This last year had its share of ups and downs, but it was overall a good year. I thought I'd post a short…okay, not-so-short month-by-month review of 2008 at the Five J's.
January 2008: Jerah and Joely cut their hair and donated it to Locks of Love. They've kept their hair fairly short ever since, so they can actually comb through their hair without tears! Amen!
February 2008: I started reading a couple great blogs, The Happy Housewife and A Simple Walk, an act that would literally change my life. Those two wonderful ladies have since become dear friends to me, and I am so looking forward to February 2009 when I get to meet them in person at BlissDom.
March 2008: Jerah turned 9 and I turned 33 (yes, I'll admit it). That's almost a third of a century. That's almost old. And I'm starting to feel it too! But on the bright side, I'm still closer to 30 than 40. That's more than I can say for my wonderful husband. I also purchased my wonderful 70-year-old Baldwin piano for next to nothing from an acquaintance. The Baldwin replaced the 10-year-old Weber that I had taught on for the last decade.
April 2008: My husband dropped a glass syrup bottle and cracked the top of our smoothtop stove. But we figured out how to replace it ourselves and even instituted preventative measures so it won't get broken again. It was also during April that my family became hopelessly addicted to Lost.
May 2008: Toni, Kate, and I joined forces for our 3 Moms, 3 Kitchens, 31 Days Challenge. And through the challenge, I discovered that I actually like cooking! I'm not necessarily very good at it, but I like it.
June 2008: On June 1st, Toni, Kate, and I launched Happy to be at Home. And only a couple weeks later, my mom underwent triple heart bypass surgery, just 7 months after my dad underwent the same procedure in the same hospital (athough my dad had to have twice as many bypasses — a whopping six!) I flew up to Missouri to be with my mom during her surgery, leaving Jeff home alone with the kids for nearly a week. Of course the surgery happened a week before our church's VBS, of which I was the director. Talk about stress!
July 2008: I tried to take July pretty easy after my highly-stressful June. I spent a lot of the month finalizing our curriculum for school starting in late-August.
August 2008: I flew to Oregon for my nephew's wedding, again leaving Jeff home alone with the kids for nearly a week. Jaden turned 11, Joely turned 6 (and started her own blog), and then we started school during the last half of of the month.
September 2008: We started changing our diet as a family, switching to more of a Mediterranean/Asian diet. We haven't stuck with it too strictly, but we are much more aware of what we're eating now.
October 2008: I was completely amazed at the progress Jaden made in his drawing lessons. His before/after self-portrait astounded me. School work continued as normal, with a little more tweaking here and there of our daily schedule. By October, we had pared down our curriculum to mostly just the basic, focusing on mastery over quantity.
November 2008: We joined Netflix, and we haven't looked back since. We regularly watch movies together as a family now, and we're really enjoying introducing our kids to great movies from our childhood, like Back to the Future.
December 2008: Started working on a major overhaul of our Happy to be at Home site which forced me to learn a lot about working with the code in css and php files…and I discovered that I kind of enjoy it, too. Well, I am a geek so that's not really surprising. My parents and sister and brother-in-law visited for Christmas, staying for a week, and then my husband's mother, sister, and brother-in-law arrived on New Year's Eve to stay for 6 days. My house has been so full of family, not something we have very often. It's been a very nice change.
And now it's 1:22 a.m. on New Year's Day, and I'm writing my first real post in 2 weeks (I know you're amazed, aren't you, Toni?). Happy to be at Home has just been relaunched with its redesign, and I'm about to head to bed…exhausted.
But it's been a good year, and I'm looking forward to 2009. I hope to post my goals for 2009 sometime tomorrow…er…today. Goals are good. I'm not much of a goal setter, but I know I should be.
And now I'm rambling. My tiredness is really showing…
Hope you enjoyed my 2008 fivejs review.
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