Theme for the Year

[Elaine: boy's bedroom pictures are up in The Brother's Room, check on the What's Posted section. I won't do my daughter's pictures yet because I'm not finished with her room]

My theme for last year was basically something that I wanted to work on making a part of my life. I think I am going to try and continue it this year because it is really a thought that I have to say a lot because it isn’t really the cultural norm.

“I choose to live Small in a Big, Big World.”

By this I mean that I will focus on my neighbourhood, I will focus on my home, and on my church. I will try to grow relationships here. I will try to serve my neighbours, my family and my church with my time, money and efforts.

By this I mean that I will focus on living with less. I don’t often shop in Thrift Stores. I go maybe once every two months. But when I go, I go like as if I was going to a store. I go with a list and I get what is on that list with very little else. I rarely shop, other than grocery shopping. And even that I’ve taken to delegating to my husband with a very specific list of sizes and sometimes even brands.

By living with less, it means that I will do everything I can to make the things I have enough. So, for example, for Christmas we received several new board games. I told the Children, we must not use another spot to store games. We then purged several games we decided we didn’t like or we had duplicates in our new games. For example, DD got a Disney Sorry game so we purged our regular Sorry game.

This also means we will eat less. I’ve heard that we eat too much. We are certainly not lacking here. So, we try to make simple meals and we rarely eat in between meals.

We have less clothes. We really do. I have 4 pairs of pants, a short black skirt, a long black skirt, 1 other long skirt and 3 shorter skirts of different colours. I have about 7 long sleeve shirts and 3 sweaters. Then the needed under clothes. I have 2 pairs of night clothes as well. That is it. My children also have few clothes. This makes laundry easier to actually do, and it is easy to manage. When something is wrecked, I actually do mend it because we miss it.

This does not mean that I don’t buy things. But I try very, very hard to not buy things that I did not intend to buy when I left home.

Like I said, its such a work in progress. I’ve been working on this for a long time and I’ve a long way to go.