I have been teaching Ladybug all about coordinating colors when picking out her outfits.  She is a pretty good job on this outfit. :O)

As 2009, flows into 2010, I have been reflecting over the year as I typically do as I celebrate the arrival of a clean slate. What’s nice about a new year is we get to start over. There are no mistakes, no disappointments, and more chances to “get it right”. It’s feels like the freshness of a new school year–full of promise and anticipation of the wonderful things to learn. It’s a time when we strive to make the coming year better than the past year.

Many people attempt to make New Year Resolutions. Striving to improve up on their lives and the lives of other around them. These resolutions are forgotten by the end of the first week of the year. Most don’t write them down and those who do write them down don’t keep the list at the top of the stack long enough to get a good habit going. This year I plan to not only write my resolutions for a better year down, but to strive to keep them out to remind me to keep going.

After watching an awesome and inspiring program helping people loose weight, I pledged to help our local food bank through this network by loosing forty pounds this year. By this time next year, I hope to be trimmed down, very active and healthy. This will obviously mean that I need to win the battle over sugar once and for all. That’s the trigger for me and it’s the biggest battle but I know I can win if I keep my attitude in check.

In November, I began reducing activities in my virtual world so that I have more time in my real world. One of the things I regret is how I did this, but I also know that when I finally had the courage to do so, I had go for it or loose the strength. I still find myself edging back to the wrong side, but am able to pull back faster. I hope that by the end of 2010, I will have found a good balance of technology and family time. I hope the toes I stepped on in the process can find understanding and forgive my actions at that time.

This year several members of our church family read through the WHOLE bible in close to 90 days. It was HARD and yet very REWARDING!! It showed me that if I really put my mind to it, I can read through the bible once a year. As a Sunday School teacher, I really must be familiar with the bible beyond the lessons that I teach over and over each year. I also strive to get through the reading program from Headquarters to become a certified Sunday school teacher. I have been working on this goal for over ten years. This is within my grasp more so than finally finishing that four year degree in twenty years (still sitting as Junior in my degree program). Time to start knocking out those books.

In order to reach these goals, I need to find a more organized, disciplined and punctual Mama. This is a toughy. I fall flat on my face every single year because I can’t seem to get a handle on this part of the road to a better me. This coming year NEEDS to be the year I get this under control. I will be returning to work in the fall and the only way Ladybug and I will survive work and school is for Mama to find the strength and dedication to being more organized, disciplined and punctual. Other areas of our lives will benefit greatly from this goal as well.

Meeting these goals should bring more time to chronicle Ladybug’s childhood. I can’t think of a more precious gift to give her one day is her childhood memories written down for her to read as often as she would like. To laugh at her escapades, to understand memories better, and to feel how much she was loved as she grew. There are various medias available to facilitate this and I hope that be able to balance the doable resources with other facets of my life that needs attention. Hopefully, one thing will be this blog.

So, as you celebrate with your loved ones this year, I pray that you will find more hope, happiness, love, peace, joy, comfort, healing and blessing in 2010.

I have been communicating with a fellow adoptive parent and was alerted that my website wasn’t acting right. I immediately checked it out and found that I had been hacked. Not so much someone looking for my personal information but someone with a “bot” looking for weaknesses in websites just for the grins and giggles. He then changes all the links to show his “signature”. Fortunately the database was untouched.

I immediately called my sister to help fix things and she was able to verify that my site had only been hacked for a matter of hours. If you happened to surf here during that time, your information appears to have been safe. No viruses, etc. Just someone with too much time on his hands.

One thing I learned through this is the value of a STRONG password. My password had been something that could be found in the dictionary and, according to my sister, the “bots” have been becoming smarter and thus easier to figure out simple passwords. I now have a STRONG password in place and hope this is a thing to keep the shenanigans of a bored computer programmer out of my web site.

And now, back to our regularly scheduled program…

Yesterday was the beginning of the Season of Advent–the waiting period–before Christmas. It was always a special memory from my childhood and I brought it back to our little family before Sarah came home. I felt that it is a good way to keep Christ in CHRISTmas and focus on the Reason for the Season. Our last two Christmases were a bit mixed up with Ladybug’s palate repair the first Christmas and then last year just not being organized at all, it, again, fell by the wayside. However, I am DETERMINED to not let that happen this year.

Since Little Miss Ladybug is into EVERYTHING these days and seems to want to prove she is capable of things that she really isn’t old enough developmentally, I have decided that we will not do the candle portion of Advent this year. So for our little family, Season of Advent will begin tomorrow on December 1st. First Ladybug and I will bake cookies before school to set aside in the freezer for gifts at Christmas. When she returns home from school she can sample a treat with hot cocoa and untie a surprise from the string of twenty-five surprises that I have gathered (cars, lip gloss, etc.). Each night after dinner we will read the Countdown to Christmas (My First Read and Learn) Board Book that has an activity to facilitate talk about the birth of Christ. At bedtime she can cross off a day on the calendar to see the progress of Advent.

Ladybug is going to be THRILLED with this, I just know it and I’m excited, too. :O)