an alone weekend with lots accomplished!

Earl and I had a long weekend, while the kids went to Asheboro to the zoo with the grandparents. We took naps, watched movies, went shopping and relaxed. It was a great time to connect and look at the way our lives are moving. In those decisions, we are giving up fast food for the next 30 days, using our extra money and income tax to pay off debt (hopefully by the end of the summer we will be debt free except for the mortgage!). This is the first step to accompishing some of my goals!

I also spent some time this weekend and made a summer schedule for us to follow, so hopefully this will be the beginning of another goal!

Tomorrow I'm joining a group on facebook to read Power of a Praying Wife during the month of June. Join me!

Finally, I adjusted and modified some of my goals to make them more specific. The point of this is to make them more defined and to give it enough time to make it a new habit.

PS. since the kids went to the zoo, I'm going to mark it as once!

Park Days

We went to the park yesterday with Joe and Petra for the last time. We had a good time playing together, even if it did rain on us. The kids had lots of fun, although they scoured the woods and built a fire instead of climbing on the equipment!

little bits begun

#43 I purchased a kids worship song that sings several of the songs we sing at church. The kids and I have enjoyed singing along in the car, and I'm hoping this is the first step to having them sing along in church. I did see Alex try harder this week than in the past.

#54 I switched to a homemade furniture polish, made up of lemon juice and olive oil. It works great! I tried homemade dishwasher soap, but it was a failure. I may try again in the future.

I have completed a week of the Lord's table Bible study. It is really eye opening.

Strawberries, #69

My sister and I took the kids strawberry picking yesterday. It was lots of fun! We picked enough strawberries for me to make 7 pints of jelly, freeze 12 cups, make a strawberry pie, serve them as a dessert to the family and as a snack for breakfast and lunch today! One more goal checked off the list!

Pressing On

Yesterday my dear friend Suzanne and I went to Wilmington shopping. We had a really great time wandering through the outdoor mall window shopping. I'm going to call it a mom's night out, even though I had Daniel, because it was such a refreshing time.

My mom taught me to crochet while Daniel had surgery, so I've started a something. It may be just a baby blanket for Caroline's dolls! I should modify my goal now to finish it :)

The kids and I have started a daily Bible study, but I don't want to mark that as complete until we've done it steadily for a month. I thought about Elizabeth George's good, better, and best philosophy in her book a Woman after God's own heart. My previous post about this great Bible study method is probably "the best", but in this season I need to do just good. So we are reading a section, talking about it and doing what we can with it. We started in Mark this week.

Planning

This is a lighter week for us, so I want to begin working towards Bible time with the kids. I think I am going to follow the Heart of Wisdom method, but I am struggling with being a perfectionist in it. There are four basic steps to this approach. The first is to create an interest. They suggest doing this by remembering first with prayer for understanding,what you learned yesterday, ask about prior knowledge of the passage, and share what I have learned from this. the second step is to read the Bible, chronologically so you read through the Bible in a year. This is where my perfectionism first comes in-they reccomend the Narrated Bible, but I could also find a list and just follow the readings. During the reading it is reccomended to use Bible study tools like dictionaries, an atlas and a concordance. They also reccomend using who, what, where, when, why and how to begin learning inductive Bible study. The third part is to expand on what was learned with a writing project, a craft, or a worksheet (these are just examples). The fourth part is to share what was learned. They suggest creating a Bible portfolio for this purpose. That is explained here http://heartofwisdom.com/homeschoollinks/creating-a-bible-portfolio-2/. This is where I get overwhelmed. I love all of this, but do I follow all of it or just parts? I think it is to ambitious to have a project and a notebook activity ready, unless I planned it out a month or so in advance? I need to keep thinking this out and pray and talk to Earl. I was hoping to start tomorrow.

I did find a list of chronological reading http://www.ewordtoday.com/year/31/cmay01.htm