Forward!

It's now 2013 and I was not quite ready for 2012 to end. It was so much fun and involved so much change!

We moved to a new house with more room for our growing quiver.

We had our first new years eve here one year ago amidst the moving boxes. Okay so this picture is of the fireworks we used to celebrate 2012 but it works!

We added a new baby, Chloe, to our family.

We got to travel some.

We homeschooled this year without a co-op group.

I was not teaching BSF this year, which was a huge change for our family- sorry no picture.

 Chloe was baptized.

 It's fun to look back and be reminded of all the blessings for the year. It's also hard not to look back at all the things that I coulda, shoulda, woulda done and did not do. However, as I was feeling like a colossal failure last night in every area God reminded me that I am not a failure. I cannot be a failure so long as I am a child of His because He has already won the victory! My focus needs to be on persevering and finishing this great race called life. I'm too young to wallow in the pit. There is lots of LIFE yet to live.

One of my favorite blogs is A Holy Experience and her post yesterday was about basically the same thing and something she shared really spoke to me. The idea of Forward! She gave a great analogy regarding her daughter Hope. Hope was at a piano recital and during her piece missed several notes but she finished. Her teacher told her in a nutshell that instead of concentrating on all the notes that she got wrong she moved forward to the next bar and kept going. I too can choose to not look back at my perceived 2012 misses but instead fall forward and move on to today. There is no reason not to.

So my motto for 2013 is Forward! My goal will be to focus on each new day as it comes with it's fresh slate. God's mercies are new every morning.