Our biggest goal was to bring our new baby into the world (and as we said to start the year, hopefully with a name). I'm happy to report that we were beyond successful. Caleb Samuel arrived healthy and happy and has been such a good baby and an amazing addition to our family. Plus, we found the perfect name for him. Lydia started kindergarten and is doing awesome! It has been a huge joy to see her grow. She is full of goodness and happiness and shares that with so many people. We did not have anything big we expected for Austin, but he has done so much this year and is a bight and happy spirit who is learning new things every day. Those three children our the most incredible people and I am lucky to be their Dad.
Shantel was feeling quite dejected with the state of the world in the beginning of 2017, and honestly, while this can't always be our approach, we mostly ignored the world this year. We focused on our family, our faith, our obedience, our kindness, our love for each other and our efforts to be better each day. And it worked- it worked for us right now to focus on our family and build our spiritual fortifications, knowing that they will be in place to protect us in the future. I think this quote that I shared to start the year is fitting, from President Hinckley, "Look to the positive. Know that he is watching over you, that he Hears your prayers and will answer them, that he loves you and will make that love manifest."
I set a few goals to start the year. I wish I could say that I did great with all of them, but I think it is important to look back at your successes and your failure and use both to make an even better path for the future.
1. First goal, was to be a better husband and father. I certainly had moments where I was not great, but...I think I truly accomplished this goal. Over the past year, I learned to be more patient. I listen better. I took time to build and play and chase my kids. I have so far to go- but I think the progress that I made this year, is now I understand where I want to go and how I can be the kind of father who my kids will know they can believe in and trust and we can have a bond through both joyous and troubled times. As far as being a better husband...I'm not sure if I was, but I do know that I love Shantel. She is my heart and my joy and I look forward to each moment I get to spend with her. I love the way she makes me laugh and she is my best friend and companion.
2. Blog more on Sunday. I think I started out the year strong on this and faded...probably something to work on. However, I am proud of this blog and the record we are keeping for ourselves and our posterity. Obviously Shantel does the most to keep things updated and I am grateful for that, however, I am proud of the help I give and the journal that this is of our family. We used to have a lot of people follow and read our blog. It was nice for family and friends to stay caught up in our lives. However, over the years fewer and fewer people have read our blog. We are not sure anyone actually reads the blog anymore. We are excited for this as we are trying to share more personal and important things about our family and our faith. Sometimes it is hard to share these challenges to the blog world. But now that it is just for us, it is nice to share our challenges as they happen and also the many joyous things we have. I hope that as we share these things we can build our own testimonies and inspire ourselves and hopefully for some future posterity, they can read our stories and be inspired in their own lives.
3. Focus on the keystone habits (powerful scripture study, prayer, and family home evening.) As far as scripture study- I had some great moments this year of truly powerful study- but these are too infrequent and my study is too inconsistent. I want to do better. I also want to increase the power of my prayers- and I don't think I accomplished that this year. I do think that we had a great year of family home evening. Frequently (most of the time) the lesson was put together the last minute, but more often than before we had powerful family home evening lessons that I truly believe will make a difference in the future. We are still working on this, but I think we really improved our family home evenings and had some great experiences.
Overall, I feel like I made progress and I will continue to move forward and do better each day.
David and I have been working to fill in and finish all of our posts for 2017 over the last couple of weeks. We wrote out a big list of posts that we still needed to finish - everything from little posts to our big Christmas posts. When he told me that he had just finished our "Goodbye 2017" post, I was surprised and more than a little grateful. As I just read through this post - I am overcome with gratitude for the good man that David is. He has always been a wonderful husband and father in our family, but through his efforts this year, our family has been even more blessed by him. I'm grateful to have him as my partner, in everything from making potato supreme in the kitchen, to raising our children together, to having him as my permanent Friday-night-date. I think that his summarization of our year is accurate - we focused on the things that matter the most to us and tried not to get upset or worried about the things that don't. This family matters to me, our faith in the Lord matters. And this year we felt the Lord's love and we continued to grow as a family. It's been a wonderful year. I'm grateful to be able to say that, especially because of the feelings I had at the beginning of the year. A huge portion of why this year was so great is because of our sweet Caleb. He's truly brought so much joy to us. Lydia and Austin, too. As I was feeding Caleb before bed the other night, and I could hear Austin and Lydia doing their bedtime-winding down in their rooms I felt such gratitude for this life that we have. This little corner, this little pocket of space and love and peace and family and goodness. I'm grateful for it. I'm grateful for our home, and our neighborhood, and the gospel, and our families, and our marriage, and our children. I'm so happy to be here, right now, where we are. 2017 has been good to us, and I'm looking forward to sharing 2018 with the people that I love most, doing the things that are the very most important.
Last year- we did kind of a quick run through of the highlights for the year- I am pretty sure we are going to be at our picture limit for our book- so instead I'll just share one last picture.
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