Welcome Julienne and the New Year!

After a few whirlwind months, I am getting back into some routine. I am also finally ready to blog about our latest little blessing: Julienne! She arrived just a few days after her due date. After a somewhat eventful labor, our beautiful girl entered the world. We are absolutely in love with her - especially her big brother. William loves to hold her and is the first to run to her if she starts to fuss. The love is mutual. No one can get the smiles out of her like he can. It is so fun to watch!

When Julienne was 18 days old I took her to have newborn photos taken by Angela at Angela Joy Photography. I love how they turned out! Here are a few of my faves:

Our family enjoyed a relaxing Christmas holiday and now I am energized and ready to tackle a long list of projects. The theme is purging. Purging clothes, unneeded decor, stuff that has been hanging around in the crawl space untouched and even food. Am I the only one who buys cereal expecting to never come close to the expiration date only to forget about it and realize that it is months past expiration?? It is sad, I know. My goal is to use up a significant chunk of our food stores, organize things more consistently, and do a better job of meal planning. I also would like to start keeping a list on the freezer of what is inside. I hope that way I'll have less freezer burn as well as avoid the panic of planning to make chicken and only having one piece left.

I love to organize, but I'm not always great about keeping things that way. I am the queen of taking on too much and then getting frustrated and letting it go down hill. A classic example: Last year when we started homeschooling, I spent several days in the summer planning out a schedule. I had schedules for each day of the week and included lessons, chores, outings, etc. I had lists for toy rotation and monthly projects. I even included a garden calendar I found online that had a schedule of outdoor chores. The whole nine yards. Well when you go from no schedule at all to having every hour of the day regulated, you're asking for failure.  Kudos to people out there who can, but it's not for me. It lasted about a week. I've learned to take baby steps and make my goals easy enough to accomplish. It if is too much work, I just don't keep up with it. Plus having little ones makes scheduling anything rather tricky. Julienne is a little miss bossy pants and tends to plan our days for us. It's a good thing she's cute :).