A New Year

December was a hard month around here. Lots of sick bugs mixed in with a ton of other stuff that just made some of the stresses of living here (like finding a doctor that doesn't have a massive waiting list..) magnified. How grateful I was that we made the decision back at the beginning of November to simplify Christmas and New Years. I think it was the first year we did not have guests. It felt a little strange. But I wonder if the strangeness wasn't due more to the fact of being in a new country than it had to do with the factor of not having guests over. Hm. Enough about Christmas for the moment though, as I will post more on that later.

Right now, I really just want to take a minute to say a big "hello!" to 2014. We sat down together as a family on our last Family Home Evening of 2013 and each decided on some goals that we wanted to tackle this year. Living in a city that has so many resources Jason and I kind of wanted to capitalize on that a bit by ensuring our goals used those resources (like first aid courses in our first language). In any case, here is what we came up with.

Jason: First aid certification. Wilderness survival course. More time to practicing piano. Get a bed (You read that right...we still don't have one. This pull-out sofa thing is getting pretty madly uncomfortable. Unfortunately, this one is really far down the list of financial priorities. Moving is expensive and so is this city.)

Laura: Learn to play guitar (hahahaha... I know our neighbours are going to love this one. Thankfully for them this one is kind of on the back burner because I need a guitar before I can learn to play one.). First aid certification (I really think all parents should have this!). Carve out some time to start French. Find more fun (and creative!) ways to introduce music to the kids.

Atticus: Learn basic swimming. Learn to tie shoes. Create and build an airplane out of lego. Create and build a boat out of lego.

Milayla: Take swim classes. Use the toilet all by herself.


We're excited to get to work. I'm also working on my 'one word' for the year (last year's word can be found here) and which principles I want to work on with the kids along with my individual role goals (like being a mom :) ). Which means that I better go and get started on that lovely thing called planning.

Hope you all have a wonderful New Year filled with many opportunities to strengthen families, friendships, and faith.

Reaching Goals

As I wrote about back in our New Year's Eve post, we've been working on teaching the kids to set goals; not just at New Year's but all year round (we just used New Year's as an easy starting point). Well, it turns out the kids are crazy about goals! 

The deal was that we all had a week to reach our goals by the end of the week. That gave us 6 days (as we were not working on our goals on Sunday) to work toward them. We wrote down each of our goals and made little tracking charts to color in. Also, each day that we all worked on our goal we got to color in a slice of pizza on an additional sheet. If we all worked towards our goal each day (and reached our mark for each day) we would get to celebrate with pizza at the end of the week. 

Well, Milayla reached her final goal the first day. Hers was to walk 6 steps and on the first day she walked 10. Then she promptly went back to crawling so we kept working every day with her to get her to prefer walking over crawling. It's a little puzzling; this walking thing with Milayla. She's been walking since 13 months and is presently quite strong and balanced when she walks. However, try as we might we can't convince her that walking is better than crawling. I'm sure she'll make the switch at some point when she decides it's the cool thing to do. Perhaps she needs to hang around more big kids. In any case, check out her cute little victory smile (sorry about the red eyes, those iPhones can only do so much...). In any case, with this girl's determination, intelligence and hard work we really need to be setting out some more difficult goals for her. She is one hardworking baby, and cute too ;) .

And Atticus had a goal to write his name all on his own. He could already write all the letters without our help (and the rest of the alphabet for that matter) but we would have to tell him which letter came when. Well, not anymore! Man, is he hard working. While helping him work towards his goal I learned that he works well under pressure. I was trying to let him set the pace and take initiative on his goal so that he could really feel like he earned it, but he would sit at the table doodling each and every day... Finally, on the second to last day I brought out our bedtime clock (a clock that works some great miracles around here at bedtime, I tell ya :) ) and set it for 5 minutes. In that 5 minutes, he had written his name (on his own) not once, not twice, but three times without anyone at the table pressing him to work on his letters. And when his time was up he was simply beaming about his accomplishment. As well he should be.

As for Jason and I. Well, both our goals that we set to work on with the kids (we each have a goal book that we work on continuously through the year) were tied in with music and complimented each other quite well. Jason wanted to learn another song on the piano and I wanted another song that I could sing. So we picked out a song together and both learned the same song. It was rather nice to sit down each day and practice together and all that time together led to a new song as well (even with me being sick for most of the week; though I can't vouch for how good my vocals were that week).

It was a fun week and we plan on instituting goal week around here a lot more often (hoping to make it every week soon!). So glad we gave it a try with the kids!