New Year's Resolutions

I think we can all agree they're kind of lame. A few weeks into the new year, and here's how I've done with the "traditional" resolutions:

1. Exercise. I pulled out an old exercise video, only to find that I had to spend most of the time answering questions from kids like, "Why are you watching a movie with naughty words on it?" (butt is a semi-naughty word here). "Why aren't they dressed very modestly?" and "Why isn't that girl wearing a shirt?" (Um, that's actually a man with long hair who has taken too many steroids. You know what, let's go for a walk instead.)

2. Eat better. So I bought some lentils with the intention of learning how to sprout them, which I'm told increases their health benefits by a gajillion times. I took them home and put them in my pantry right next to the lentils I bought several months ago that never even made it out of the bag. I reach right over both bags now every time I go for the chocolate.

3. Go Green. This is very popular these days and recently one of my favorite grocery stores gave me some of those reusable shopping bags to encourage me in that direction. The thing is, I use the plastic bags for an awful lot of things, the most important of which is bagging poopy diapers so we can dispose of them in our outside trash (and yes, I know disposable diapers are also an environmental problem but somehow I still manage to sleep at night). So just last week we ran out of plastic grocery bags on the same day that my toddler produced six highly-putrid smelling diapers. With our bag supply gone, we were left with no other choice than to put them in our inside trash. As the toxic smell wafted through the house, I realized that in saving the planet, I had made my own house completely uninhabitable. Plastic, please!

And yet there is something about this time of year that makes me reflective of the year just past and optimistic about the fresh start in front of me. So here are a few resolutions I am taking with me into this year:

1. Treat my children and talk about them as though they are blessings, not burdens. Because it's true and sometimes I forget it in the middle of the hullabaloo around here. I feel sad that our culture doesn't value children and our new President has even referred to babies as "punishments," but if I'm honest, my own attitude sometimes doesn't reflect that I believe God when He says they are blessings and rewards. It is definitely hard work raising kids. My life would have been easier if I never had kids, but it is richer because I did.

2. Be more intentional about praying for every child that plays at my house (and sometimes that is a lot) and making sure they know Jesus loves them.

3. Read the books on my bookshelves before I get any new ones. I am always on Amazon looking at books that interest me (as if I have nothing to do but read all day while I eat bon bons) and the library is a second home to me (and I think I might have been able to buy a second home with all the money I have paid them in late fees), but as I was dusting my bookshelves the other day, I realized there are some really good books up there that I had somehow forgotten about. In fact, on one shelf alone, I hadn't even read half of the books. That sounds really bad, but in fairness, some of them were my husband's (okay, one of them was his), and I don't know... I guess I just don't dust very often.

4. Limit my time on the computer. I'm not even sure how to do this - by the time I go through all the business of email, checking friend's blogs, researching homeschool ideas I will never have time to implement, recipes I will forget to make....I think I'm going to somehow have my speakers play a giant sucking sound, so I will at least be mindful of what is happening to my time. Speaking of which, there are a lot of other things I should be doing right now...