Year 3, January 3-4, 2018: New Routines

Time to get back to normal with gymantics and Bible Bowl practice and church.  Whoops, not church!  This weekend, the big changes happen at Indian Creek!  No more Saturday night services, but one Sunday afternoon service added at 4:30pm.  Middle schoolers will have two identical worship services on Sunday morning and then small groups on Sunday evening.  High schoolers will continue with their worship service and teaching time at Crave.  A new element for all of the tech team is live streaming the sermon on Sunday morning down to Shelby St.  The equipment hasn't arrived yet, so they are prerecording sermons for a couple of weeks.  They were just using a recorded sermon from Saturday night, but they obviously can't do that anymore.  When they do go live, they have plans in place for Shelby St. to sing one more song than Franklin Rd will so that the sermon will be on a 5 minute delay.  Normally live feeds are a bit delayed, like 30 seconds or so, depending on Internet servers.  And if the live feed doesn't work on a given Sunday, they will have other prerecorded material to share instead.  It's a huge undertaking and engineering project and I commend the tech team for even trying it.  So for us, the J6 and the J2 will have all of our church programming on Sundays. Jared and I will attend 11 am worship, and one of us will volunteer each week in the nursery for the 4:30.  Gary and Leah will probably will be there all Sunday morning and before, during and after the 4:30, as well as having their Sunday night small group about twice a month after that service.  Benaiah plans to work tech on Sunday morning for the middle schoolers or big church and then do tech for Crave, and their rehearsal starts about 4pm.  The Crave is normal from 6-7:30.  And then kids' choir will start up again.  Phew!!!  We, Johnsons, are going to be wiped out by Monday!  One and done I guess!  And the church has also reconfigured parts of their check in process for the kids, too, which directly affects us.  Again, phew!  I'm exhausted just typing all of that!  And we still have to squeeze in Sunday dinner!  Crazy!  But now our Saturdays are completely open (except for Bible Bowl Saturdays) and Gary can get the proper rest he needs (when he doesn't travel) on Friday and Saturday, as well as the rest of the staff.  I can now say I'm a big fan of the plan.  Sometimes it takes me awhile to get there.

Speaking of attitudes, I kind of stumbled upon a goal for this year.  I don't do New Year's resolutions.  I plan on doing another Whole 30 soon, but I wasn't going to do it on New Year's Day or this week because I needed to other routines back on track first and got shopping for specific ingredients.  And I haven't been one to dream much lately, because I have had my hopes smashed too many times in the last few years.  But, I've watched many speakers and bloggers go with focusing on just one to three words for a whole entire year.  Things you would find in a hashtag like #peace #intentional #grace etc.  Because of my negative attitude towards a lot of things, I have unemotionally chosen #grateful as my word of the year.  Nothing too complicated.  I know what it is.  I have counted the 1,000 blessings in years' past that author Ann Voskamp started (I did it through Facebook one year).  I know thankfulness breeds thankfulness, but I'm not putting a huge expectation on myself that I will be completely healed of my whiny, critical attitude by years' end.  I'm just dipping my toes in and seeing where it goes.  So, I'm using the hashtag #grateful2018 in several posts on Instagram every day, so I can get up to 1,000 by year's end.  Pretty simple.  And I'm allowing myself grace not to feel grateful sometimes where some might automatically feel grateful.  I'm still healing.  This is only one step.  But I guess I can try.  Other than that, I don't have goals for my business or the blog or the family or the house for the year.  I make goals as they come up, and usually they are monthly goals.  No need to have everything planned out on January 1st.  No need to overplan because we don't even know what's really going to happen tomorrow.  And like I said, I'm not much of a dreamer right now.  I'm still just surviving, and maybe, just maybe climbing out of the pit this year.  We will see.  One step at a time.

Wednesday was full with gymnastics, McD's run for coffee on the way home so I wouldn't fall asleep, then the gas light came on. Then I had to drop a check off at the bank, which was a couple of blocks north of the intersection we would turn south to go home on.  Meanwhile, a train stopped right before the crossing we needed to cross to get to the bank.  Benaiah had gone with Jared to work just for something to do, and I kept telling him that it would be later and later before I could pick him up because of all these little errands.  But we made it home in one piece.  It was slightly warmer today in the teens/lower 20's, but still bundling up weather.  Our street doesn't get plowed often, but it's ok to drive on the compacted snow, just take it slowly and don't fully stop at stop signs if no one is around.  Stopping and starting on roads like that are when people tend to fishtail.  It started to lightly snow again at supper time so Jared came home to pick up the boys to take them to Bible Bowl.  I went over a little bit of school work with the middles this afternoon during naptime and worked on my business a little bit.  Then I had to lay down this evening because my back and joints are a wreck.  Between the weather and a holiday diet, my body is protesting and in pain.  I'm really tired, too.  Time to lay low for a few days and putter where I can.

The kids need the quiet too.  But, it's usually not that quiet around here.  In fact, Nora remarked to Shauna yesterday about how quiet it is at their house without house.  Nora doesn't mind the quiet and often went to her room to get out of the noise, but yes, we bring a lot of noise with us wherever we go.  One of the first things Abishai did when we got home was ride his trike through the house and push his bus around, too.  Then there's Benaiah's CS game and rubix cube click clacking.  The middles are quiet except when they are fighting, or wrestling the dog or their big brother, or chasing the little brother.  So I guess they aren't that quiet.  We are noisy because we are a large family with 3 boys.  That's all.

