April Update on New Years Goals

Can you believe that four months of 2009 have come and gone? This year is flying by. Why is it that time seemed to creep by when I was a kid, and now that I'm an adult, the time just zooms along?

I'm still trying to keep up with my New Year's Goals. I'll be honest. This is the first time EVER in my life that I still remember what my goals were by this point in the year. I've set goals for myself on New Year's before, like most people do. And usually by now I've forgotten them....like most people do!

1. I read all of Deuteronomy and I'm now several chapters into Joshua. I've been reading using mostly my own Bible, but for some of Deuteronomy I used Buddy's study Bible. In reading some of the notes on this book, I learned a very interesting fact. This book is basically Moses reviewing the journey of the Israelites from Egypt and their wanderings in the desert, a recap of the 10 commandments and all of the laws the Lord gave the people. Here's what I learned...the journey from Egypt to the Promised Land was a distance that could have been covered in about 11 days! But because they disobeyed God, they spent 40 YEARS wandering around in the desert. Makes me wonder...what do we miss out on because we don't obey God the first time he asks us to do something?

2. The month of April has given me quite the challenge on the wife/mother front. If you know me personally, you probably already know what we've dealt with. I don't really want to get into all that right now, but just know that I've definitely grown in my walk with God and I am learning to completely trust Him!

On another note, the FPU classes continue to go well. We completed our first month of the Dave-Budget, and using the Envelopes to pay CASH for everything. We did use our debit card a few times, but pretty much everything else came out of one of the many cash envelopes. Some envelopes even had some money left over, which will carry over into May. I guess my best deal of the month came from buying Buddy a pair of jeans, and 7 shirts for Quinn for $16 altogether!

We continue to work on becoming debt free. We've paid off all total this year about $7500, with most of this coming from tax refund money earlier in the year.

3. Weight-loss continues to be a regular roller coaster for me. I get encouraged when I weigh at home and see a loss. Then I get to school for our Biggest Loser weigh-in and see that for the past 3 weeks I've maintained....ugh. Officially I have to go with the school's scales for the contest. I'm #7 overall, out of about 18 teachers, so I'm still doing better than most. According to my scales I am down about 6 pounds. We have the rest of the month of May for our contest. I could still pull this off. I've done several laps around the block, pushing a toddler in a stroller, so we will see what happens.

4. I am buried beneath a mound of papers. It is so hard to keep up right now, as we are in what we call the EOG Blitz...the 3 weeks before the End Of Grade testing. This is the test students take at the end of the school year, testing them on all the objectives for the year. Any spare time I've had is spent going over material. My spare planning time has been spent finding work for my new student, who is from another country and has NO ENGLISH skills. No one at our school speaks her dialect (which is not Spanish, by the way), so I've been looking at lots of Pre-k and Kindergarten websites, looking for any and all activities that can help me teach this child. On top of which, there are only 28 days left, so this goal may fall by the wayside until August.

How have you improved yourself this month?