How's It Going?

First of all, I am SO HAPPY with our family's new schedule, I really feel like there is now time for everything and that I am not trying to squeeze things in anymore.  Laundry is going so much more smoothly, and I am NOT doing it 7 days a week anymore, which is probably my favorite thing.  The entire house seems to be staying cleaner, things that have kind of been raking on me, like dirty bathrooms, for instance, are now being cleaned MUCH more regularly.

The kids are learning the expectations I have set for them, and accomplishing them, which gives them more freedom, when they thought it would mean more restriction.  While I have always been more of a fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants kinda girl when it came to "schedules", I am finding that we were all missing out.  When the kids were each babies, I immediately had them on sleep-feed-wake time schedules and they thrived, so I'm not sure why I thought this would be different.  It is true, kids CRAVE structure.

I am feeling good about all my goals, I seemed to have taken a week off in the area of exercise when the kids started school, which I paid for, but I'm back in the groove of things now.  My weight loss is right on target, this past Thursday was 2 months since I started this journey, and I'm down 15.6 pounds, my goal was 7 per month! 

Our dinner menus are still working great, even with school starting, and I am starting to experiment with the kids lunches, to keep them eating well, even at school.  Grace and Ethan REALLY enjoy eating at school, I'm not keen on the variety of healthy foods OR the price for school lunches now-YIKES!  To keep it interesting, I'm trying really hard to include foods they love and a wider variety, I hope to post more on this soon.

With Faith and I here alone together, she is learning to play on her own more, and I am taking time to craft (a post coming soon!).  I'm working really hard to not entertain her constantly or let her watch a bunch of cartoons, she is so fun to listen to while she is playing babies.  I told her the other day that someday she will be a really good mommy, to which she replied, "Mommy, I AM a mommy!".  My bad!  She is so cute.

The three younger kids have started AWANA, Faith asks just about everyday if today is the day.  And they are all doing so well with their verses.  Ethan has been working on them every night before bed.  I told him, there is nothing better than going to sleep with scripture on your mind!

Grace is loving her new youth group, and I feel very blessed by that.  Each of the kids are really enjoying attending Covenant Baptist.  It's still a little surreal to me, since I grew up in that church, but it's already becoming home for our family.

Faith and I went to the first MOPS meeting of the year last week, it is going to be a really great year, we are all so excited.  It's a fantastic group of ladies!

I'm one of the small group leaders again this year, we had so much fun doing some videos for the first meeting, HERE is the other one we did!