The first blog of the new decade...

...and let me tell ya, it's an exciting one.

It's Friday night and my plans this evening consisted of (I don't know if ya'll will be able to handle the excitement):

-bathing a certain 1 year old, blue-eyed beauty and getting her snuggled into her warm bed

- washing my hair

- shaving my legs

-taking the horribly chipped polish off my toes (that's gone neglected for at least the past 10 weeks)

- eating 3 Reeses Piecies cookies (YUM! They were worth every calorie and I didn't even think about how many minutes I'd have to log on the elliptical at the gym until the last one....dang it..).

I took a break from all that excitement, though, to post on my blog. Afterall, it was last decade when I last posted....

Here's AB last Sunday after church:

Doesn't that just look like a New Year's party dress? (Or in her case, a New Year's church dress!) You can see our tree was still up, but was stripped of it's lights and ornaments. We hauled it off that afternoon and so our house no longer looks like this

and it makes me sad. It always takes me a few weeks to adjust to the bare feeling after all the Christmas is packed away.

When packing up Christmas, I got the wild hair to clean out all of the cabinets, drawers, and closets around our house. A week later and I'm still not finished! I've made lots of good progress, but still a lot left to do. One of my resolutions this year is to keep our house more organized and to get rid of those "pigpen" spaces around here...do ya'll have those? In many ways they are my comfort...they are "my" places where I can just throw my things around and leave things on the floor and be as messy as I want! It's the rebellious streak in me, I guess because, the weird thing is, when the rest of our house gets out of order it makes me crazy...but not those special places of mine....those places are my car, my closet (and the office that's right next to it), the mail basket, and two drawers on the bar by our kitchen table.

It's been a slow process getting everything in order, and I've still got a lot left, but things move a little slower when you have a "helper" who's 13 months old.

Annabelle loves crawling in small spaces and she loved "helping" Momma pull everything out.

I guess all my other New Years Resolutions are the basic standard ones... you know the ones we all say we want to do year after year....

- be a better wife & mother (I've already got 10 points for both of those just this evening, since I did bathe my baby (good mother, check.), & shave my legs (good wife, check.) I know, I know, poor DW....When did shaving your legs make you a candidate for a good wife?!?!?

- loose weight (minus 30 points since I had THREE of those dern cookies!) One step forward and three steps back....my "journey to weight loss" story.....

- be a better Christian. My main focus here this year, is to love others. I have such a hard time loving everybody. Some more than others. But Jesus loves us all and He didn't suggest that we love each other, He COMMANDED us to love others...even the unlovely others.

John 13:34-35 (New International Version)
"A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another."

I pray this year that Jesus will give me a heart like that...a heart that loves others, that shows mercy and grace to others...not to just the people I WANT to show mercy and grace to. I know that's a lot for me to want to bite off, but I feel so convicted with this area in my life and with His help, I hope to change it!

I'll tell you what else I'm hoping to do in 2010 (besides make sleep a priority), and that's have a few more Friday nights like these!

Hope your first week of 2010 was wonderful!

~amw~