A Time For Zhu Zhu Pets?

So Saul said to his servants, "Provide for me now a man who can play well and bring him to me." ~I Samuel 16:17

It's Kung Zhu mania in our house! According to Noah Zhu Zhu Pets are the coolest thing right now! When I first saw these things I thought they were...well...stupid. Now I have to admit they are pretty fun and it's not just Noah who thinks so! 

Watching the fearless Kung Zhu's fight it out in
the battle arena.

A Time to Be Organized: Calendars, Calendars, Calendars!

"Let all things be done decently and in order" ~I Cor. 14:40

Remember the days when our young minds could retain anything and everything and we never needed to write things down. Remember when you could recall a friends phone number without looking it up...several friends numbers in fact! Those days for me were long gone after baby number one but after baby number 5 I'm lucky to remember my own phone number let alone anyone else's. The same goes for commitments and Dr. appointments, etc. In order to keep our busy family on time and where they need to be on the right day I invested in a dry erase calendar board. These range in price and size so find one that fits your families needs. I got mine at Rite Aid I think for about $10. It's magnetic and fits on the fridge right next to the phone so as I'm making appointments and agreeing to be places I can write it down immediately. I also have a small yearly calendar that is on the fridge right next to it for appointments that are in the months to come. This is not a fool proof system (remember the story of the surprise birthday party we showed up a week early for...) but it has helped me a great deal in keeping us where we need to be and when. Now I am so dependent on my dry erase calendar that I don't know how I managed without it. I keep track of the kids school things on it, church activities, appointments and engagements. I have a friend who color codes hers. I realize that people have phones they can put this stuff into but the benefit of the dry erase calendar is that it's there for everyone to see so we all know each other schedule and can just look at it and see what we have going on. 

For my husbands benefit I have to add that if you are considering buying one consider whether or not you care what day of the week it starts with. Ours starts with Mon. as opposed to Sun. and it has thrown my husband for a loop. 

A Time for A New Year

Therefore if any be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold,

 all things are become new. ~ II Cor. 5: 17

I'm sure I'm not the only one who has taken time to reevaluate things in my life and resolve to do things better. Seems we all do this at the beginning of the year but how many of us actually follow through the entire year? I know I don't. This year I was overwhelmed as I stopped to think about what changes I wanted to make, what things I wanted to work on. Part of that is I'm very hard on myself but the other part of that is my 5 little blessings...

They keep me pretty busy so a lot of the things I would love to resolve to do I just don't have time for. Also, having the privilege of raising these 5 children God has given me comes with a lot of responsibility. God has entrusted them with us to raise for Him...a wonderful but also hard job. There are so many things I would love to be doing differently or better or more consistently with them. Then I also have myself to work on! There are many areas in my own life I would like to be consistent about or change. So after much prayer and evaluating my priorities I finally decided what my resolution would be: Read my Bible in a year. It's something I've desired to do in past years but it just never seemed like the right time. This year it felt right. Knowing my personality I knew doing it chronologically would not be the way for me to go. So I went online and found a schedule that would work for me Here. I've never read the Bible through in a year and I'm really excited to do it. I also concluded that if I can be consistent about this then all the other areas that I'm hoping to work on/change will fall into place as I spend more time in my Bible. God just showed me that I need to be realistic about my goals and understand that this is a season in my life that I'm just not going to be able to do certain things I'd like to right now...and that's ok with me. 

Part of choosing to discipline myself in the area of Bible reading and seeing that for the past 5 days I've been doing it has me encouraged to try and discipline myself in other areas. I'm for the most part a very organized person but always feel like things could be MORE organized and MORE efficient. So I've been on a frenzy lately re-arranging things. Many times I have people ask me how I do this or how I make time for that so I thought I'd share some of my tips/techniques that I've adapted over the next few blogs that help keep our home running, kids clean and mom sane! 

I trust everyone had a great holiday season! I feel like so much has gone on in our family in the past few weeks...just such a busy time of year for everyone. We had a great celebration...very quiet but great. I'm not big on talking about or focusing on gifts we got because it's not why we celebrate but one thing I got this year was just so fun and cool...an ornament with all our family members names. A wonderful reminder of how much God has blessed Ben and I over the years...8 to be exact as of yesterday! What an amazing journey it's been!