Thoughts on the New Year

Happy 2013!! I hope your year has started out awesome :) We stayed home on New Year's Eve, but it was in no way boring! Casey bought a second hand fire pit from someone he works with. I thought we would freeze out there after dark, but he proved me wrong, the fire put out plenty of heat and the kids thought it was super awesome. Not as awesome, though, as the giant Jenga game Casey made out of 2x4s. Ha! It was fun. We stayed up late (not the kids, we're not quite there yet) and watched the ball drop and kissed at midnight for the first time in many years. I think since Natalie was a baby.

I don't usually have much trouble putting together a list of goals for the New Year, but this year I just don't think I need any added pressure to accomplish more things. After much prayer and pondering, I think what I need is quite the opposite; to slow down, to not expect so much from myself, to find balance in what I have going and to learn to do just one thing at a time. I'm still praying about what this will look like in each area of my life so I won't go into too much detail for now :)

We started our second semester today and for as much as I was admittedly dreading it, it has been such a nice day and it feels amazing to get our routine back! Wowee, we were getting lazy ;)

One thing I would like to challenge myself to do this year is to take daily photos of our everyday life, a sort of 365 photo challenge. This one thing doesn't stres me out, it excites me. I love taking pictures and taking pictures of my daily life here at home truly helps what can sometimes feel mundane and unimportant feel beautiful and worthwhile. There are so many joyful moments in everything we do here and having started this just yesterday, I feel like I'm already taking more notice of those moments.

 The record was a gift for Casey from me. I found it on Amazon. What can I say, we connect over Paul Simon ;)

As for the blog, I am so excited about this year! You might have long ago realized that this is not a blog with just one genre and although I love talking about sewing and sharing sewing projects, my life is much more than that. I'm excited to share some health and fitness experiences and some encouragement in that arena. I haven't done much of that because I think I've felt that it would come across as kinda vain, but it's on my heart that there are moms (or non-moms too) out there that need to hear that a busy mom, former sugar addict and physically lazy person CAN lose weight, learn to love healthy foods and become a home exercise enthusiast. I am proof and I should share :)

As I take pics of our daily life here too, I know that more blog ideas will be forthcoming. For example, what do you feed your kids for lunch? I have acquired quite the repertoire of great and easy non-recipes for easy meals for lunch or when you lack time or when Daddy's out of town. So I should share those too!

Anything else you'd like to see more of here?? What are your New Year's goals??