Thinking About New Year's Resolutions

Yep. already starting to think about these. I know my resolutions are pretty much the same every year. And in fact I make resolutions all year long at various points. But in the chaos of this pre-Christmas time, I'm looking forward to things calming down a bit. I think I just have three major focuses for January:

Cooking habits - getting into making my own bread, making soup weekly, making cheese with Seano.

Activity habits - We seem to be naturally moving into restricting computer time to 3 hours a day. That allows time for school work and some time for non-school work stuff. But the computer has really become a problem, especially for Josh. It's eating away motivation and time. So it has to be restricted. I've tried the gentler method of trying to woo my kids away from it with other fun stuff, but that is only hit or miss in results. Sooooo, we are going to get formal about this at least for the first 6 months of 2012. We'll see how that works. Josh acknowledges there's a problem so he alternatively thanks us/gets angry at us. When the kids don't have the computer to keep them busy, they'll need other things, so I'm hoping to encourage more reading, exploring hobbies and more exercise/outdoors.

Sleeping habits - I'm going to try to be consistent in getting everyone up at 8:00 a.m. I want to come up with an alternative to doing the breakfast thing. Sean and Becky are NOT hungry when they get up. They do not want to sit at the breakfast table. Added to this is that often we are interrupted by things going on with my aunt and her caretaker. Soooo, I'm thinking maybe the thing to do is to get them up and then have them all lie around my bed or bedroom while we pray and then I read aloud to them. Then everybody can go get dressed and come downstairs, eat breakfast, clear off the table and start on any academic endeavors for the day. Of course this is a bit different everyday. Monday and Wednesday are Latin days, so we have to leave at 10:00 (if they are coming with us, I've started to only make them come 1 day out of the two). Thursdays are Aquinas Days so they are different. Fridays are different too, because some Fridays, Josh has to go to Latin at 8:30. But we still could do this every morning, except Thursdays and those Fridays that Josh is here, if we get up at 8:00 consistently.