Prayer Signs and Goals

Random picture of week - Addison in glasses. So my mom put her glasses on Addison. She absolutely loved it. When she had the glasses on, Addison would reach toward someone, and when you got her close enough, she'd tap them until they would look at their, then she would just start cracking up. Then she'd reach for someone else. It was like she wanted everyone to look at her! It was so funny!

So one of our family resolutions this year is to pray more on our knees with Addison. Bart & I always say family prayers when we wake up and when we go to bed, but usually Addison is either still sleeping or hasn't woken up yet. I will say night time prayers with her, but I haven't been very good about saying morning prayers with her. So we decided that we wanted to pray more with Addison so that she could learn how to.

I was actually very surprised. The first time we really did it this year, we helped her kneel down, and showed her how to fold her arms. Ever since then, when I say, "Addison, prayer time." She smiles at me and folds her arms. Of coarse after that she proceeds to crawl around and play while we pray, but at least she is getting the folding the arms part down.

I actually think she might think folding her arms is the sign for "prayer time." She's getting really good at signs now. I think she actually knows what half of them mean too. When I ask her, "Addison, do you want a bottle?" she'll do the sign for milk and then start walking toward the fridge because she knows that's where I get the milk for her bottle. It's so neat to really be communicating with her! I love it.

As you can see, I posted some family new year's resolutions this year. I read somewhere that if you tell people what your resolutions, you are more likely to keep them. So I decided to post our family resolutions.

Bart read somewhere that it's better to have a few resolutions that you can easily achieve than a whole bunch of ones that you're really going to have to work for. I'm not sure how I feel about this. I understand the whole psychological thing....make your goals easy to achieve, then when you achieve them, you'll feel good about yourself and be more motivated and all that.

However, I am the type of person that wants to make a million goals because I want to be perfect. :o) Unfortunately I do usually do fall into the pit of depression when I don't reach them. Last year I changed my attitude a little bit though. In stead of getting depressed when I didn't reach my goals, I think, "But look at how much better I did than I would have if I didn't set that goal."

So I think I will continue to make my million personal goals. Although instead of making huge goals at the beginning of the year, I think I'm going to take them one month at a time. At the beginning of each month I will assess how I did with last month's goals and make a new goal list for the new month. Hopefully this will keep that million goal list from being too overwhelming.