Praises In The New Year.

Our New Year started off with a bang... literally! Being the party poopers that we are (aka parents of a baby), we were in bed by 10:30 PM, blissfully unaware of all the celebrations taking place around us. But I can tell you exactly what we were doing at midnight - waking out of a dead sleep to the sounds of Chiang Mai exploding. Ok, so maybe not exploding, but there was a lot of noise and fireworks going on! After 15 minutes I was able to go back to sleep. My first praise of the New Year was Paul didn't wake up in the midst of all the noise!

Nat and I have a new accountability system going on and it has worked all week! Now that Paul is in his own room, we wanted to start a better morning routine... for ourselves. We've been up by 6:30 every morning which gives us time to get ready and spend quality, uninterrupted time in our devotions. My second blessing of the year! We joined in with our church's commitment to read the Bible through in a year, so now we have plenty of time to do so.

While Nat worked on a project throughout the New Year's Day, I decided to work on one too: our latest addition to our kitchen!

This might not seem like a big deal to most people, but I am thrilled to have some extra storage space AND counter space. Before we bought this hutch, my glasses and plates were at Paul-level and I was forever trying to keep him from breaking anything. Well last week he finally succeeded in breaking a glass (yikes) and so that kicked us into high gear to find something for the kitchen. So I happily spent New Year's Day organizing it, using the counter (double yay!), making some fun food like homemade pizza sauce and pizza and feeling like my kitchen is starting to come together. I feel very much at home in my kitchen now so that's my third praise of this new year.  :-)

Today's praises include chatting with a dear, dear friend for 2 hours, my hubby's back getting adjusted again, and more language learning. In the midst of everything, Paul has been playing quite happily which is always a blessing. 

I have several goals for this year... right now in the mental stages, but I should write them down. One of my goals is to be more purposeful in writing, sharing what the Lord is doing in our little corner of the globe and praising Him for it. So hopefully you will see more posts in the future. For now though, I need to do some more language study. After a 10-day break, we return to school tomorrow!