Monday Morning Musings - It's A New Dawn, It's A New Day, It's A New Life For Me

Where's Addy?

I LOVE a new year. It's the best feeling. A whole brand spankin' new clean slate to do with whatever I want. Yesterday we set goals. We set several family goals and made a plan to carry them out. We also set individual goals and made plans for those. Each first Sunday of the month we are going to evaluate how we did the previous month and make a new plan for the new month. I found this quote yesterday and put it on the front of our goal journals:

"I urge you to examine your life. Determine where you are and what you need to do to be the kind of person you want to be. Create inspiring, noble, and righteous goals that fire your imagination and create excitement in your heart. And then keep your eye on them. Work consistently towards achieving them." -Joseph B. Wirthlin

This is the kids last day of Christmas break from school. Real life starts again tomorrow. It will be nice, but I am glad to have this one last bonus day to just kick around the house and hang out together and have fun.

We took down our Christmas trees and our decorations today. I think I enjoy taking them down as much as I enjoy putting them up. It is so fun to decorate and anticipate the holidays and it is also so fun to clean it all up and give the house that fresh clean slate feeling that comes with a new year.

So Steve made a big change in his life last week. He traded in this:

For this:

It was a good change that was a long time comin'. He just had to talk himself into it. His old monstrous beast was a gas chugging diesel. And for the last year or more, diesel has been a full dollar a more a gallon than regular gas. And Steve drives a lot. He fills his tank up an average of every other day. So with the savings he will get with better mileage, regular gas prices, and a smaller truck payment, we are thinking we will save enough each month to almost pay one of his employees pay checks for the month. Not to mention that his oil changes will now be 1/3 of what they were. And he drives so much that he has to buy new tires so often. And the smaller tires are half the price of the others. And I don't have to take a running leap to get up into the truck now. Too bad he didn't have this truck all those times I was pregnant and had to make my way up into one of his big huge trucks.

The other day Addy was talking to me about something and I really had no idea what she was talking about. I kept asking her to clarify a little. She got frustrated with me and said, "MOM! Are you hearing what I am saying to you? Do you think you are losing your mind or something?"

We were driving in the car one night and Zac changed my Christmas station to some other station and a rap song came on. In a part of the song that just had music I started singing my own rap song. Zac turned and looked at me and said, "No free stylin' mom." Then later Emily was trying to get him to change the station to the station she wanted. He said, "Zac FM doesn't take requests".

Have you ever seen the show Take the Money and Run? The kids and I watched it last summer and the other day the girls were for sure they were filming an episode near our house. We had been gone somewhere and when we got home, there were 2 cars parked down the street from our house by the walking trail. One of them was a really nice car, but don't ask me what it was. I'm not a car person. Not long after we got home the girls were in the kitchen and they saw a man dressed "in very nice clothes" by their description, running down the trail to the car with a silver briefcase attached to his wrist, just like on the show. For a minute I thought maybe it could be possible they were filming the show, but they said there was no camera crew so I had to burst their bubble and tell them it probably wasn't so. Now I'm really wondering what was going on.

Speaking of TV shows...Do you watch The Big Bang Theory? Oh my! Steve and I had never seen it before, but we just started watching it about a month ago. It is the most hilarious show we have ever seen. I am excited because they had a Big Bang marathon on New Years Eve and so our DVR queue that was getting rather low on BBT is now bursting at the seams.

Here's the theme song. How can you not want to watch something that opens with such a catchy little ditty?