2019 Family Motto

Last year, I had a 'family motto' for the year. I really enjoyed having that as a kind of overriding thought for the year and want to do that again this year.

My 2018 family motto was A clean home is a happy home. I really spent the year trying to focus on keeping the house more picked up. By nature, I am a good-intentioned slob. I'm scatter-brained and a bit lazy, so while I don't WANT to be messy, I can't seem to ever truly get my act together. Some things were successful: I made our bed more in 2018 than probably the entire sum of my life before this year! Some things were not: enforcing making the kids help.

Enter this year's family motto:

I told the kids a few weeks ago that I was tired of being the only one who picked up and the only one who cared about how the house looked. While I most definitely picked up A LOT more in 2018 and our house looked, on average, MUCH better...there were still lots of days it got away from me. We decided that we're going to sit down and come up with our guidelines - some of which are the same as our 2018 motto {#1-3} but didn't actually happen all that consistently:

1) When we get home from school, rooms, bathroom, and playroom are picked up - adding to this that they will also unpack their lunchboxes/put away anything they have brought home from school {largely Drew}.
2) Before dinner/while I'm cooking, they will pick up anything of theirs that is in the kitchen/living room.
3) After dinner, they will help me clean the kitchen - someone can vacuum the kitchen, someone can load the dishwasher, etc.
4) They are responsible for folding and putting away their laundry - and honestly I don't care if it's folded - I'm just tired of folding SO MUCH LAUNDRY.
5) Together, we are going to come up with a list of chores for every day - for example, taking out the trash or vacuuming their rooms - a small 5 or 10 minute activity - that will take something off my plate.

I basically told them if we all pitch in 10 minutes, it saves me 30 minutes at the end of the night, ha.

I'm also toying with the idea of doing some purging - maybe a room/month {not that it should hopefully take me a month ha} - our closet and office could definitely use some cleaning out {I'm looking at you bag of cords that have been in a corner of the office SINCE WE MOVED IN} and we have several junk drawers in the kitchen. In a lot of ways I don't hang on to stupid stuff, except the stuff the kids bring home from school or ALL the drawings Drew makes these days, but I have a lot of piles of 'I don't know what to do with this stuff so I'll just stick it in a drawer'. Eventually that stuff is needed or it isn't, ha.

So there you have it - my continued quest for cleanliness and organization in our home. I think 2018 was a good start, but I'm really excited to take it further this year and hope detailing it out and putting more thought into the steps will help!

I also have some small goals for 2019, so I'll do a post soon about how my 2018 goals went and also what's on the agenda for 2019 - I'm sure you're so excited!

December 2018 Reads

I've been sharing my monthly book reviews since April of 2015, and it's one of my favorite posts to write and also the one that consistently gets the most comments. I love sharing my thoughts on books and also getting recommendations!

2018 was a year FULL of reading - thanks to the POPSUGAR challenge, I read the most books I've ever read in a year - 106! Holy smokes! That number is insane to me. I don't anticipate that happening EVER again, but it certainly is something I'm proud of. #nerdalert

Now out of the 7 books I read in December, 6 were largely fluff, but it's always fun to occasionally give yourself some pure lightheartedness, ha. But I've already seen some reviews from other bloggers {I'm looking at you Emily and Natasha} of some books I'm excited to read that have more substance! And will hopefully fulfill some 2019 POPSUGAR prompts because Allison and I are going at it again - not as a contest this time but just to finish it. 

Enough blabbing already! Here are my December reads... 

I read 3 more books by Kasie West - they were all cute but P.S. I Like You still ranks as my favorite. So if you like YA, you'll like any of these, but I don't feel the need to put individual plots and thoughts here - they're YA, they're cute and fluff, I liked.

Hello Stranger and Shelter in Place - I read a Lisa Kleypas and a Nora Roberts this month - kind of like Kasie West, no real reason to individually review - if you like romance, you'll like these. Although Shelter in Place starts out with a mall shooting and there were several scenes that made me tear up because that is NOT light-hearted material.

The Kiss Quotient by Helen Hoang - Stella Lane is a brilliant economist who has trouble with men which she blames on her autism spectrum disorder. She hires an escort to help learn how to interact with men, and shocker, she falls in love with him. This book was cute, a little predictable, a lot R-rated, but also an interesting look at what was formerly called Asperger's. The most interesting part of the whole book was the author's note at the end where the author, Helen, talks about her own self-discovery of her high-functioning autism and receiving a diagnosis in her 30s. Very interesting!

Time's Convert by Deborah Harkness - This is a continuation/companion novel for the All Soul's Trilogy and it was really good. I really loved the All Soul's Trilogy and consider it to be witches and vampires for the non-YA set, ha. The series as a whole is really enjoyable, extremely well-written and thought out, covers a lot of really cool history, overall so good. So if you enjoy fantasy but want something deeper than Twilight, this is the series for you.

I warned y'all this wasn't my strongest month, ha. Let's see if I can turn it around in January!!