Monday

I really appreciated the people who mentioned that they had been waiting for a new post after my last post, so I'm making sure that I get back here and post again so you all didn't give up on me! :)

There's not a whole lot happening around here these days. We got the fireplace put together in the guest room and it is AWESOME! I'm going to take some photos and but I'm going to wait because right now it's a gigantic mess in there while we move out the old stuff to make room for the new stuff. We haven't painted or anything yet, so we still have a ways to go before the room is complete. I'll keep updating as we do more to it because it's a super fun project!

This week we're going to get the Christmas tree up and get the house looking all Christmasy! I love all the Christmas stuff but I only love it for a while and then I start to get tired of it and it starts to feel cluttery so I don't like to put it up too early in the season. I want to still be loving it when Christmas gets here! It's always fun to get the Christmas stuff out. We do a yearly Christmas tree ornament that signifies something that happened that year, so putting the tree up is really fun. We have ornaments that go back to when my husband and I were dating, so our Christmas tree is kind of like a scrapbook of our marriage. Each year is represented and we talk about each ornament as we put it on the tree.

That means that every Christmas I have to come up with an ornament that is significant to our family. I'm having a hard time this year because I'm not sure what one thing represents this year. I'm thinking that I might find some sort of bicycle ornament to represent how much fun we had on our bikes this summer. This is the first year that we did family bike rides and we loved it. That is something fun that we'll want to remember.

Summing up this year reminds me that I never explained what happened to our year of adventure! Remember how much fun we had with that for the first six months of the year?!

Here's what happened. We were doing super great and then the forest fires hit. For a good two months this summer our city was under a cloud of smoke. The fires in the area were terrible this year. All of the outdoor Year of Adventure activities that we had planned had to keep getting moved because we were waiting for the smoke to clear. At times it wasn't too bad, but it seemed like every time the smoke got better, something else came up and we had to postpone our activity. It was also over 100 degrees for a good portion of August. Between the smoke and the heat, we just couldn't get out there to do everything we had planned and eventually we just kind of dropped the plans.

And actually, we did do a couple of the activities that I never blogged about. The boys decided that building an RC vehicle wasn't going to happen this year, so they spent the morning with one of our neighbors, who has a collection of awesome RC vehicles. They got to try them out and learn about them and we decided to count that as the activity. The boys also went to the pumpkin patch without me and Clarissa because Clarissa wasn't feeling well that day. I have the photos and I've been meaning to blog them, I just haven't gotten around to it.

We also did build our backyard movie theater this year, the smoke was just too bad to actually go outside and watch movies. We planned it a few different times and had to cancel it for one reason or another every time.

So the Year of Adventure was not a complete success, but we did learn a lot and we haven't give up on it. I think our first mistake was putting too many things on the list. Twenty four things was two activities a month. That sounded awesome when we started but once we got behind it was hard to catch up. There were also a few things on there that were maybe a bit unrealistic. A few of them were out of town day trips and we did do a couple of those but when it came down to it we just didn't have time for all of them this year.

We want to do it again but next time we'll probably stick to 12 things. One activity a month is plenty when you're trying to get everything crossed off before the end of the year. We're going to have another family meeting about it and I think we'll probably do it again next year but we'll tweak the list a bit, or we might make a list of 24 things with a goal to complete 12 of them. That way if one thing falls through we have alternates to choose from.

But the activities we did cross off our list were awesome and unforgettable. We learned that we love bowling, we became a family of bike riders, the boys finally tried out camping , I successfully grew a garden and all in all we did have a lot of really fun experiences as a family that I'm really glad we accomplished. I don't think the Year of Adventure was a failure. What we did accomplish was really fun and it's something we want to continue to do with  a few revisions in the future. All in all I think this was a really successful year for our family and we all grew and learned and became closer as a family. Maybe it's a good thing not to cross everything off the list. Having more things left to do gives us more to look forward to in the year ahead! :)