I loved our family new year traditions growing up- On New Years Eve we played games and ate treats - you know, the usual party stuff! We also lined up one of each of our shoes by the front door for the new years baby to fill with little gifts and treats during the night- (usually our dolls and Barbie's shoes too!) The New Year baby tradition of filling the shoes is a tradition passed down from my grandma's Swiss heritage! The thing I remember looking forward to a lot each year was when we sat around and talked about the year and reminisced a bit, then we each received a piece of paper where we made predictions for the year to come... which of my aunts would have a baby? who would buy a new car? who would vacation and where? what classes in school might get failed? any broken bones? how many books we might read etc....Some of the predictions were thought through and some of them were just for fun. But the thing that I learned by doing that is that it is good to reflect and remember life and it is good to look ahead in excitement and plan or set goals.
I am not a big goal setter, like some people! Well.... let me re-phrase that- I do like to set goals I am just not the best at actually accomplishing them! :) But good at it or not-this is a tradition that I love so I talked Glen into doing it with our own little family. It doesn't usually work to do this along with our New Years celebrations- so we do it for our first Family Home Evening of the New Year. Well, in reading my previous posts about the past year I went into this family Home Evening thinking that although things worked out in the end -I was going to have to embellish our year a little (or a lot!) because it had certainly been our worst year to date- hands down!! For our activity portion of FHE I got a poster board out- I actually cut it in half because- no way would there be enough items to list to fill it up and I didn't want it to be so obvious what a bad year we'd had! We began talking about the year and remembering and writing our list of Happenings in 2011 and the list just kept getting bigger and the memories flowed and we laughed and shared our favorite things about the year!
We ended up running out of room and didn't even fit everything on our list! My heart swelled but at the same time I felt a pit of guilt in my stomach because of my attitude- I learned that 2011 was actually one of our best years!! I know my previous posts certainly don't paint that picture but it is true! In between the hard times we did a lot of really great things! We made some great memories and had some very special things happen! We all grew a lot through change! We ended the activity by naming a few of the the items on our list that happened that were not so good- there was a broken arm, a trip to the ER for Gabe, Glen's grandma's passed away... just a few things to mention there-but all the other things we realized were great things that happened in 2011!
We all took some time to set some personal goals and then we set some goals as a family that we posted up where we would see them everyday-to remind us throughout the year of what we are working on together!
In trying to protect my kids from knowing "the truth" about our year I learned a few things as we took the time and really thought about the year and focused on all the fun times we had and the neat things we did! Number One is the importance of recording it- I really feel like if I would have been better about recording our life I would have been more aware of all the great things day to day - just another way to be reminded of blessings is to write about them and look at them! and Number Two is that our Year 2011 seemed like it would go down in history for being our worst year but in reality it was one of the Best ever- it's all about perspective and attitude!
Check back for a little look at our 2011 fun!
O, and Happy New Year!
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