Excuse my ADD

So here I go again... In my defense it is a new year and how could I not make a resolution or two (twenty? rough estimate...) It would in fact be irresponsible of me not to take this opportunity to better my life and that of my husband and kids as well. I always thought that someday I would "grow up" and suddenly know all about being a mom and a housekeeper and being responsible. Like a switch would flip and instead of wanting to spend all morning in bed, suddenly I would be up at 6am cooking pancakes and eggs for the whole family while singing 'oh what a beautiful morning'. Its so sad that that isn't true. Its a huge stinking learning process. 7 years of marriage and 4 kids later, I still have a lot to learn. I'm embarrassed that these are basics, but heres a little look at some of the things we'll be working on in 2011.

One of our main goals this year is to get our house organized. Our current system isn't working and we need to get a better plan so that I'm not always buried. My kids have NO chores and no opportunity to learn responsibility, or work ethic, or independence. So I found this great websitewww.freeprintablebehaviorcharts.com that is going to help me with this. They not only have charts on EVERYTHING I could ever want they also have great articles to read on a wide range of parenting issues and concerns. I'm in love. I could make really cute charts but I would turn it into an unnecessarily gigantic project so this is much better. Pick it, print it, get to work. As Mater likes to say, get 'er done! We're going to have a few charts up on the fridge. There is Josh's potty chart and Hayley's reading chart, and even a mommy and daddy chore chart. A kids chore chart will soon follow. It'll be a fridge only a mother could love. For the kids chore chart I'm kinda doing something different that I think will work for us. It'll be more like a daily routine chart and I'll have a magnet for each kid. As they do their "stuff" they can move the magnet along on the chart. So not just chores (although that will be on there), but get dressed, pick up toys, nap, etc. We might lose the magnets the first day, who knows, but I'm excited to try something new. Its much better than the alternative, changing nothing but expecting the results to change. I'm a very visual person so I know this will help me. We have great scripture reading charts for Jeremy and I too. I gave them to my Mia Maids in December to help them keep track of their daily reading in 2011. That link will bring you to the original but I edited it to remove the pic of the kid and replace it with a picture of the scriptures I found on google. Jeremy and I will turn it into a contest between us. :) I LOVE charts.

So along with getting our house in order, another big resolution of ours is to get our financial house in order so to speak. We've tried the budget thing quite a few times but we're giving it another go. We went to a church meeting on budgeting and the teacher showed us a great budget he'd done on excel and he emailed us a blank budget form that he had set-up. Let me know if you're interested and I can send you that blank budget form that works with Excel. I don't know much about excel but the teacher taught us how to use the form. Jeremy, being an expert in this area, has it figured out and did a great job getting it all set up for us. We're also incorporating an envelope system to move away from using our debit card. (I decorated the envelopes :)) Right now we have no idea where our money goes, and this will help with that. Besides envelopes for food and dates, theres even a Christmas envelope so that we aren't so pinched when December rolls around. We just figured out what envelopes we wanted and how much to put into them and ta-da, we're all set. I'm so excited. I don't do well with stress at all, in fact my stress tolerance level is like a 1. I'm feeling a lot of hope that this will help to get my currently astronomically high stress level down to manageable, functionable levels. (Yes that is a word, don't look it up.)