resolutions and a stamping binge...

I think I am suffering from a hangover this morning, NO not that kind of hangover, a stamping hangover. Over on splitcoaststampers they had a New Years Eve stamping party, with hourly challenges. You can check it out **HERE**. Since my children were fairly well behaved (Thanks to delivery pizza and the dvd player) and hubby was plowing snow for hours after work I managed to play along from 2:00 in the afternoon until I burned out around 9:15. I am in general a fairly quick stamper but I still average over an hour for any project that has much detail, so I was really happy with how much I got done during that time period. Below is a sample of what I did.







If you are looking for details please see my gallery on SplitCoastStampers.

Yesterday I was talking about resolutions. Now I am not going to make any silly ones like losing the extra 50 pounds I am carrying around, thought that wouldn't be a bad idea, but I am not going for anything that extreme. Which is a good thing since I had left over pizza for breakfast and that would have blown any extreme diet in the first couple of hours of the new year. But I do need to work on us all being healthier and because cooking from scratch is cheaper resolution number one is

1. Is to limit eating out at restaurants to once a month and fast food to only once a month as well. *No Jules that doesn't mean cutting out cereal dinners, just the kind of fast food you buy at McDs.

As you can imagine living in a house with 5 children and keeping it clean is kind of like shoveling snow in a blizzard. You have to keep going or you will be buried alive but it never looks like you are making progress. Now my house is rarely terrible but it is also rarely as nice as I would like it. So this year I resolve to

2. Have the whole family do a quick pickup/clean up every night after dinner. Currently we do this every Sunday afternoons but it will take less time if we do it every night. If this gets done while I wash dishes and make lunches for the next day then I can concentrate on cleaning instead of picking up in the morning.

That should free me up to keep the house work under control so that I can

3. Be in my office creating by 9:30am each weekday (that I don't have to work at the Disney Store, of course)

This should enable me to reach my goal of getting published this year. I am actually published, not for stamping or scrapbooking, but for articles that I have written about foster parenting. I hope to manage this by finding time to stamp for other then challenges and planning classes. So watch out Stampin' Up! because I am going to bombard you with contest entries as well as the various stamping magazines. And while I love being on the Elzybell design team (wait until you see the new stuff January 9th-12th, you are so going to love it!), there is one other company that I plan to see if I can get their attention this year as well.

And since everyone needs fiscal goals mine is to

4. Keep on top of our financial goals. I am usually pretty good at this but the hubby is now less then 3 years and 10 months from early retirement, (not that he can stop working but that he will be able to just work for himself) so we are at a crucial point. To do this we have to be completely debt free. We are mostly on track but every little bit I can squeeze out to pay down the mortgage will put us that much closer to goal.

And lastly, the house. We have been in the process of essentially tripling the size of our house for the last 7 years. All the major work, with the exception of the kitchen, is now done but we still have little bits and pieces, here and there that need to be finished. So I resolve to

5. Finish all the detail work in one room each month, this year. That should allow us to concentrate on the kitchen in 2010. This sounds worse then it is. Most rooms only need trim painted or a closet door but if I don't put it in writing then I will easily ignore it all for another year.