It almost gets old, hearing about New Year’s resolutions - but this year in our house, it’s different! With a 4.5 year old, 3 year old, and 16.5 month old - PLUS a baby due in April, well, we need to get our act together a little better.

I started my own ‘changes’ today, trying to get into more of a routine. Somehow, that had fallen by the wayside lately - especially with a rough bout of morning sickness early on in the pregnancy.

We backslid, or in the better terms moms at our church have told me - we’ve been in ’survival mode’ - doing whatever it takes to get through the days.

Well, I’m tired of simply making it through, and I’ve really been able to see the difference in my children. (Not for the good)

So, this morning we started introducing our new routine, which will get thrown of by drs. visits and other plans this week - not to mention New Year’s Day with Daddy home. But hey, life is ever changing, and while we don’t really plan ahead or stick to tight schedules, we do stick to some things.

Here’s a look at our morning today, which went better than recent weeks. The youngest two were awake first, and played well together for 15 minutes while I checked emails and took care of some online business.

Next was breakfast - which ended up taking 20 or 25 minutes all together. Oldest son woke up during this time, and everyone loves to share their thoughts at the table, so it can drag out a meal quite a bit.

With cereal in their tummies, they quickly ran off to play while I washed up dishes, loaded the dishwasher, and wiped down the counters. This is one of my new resolutions - to try and clean up our dishes after each meal! We sometimes simply don’t have time to do this, hurrying on to something else.

During this 30 minute period, I played the instrumental music for the new Sonbeams Bible Verses music (we picked up a tape of 4 new songs yesterday - only 1 left to do!!). I admit, I’m hooked on these songs, already picking out my favorites and playing them over and over. Anyway, some of these are peppy, so that helped get the dirty work done while filling their ears with Scripture at the same time!

This put us around 9:15 - 9:30. Recently, I had allowed them to start watching Elmo at 9:40, which got to allowing them a few extra minutes of Sesame Street starting at 9:30. DH mentioned he wasn’t wild about them watching 3 30 minute shows - but he understood how tired I was getting and needing a little break.

I agreed with him, and despite the encouragment of the other moms Sunday telling me not to feel bad, I still did. Today, I’m proud to say we made it without Elmo! Instead of watching that, we began another new routine - reading a One Year Devotional book for children and then discussing that Bible passage.

That didn’t take long, so we pulled out the next chapter of “Little House in the Big Woods”. My children LOVE watching the Little House DVD’s my parents bought us, and my oldest son making up stories the other night prompted us to say that Laura was a writer. I then remembered having the book series in the garage, so went and pulled it out. I could hardly believe they sat as still as they did through that first chapter!

A little more play time followed, then they watched Word World. This show has taught letters, sounds, and words in such a fun way to our children. There’s only been a few episodes we’ve turned off - overall they LOVE it!

Well, that’s our morning in a nutshell. We’ll continue adding more routine to our day over the next week or two. We’ve gotten slack on our Responsibility Charts the past few weeks with the b’days and Christmas things going on.

This will be one thing that we’ll pick up full force next week. I found they worked best when we sat down together, and talked about what each one of them could do to help me, to please the Lord, or something they needed to work on. When it was things they helped write down, they were more interested and excited about doing them than when I simply wrote down 5 things.

The key is picking out things they need to do or need to work on, but are able to accomplish easily - without getting too frustrated. Something about knowing they did a job well, being praised and acknowledging how that made the Lord happy (plus getting to choose a sticker!) - inspired more positive behavior.

I did take a little extra time with oldest son while the younger two napped. He’s been so excited about learning, so after a quick game of Charades for Kids (Christmas gift find at the Thrift Store), we pulled out a new dry erase addition/ subtraction book he got for Christmas.

He worked on this while I took a shower. He got all of the addition problems right (there were dots to count beside the numbers - but hey, he’s 4!). Subtraction was something we haven’t worked on, so that frustrated him and didn’t finish those.

He is so like me - loving writing, reading, English, math! The past month has been filled with hearing him count to 100. We have no idea where or how that started, but he simply loves to count! He even counted all of his green peas on his plate the other night - all 75 of them, then ate them one by one.

In close, I’d like to remind you that you don’t always have to have books to go by to learn. Today, we were cleaning up some Mega Blocks (Craigslist find, plus some freebies a patient gave my hubby). In order to get them all in the boxes, they have to be connected together.

DH says my intentions are too high - teaching them to learn to put them together before packing them up. BUT - we had loads of fun today finding matching pieces (taking a lot of time too!)

DD just turned three, and would get so excited about finding the 1 blocks (one dot each), or the 4 block pieces. Then she learned to look closely and see that some were thick and others were thin.

We weren’t just cleaning blocks, we were sorting/ matching/ counting! They had to visually recognize pairs - what went together and what didn’t. It was a great learning opportunity.

This is what Sonbeams is all about - finding the little things to use for lessons without having to buy ’stuff’!

What New Year’s Resolutions might any of you have?? Don’t be shy!