This Year:

I've come here several times since my last entry, wanting to write a post and the words either don't flow or I don't have enough time.

The last time I wrote in here was nearly two years ago. We had just moved to our little farm and we were excited to begin our homesteading adventure. The first year went really well - we had a garden that produced well and lots of chickens. By then end of 2014 we had made the decision to greatly expand our landscaping business and so 2015 found us too busy to plant anything at all. We still have chickens (and eggs!) but the garden and just about every other homesteading activity took the backseat for much of 2015.

As I look ahead to the rest of 2016, I'm already thinking about goals I want to achieve. I want to be intentional about each of these and I've been considering what is important to focus on this year. In the past, I've chosen a word for the year - kind of like a theme or something for me to focus on. This year, for 2016, the word that keeps popping into my head is:  d i s c i p l i n e .

Discipline. It's such a harsh sounding word. I actually don't even like it. I don't like that it's *that* word that seems to be my word this year. I mean, who wants to work on discipline?

I've found that this past year was difficult because I lacked discipline; in routines, meal planning and grocery shopping, budgeting and spending, exercise, homeschooling the kids, and cleaning the house. Nearly every day was so free-flowing that I felt stressed by the disorganization and lack of routine and planning.

2015 felt chaotic because I have pretty much failed at being disciplined about all that stuff - all that really important stuff - for a long time.

So, this year I hope to be more disciplined overall but there is one main area I will focus on: finances. I want to take that very seriously this year. I would like to be disciplined with budgeting and will probably move to a cash-only/envelope system for things like groceries, clothes, homeschool supplies, etc. I'll write more soon about that (hopefully!!).