Hail All! Here we are at the end of another year. Everyone in my house managed to squeak by without any major hiccups. Which is always cause to celebrate. This is a time to reflect upon our failures, and plan for next years improvements. A time when we can look back at those times we were embarrassed by doing something silly (translation stupid), and, if you are me, at those times when we should have been embarrassed and weren't (that's what happens from having no shame). So I thought I would take a moment to reflect on last year.
This was our first entire year as Louisiana residents. All this year I have looked at every murky swampy looking pond, and only once saw an alligator in the wild. I'm still not sure about that one either since we were doing 80 on the interstate. The first assumption that everyone has about Louisiana is that it is fraught with gators (the second is that its full of swamp people and its not). I expect to be more impressed in the next year. Is it to much for a girl to ask to see an alligator in the wild from a safe distance?
This year we transitioned from being a homeschool family back into regular school. This decision came after much prayer, and the ladies have been very blessed with both friends and opportunities since then.
This year we moved from our soul sucking rental. I should say it was soul sucking simply because it was in the most phenomenal neighborhood, but the house was super cramped, and internet wasn't available (which is a must for the tele-commenting Señor Hotness). That was a pretty long list of first world problems, but after much waiting we were blessed to find a house perfect for our family.
This year was also a huge year of changes in the job department. Señor Hotness took a new position with a new company. He is still a super awesome lighting guy, but where he use to cover an area from East Texas to the Mississippi border now he manages a sales area that is pretty much all of the central time zone in the US, and two Canadian Provinces. To say he's gone a lot is an understatement, but we are so happy that he is home every weekend. Also through the magic of FaceTime he is always here for family prayer, and we are able to see him for face to face conversations every night. I also learned that you can have entire text conversations solely through DubSmash...and they make perfect sense.
This year I finally admitted to myself that I HATE to paint walls. Which is pretty weird considering how much I love to paint pretty much everything else.
This year I realized that I need some accountability if I want to lose weight or become more active. Although, I will say moving into a house with three flights of stairs has improved my activity greatly. My girls too. They loved all the stairs we have in this house until the first time we had to put up laundry. Then they just became an unbearable burden.
This year I made many awesome friends in a place that I wasn't sure I would find any, and have been very enriched knowing them. I discovered that Louisiana isn't full of swamp people, and even though I live 30 minutes away from the Duck Commander head-quarters the closest I have ever gotten to one of the dynasty crew was that time I saw Uncle Si at a four way stop. Disclaimer: I don't even watch Duck Dynasty.
This year I slacked off on the blog, and even when I did blog it felt stilted and forced. I felt like I did projects just for the sake of blogging about them, and they suffered for it. In the next year it is my goal to blog more for me again, and less just for the sake of doing it. In the beginning this was a place for me to be myself. A place where I could let my freak flag proudly wave. A place that I could say what I wished no matter how, lets say quirky, it might have been. So this next year is going to be all about the basics, and letting me be just as weird as I want to.
I hope that in this New Year you all will be blessed to improve on that which you seek improvement, and as always much laughter and even more love.
