us better.

I hate that peoples resolutions so often tend to pick things that are related to living up to the unrealistic expectations that society tends to place on us. Women and men both resolve to be more perfect in the eyes of others. They want to look like the perfect tall, thin, healthy, together no problems person that is always on TV. The resolutions that are prompted by feelings of inadequacy are the ones that worry me.

When people decide that their lives need a change, that change needs to be prompted by something from within, not from outside pressure. We need to make resolutions that are rooted in the desire to accomplish something, not resolutions that are rooted in guilt and peer pressure.

Now to me... I have been guilty of making resolutions for all of the wrong reasons for many years, so this year I am changing my thinking and making resolutions that will help to make me a better person from the inside out and not from the outside in. So here they go.

1) I resolve not to make any resolutions that are motivated by peer pressure and feelings of inadequacy.
2) I resolve to love me for me, this includes all of my faults as well as the areas that aren't. I will try to stop obsessing about things that I notice about myself and my appearance that bother me and instead remember that I am beautiful for who I am.
3) I resolve to be more supportive of and helpful to the people that I come into contact with, this includes family, friends, acquaintances, and strangers. I will try to make sure that the way I treat people always leaves them feeling better rather than worse.

I think that this should be it for now. Those are both pretty big and pretty difficult so I will stop there before I set myself up for failure.

So what were your resolutions? Did you make them because they are really something that you want to do? Or were you motivated by pressure from friends and society. I urge you to think about the motives behind your resolutions and make some that are honest and true reflections of things that You want to change about You to make yourself a better person from the inside out.

Tuesday Blah's

I am feeling a little blah today. I am not sure why, I think that it is because for so long we had major changes happening on a yearly basis, moving, having babies, things like that. Now the only changes in the foreseeable future are pretty far off. I think I have forgotten how to come up with my own entertainment. So I am looking for fun things to do to break up the monotony. I am not having much luck coming up with suggestions for myself right now. It seems like everything I think of involves being outside which is not really an option because it is already over 100* outside, and it is only going to get hotter. There is also the fact that most of the things that I want to do cost money that we just don't have available right now. I am so torn as to what to do.

Yeah, so I'm a slacker.

The good news is that I have been keeping on track with become the housewife that is impossible to become. The bad news is that I have totally neglected to tell anyone about how I am getting there.

Why? This stuff is hard. How do those women do it, keep a perfect house, stay in perfect shape, have hobbies and interests outside the house, help their children grow into respectable people, and keep a husband happy? The answer is a little of two things. a) they don't or b) they are planners. I am hoping to become one of the planners.

The more time that I spend trying to get a grasp on what I want to do with my life the more I feel like I have a million different directions that I want to go. Perfect mom, of course, Amazing wife no doubt. But what do I want to do to fulfill me? Take pictures? I do love beautiful pictures, but even with all I do I have never seen myself as artistic. Become a real actual historian? For some reason this hit me last night. I feel the desire to become the historian of the military wife/family. There are a million books about what happened during the battles, and even the letters home, but what about the development of the job that it is to be a military wife?

So I sit here and contemplate the future, while my girls dance around me in their tu-tu's and remember that no matter what, family will be first, and I have time to decide what my calling in life is.