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Showing posts from December, 2020

Christmas 2020

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 I wrapped gifts on and off for a week leading up to Christmas this year.  I usually wait till Christmas Eve and have a miserable evening.  Wrapping in stages made the chore much more bearable, even joyful, as I meditated on making each package beautiful and the joy that the girls would have in their gifts. We always buy a gingerbread kit and we always use the leftover and unwanted Halloween candies to decorate the gingerbread house. As you can tell, the girls don't like gobstoppers or bottle caps, etc.   This December, Norah's classmate paid her to paint succulent pots for his mom as a surprise. He used an excuse to bring the pots over to us in secret earlier in the month.  Once the pots were painted, we all went over to their house for dessert and to exchange gifts a few nights before Christmas. That's how we got the pots back to her classmate in secret and in time for him to slip them under their tree. He sent a video of her unwrapping her gift and finding out that Norah

Goals for 2021

I'm making some goals for 2021.   I'm keeping it simple, going back to the basics.  1. Read the One Year Bible.   2. Clean with Fly Lady.  3. Take my vitamins and count calories.  4. Read at least one book a week.  5. Exercise five or six days a week.  (Anything from strenuous weight lifting to simple walks will count towards this goal.) 6. Contact one family member or friend every day.  I've done all these things consistently in the past. I still do most of these somewhat consistently, but the last few years have been so busy and emotionally and physically challenging that I have fallen out of these healthy habits for weeks or even months at a time. So I am putting a renewed focus on these simple things that make the most difference in my spiritual and physical well-being for 2021.  

New Leisure Time

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I'm done with my first semester of grad school. My oldest just finished all her CCPlus work for this semester.  It's also the official first day of Christmas break for our Classical Conversations Community.  A big snow storm is only hours away, so it's freezing outside. And I'm still a bit worn out from a full day of Blue Book testing and lively conversation with my Challenge 3 class yesterday. So I've got my feet up by the fire and I am leisurely reading five books at the same, literally. I'm reading one chapter in a book and then switching to another and then another.  I haven't been free to read what I want in months and I just don't know where to start, so I am just reading them all at the same time.  Whenever I get too restless from sitting and reading, I'll listen to my favorite podcasts and do some housework and/or meal prep. In the next few days, I actually look forward to writing a new essay on The Iliad for the Circe Apprenticeship, assessi