happy are we!

Our vacation put us a little behind and we are just today getting into the swing of the new year. When New Year's day passed I worried that we'd missed our opportunity to set new goals, but then I realized that is ridiculous...being a week late is no biggie!

The first thing we really wanted to do differently this year is to have a family theme/motto. I searched the scriptures and thought of several possibilities and then Lance and I picked together. So without further ado I introduce to you our scripture theme for the year:

Happy Are We!
"...and whoso trusteth in the Lord, happy is he." -Proverbs 16:20

It was actually quite hard to choose--we had two favorites--but we settled on this one because our overall goal this year is to be HAPPY! There are a lot of things outside of our control (adoption being the obvious one) and although it gets hard, emotional and stressful, we want to focus on trusting the Lord and his timing, and being happy no matter what! The First Presidency Message, "Living the Abundant Life" in this month's Ensign really helped us settle on our theme. If you haven't read this talk yet you really should! I was going to quote a few favorite lines, but I really just love the entire thing so go read it! You won't regret it! I love Thomas S. Monson! I'm so thankful to have a living prophet who is so inspired, and we're going to keep this talk to read over and over throughout the year to help us stay on track with our theme and goals.

Now, onto our goals. As we have in past years we decided once again to settle on three.

First, our spiritual goal. Family night EVERY week. Our goal is to not miss a single week. We struggled with this last year because of Lance's schedule but this year we aren't using any excuses, we are making it a priority! Another spiritual goal is to read Z the whole BOM. We're very good at reading scriptures with him, but we've always used the little kid picture readers. This year I want to read from the actual book. Hopefully we can build up to him repeating verses with us too.

Second, our financial goal. We want X amount of money in the bank (I don't feel comfortable writing how much). Basically we want to build our savings to have our adoption fee, plus a down payment on a house and still have an emergency fund. Our goal is to be in a house by the time Z is three, but we're going over our budget with a fine tooth comb to cut expenses and we're optimistic that we'll be able to make it by the end of the year....if we stick to our budget that is. Definitely a good goal to help us cut out splurges.

Third, our physical goal. Instead of focusing on weight or getting toned x amount we decided to make it our goal to each go to the gym at least 15 times/month. I really slacked at the end of the year and we need to make sure we're getting our money's worth with our gym membership...plus we're both way happier when we're working out.

We have a lot of big decisions we're working toward this year and our goal is to put trust in the Lord and be happy as he guides us! I'm so excited about the new year and the opportunity to start fresh. I'm hoping to gain some patience along the way because that is still something I feel that I seriously lack. So, cheers to 2012! Hopefully there are a lot of great things in store.