This blog post will seem really short because I didn't take many pictures in the last few days!  Yeah for having a break!

Just like in Canada, we can run outdoors on the wicked cold sidewalk in our bare feet so we can throw something away in the trash.

Good grief, kid, it's like 5 degrees out there!  You be crazy!

Look, Mom, I got fire hat and fire truck!

Train engines make yummy breakfasts!  He ended up just eating a little bit of it because it's hard as a rock!

This is a neat Melissa & Doug to go toy! You put a little bit of water in the wand/paintbrush and then "color" on the page and the colors start showing up!  No, it doesn't teach them to stay in the lines or to use their imagination on what colors to use, but, it's not messy and it keeps them busy!  The wand does leak though, so we do have to empty it every time.  Oh, and the pages dry within 30 minutes or so and are resuable.  They are made of heavy paperboard.

Wow! Keturah took note of Nora's room and finished cleaning up her room!  I helped her, finally, on one last box she had to go through.  And she's been working on her organizing her Legos.  I think keeping an area clean comes with age and maturity, and practice, lots of practice.

Back to routine!  Cars on the gymnastics floor.  He insisted on taking his socks off, too, but kept his feet near or on the floor.  It wasn't too chilly in there though.  It's much colder in our sunroom!

Cartwheel after a little run and step!

Doing arm raises for "conditioning."  "Conditioning" is the gymnastics term for strength training and cardio.

Trying to balance on bar like they will do when they reach for the high bar.

Yeah!  Kips! Which are basically going all the way around the bar in one motion!

Up and over!

And ideally when you finish, you are still up on the bar with your arms straight and the bar at your hips.  It's something I never could do.

I saw this on another post and decided to give it a try since I didn't do any New Year's resolutions or goals.  It also goes hand in hand with the #grateful challenge of 1,000 blessings and the "word of the year" concepts.  So, I post on Instagram once a day based on these prompts.

Theme verse for the year maybe?  Not 100% sure but it's a good one!

1,000 blessings and/or grateful posts.  #grateful2018  This is written by our worship director, Laura Dingman, and I'm a street promoter for it.  It's a really tough, deep study though and I'm taking it very slow.

Someone has not one but TWO albums coming out in Februray!  Get physched!  I was until I checked Amazon and my order didn't go in right for Surrounded so I'm not getting the autographed copy of that one.  But I did get the autographed copy of A Million Lights.  Really, how many autographs can you have?  Plus, I know it's probably printed on there.  Surely he's not going to sign 1,000 of them is he?  Maybe.  Some might.  We'll see in February when it comes!

Late supper with Daddy since he was at Bible Bowl practice with the boys.  Lots of good conversation between these two.

Oh, this picture!  It cracks me up!  I felt like I was the judge and jury listening to a "he said" "she said" court case!  They were both found guilty!  But just think, you are typing away at your desk and up pop these two, one in each window! I'm not Lucy in Peanuts where you come seek me out for advice through a window.  Totally hilarious!

Didn't I say it's cold?! The furnace can barely keep up!  I'm going to have to buy some bigger space heaters!  And yes, we could winterize the house better, too, but we ran out of money to fix the house.  It'll be back up in the 30's this weekend.  But brrr!!!!!!

I decided to procrastinate on other projects and dig into this one.  Well, it started with looking at the games and puzzles shelves to see if I could get the new Clue game to fit.  And I was in the mood to take a serious look at the games we own and get rid of a few.  Which led into looking at puzzles and finally matching up the pieces of games and puzzles I found while going through things in Charlottetown with their respective games and puzzles.  Well, how did I know we have not one but THREE Spider-Man puzzles?  And Spider-Man isn't even our favorite superhero! And they were all different sizes.  I did find some matches though.  But now I need to do every single under 100 piece puzzle because some pieces are still missing.  Oh well, I love doing puzzles!

Hm,...which one should be get rid of?  The one made in England in 1958 that is in excellent condition or the one made in the USA in 2009?  Same game, same instructions.  The older version has extra tiles that we can write on to make up for missing pieces.  The newer version is also missing pieces.  Hm,...thankfully, we didn't spend money on either one.  And yes, I know there are all kinds of crafts we can do with puzzles and games with missing pieces.  You can use the tiles to teach reading! We also have Scrabble Apple, regular Scrabble, and Scrabble Flash.  It runs in the family!

Gorgeous ice crystals on the front door and the sunrise in the background!

Miscellaneous screen capture I took while watching a video.  The person who took our picture in front of the big Christmas tree, cut off the "star" at the top.  Notice the actual design of that star!  Yes, when in New Orleans, you cover anything and everything with that symbol called the fleur-de-lis which is French for lily.  It's actually on other states' and countries' flags and such, and of course symbolizes the French monarchy.  We even have a Lilla Rose flexi clip with that symbol on it!

We are going to hopefullly see this ice tree in the next couple of weeks!  It's already 40 feet high!  Apparently, a family has been created it most years since the 1950's!  They start with a frame and then keep continuously spraying water on it and adding color and more framework as it goes.  It's just on private property about 10 minutes away.  I'm waiting until it's warmer to take the kids.  They say it will last until April, even if the temps are a bit above freezing!  Incredible!  And there's no charge to go see it and they don't except money.  It's truly a labor of love and wanting to share that love with others.  So cool! Literally!