New Years Resolutions

So I finally wrote out my New Years Resolutions. I was thinking about writing them out like Jonathan Edwards' Resolutions but instead I'll just write them our short & sweet.
1. To start the spiritual discipline of journaling (Books where I've read about this: Life Management for Busy Women by Elizabeth George & Spiritual Disciplines for the Christian Life By Donald S. Whitney
2. To be more intentional in caring for my body - a) sleep better (get to bed earlier) b) eat better (more fruits & vegetables, less wheat - I'm allergic) c) exercise more frequently (I was especially challenged to do this in the DVD of When I Don't Desire God by John Piper
3. To cut down on sugar & canned food in my children's diet
4. To watch fewer movies
5. To read 15 minutes a day on homemaking
6. To start (on January 16) a school hour for the purpose of teaching Beth how to work hard a little bit every day and to teach me perseverance. I'll also read up on methods so that Daniel & I can make an informed decision next year.
I feel like there ought to be a seventh point but I don't know what that would be, so I'll just leave that open to whatever God wants to do in my life this year!!!


Sherri has a little encouragement about new year's resolutions on her blog.

I bopped into the Mahaney's "Girl Talk" website I expected that they would have posted resolutions but instead found something much more helpful, and so I want to stick in a couple of things that popped out at me. Hope you enjoy them!!


"...nothing exterior, no outward development of kingdoms, no empire-building, can compare with what mother has done. Nothing can compare in beauty, and wonder, and admirableness, and divinity itself, to the silent work in obscure dwellings of faithful women bringing their children to honor and virtue and piety." Henry Ward Beecher Gene Fedele, ed. Golden Thoughts of Mother, Home & Heaven, (Gainesville, FL: Bridge-Logos, 2003), pp.75-76.


The great thing, if one can, is to stop regarding all the unpleasant things as interruptions of one’s ‘own,’ or ‘real’ life. The truth is of course that what one calls the interruptions are precisely one’s real life—the life God is sending one day by day; what one calls one’s ‘real life’ is a phantom of one’s own imagination. This at least is what I see at moments of insight: but it’s hard to remember it all the time.” —The Letters of C. S. Lewis to Arthur Greeves (20 December 1943), para. 5, p. 499; quoted in The Quotable Lewis, (Wheaton, Ill.: Tyndale House Publishers, 1989), 335.