Happy New Year, Friends!

(wrote this last night, but forgot to actually *post*!)

Oh my God I'm so sleepy. We had a fabulous day, getting back into the groove of our usual rhythm to the week, with a few tweaks to reflect our renewed commitments to various priorities. Last night we started our bedtime routine at midnight, so I expect tonight we'll start at 11pm, and tomorrow we'll be doing our best to shift it back to where it's "supposed" to be, 10pm. (I laugh at the idea of "supposed to" when we're the ones setting the schedule ourselves). After we do our bedtime routine, we turn off the lights and put on an audiobook -- except we don't have any audiobooks right now, so instead we're listening to Through The Looking Glass online (I think we found it at Story Nory). Only one night, so far, but it seems as if this habit going to be a successful addition to our evening.

My alarm went off at 8 this morning and I got up and jumped right into my morning routine. I've been looking for a new mantra for during my morning meditation, and this weekend I stumbled across one that feels perfect -- I like the tune, the focus, the rhythm of it, and I like how it feels when I say it. My morning zenhabits reading happened to be an article on building sustainable habits, and included a recommendation for fitocracy, which is a cute, free community to help you stick to your exercise intentions. So far I like it a lot. I haven't unlocked any quests yet, but I'm hopeful about tomorrow...

Playing school was *awesome* this morning -- Sarah loves the new spelling book we're trying out, Joe read aloud to us from one of the Spanish/English picture books we got out of the library (my accent is sometimes pretty muddy, as I still sometimes find myself defaulting to french pronunciation if I don't know how a word is supposed to sound, so it's nice to have Joe around to read things to us), we read about the first Americans to come across Beringia, and about various prehistoric inventions. Tomorrow we have to return a bunch of our library books, so we're going to read the last Spanish picture book tonight and then drop them off at the library on our way down to A's tomorrow.

We also got a lot of decluttering done upstairs, this afternoon. The bedroom's almost livable. And this afternoon I made my lunch for the week (lentil soup), a batch of honey whole wheat bread (I've been looking for a recipe for a whole wheat sandwich bread -- this is my first time trying this recipe), and a new iced tea recipe using mint green tea and maybe 75% as much sweetener as I usually use for sweet tea. The plan is to work my way to 50% and perhaps eventually 25% of the original sweetness. I was planning to make oat bran muffins, too, but ran out of eggs. That might happen tomorrow night, or it might not.

Right now I'm going to go plug in my phone, finish cleaning the kitchen, bake the next loaf of bread, heat up some scones for our evening snack (I was delighted to read in an article on body clocks and sleeping that you should have a small, high carb snack a couple hours before bed, in order to help your body sleep through the night!), take vitamins, double check the train times for tomorrow, pack games and craft supplies for the homeschool gathering tomorrow afternoon... Yeah, that sounds about right.