Birthdays Make Good Celebrations

It's the NEW YEAR! 

People everywhere are marking the days with resolutions, or wishes, or nothing. 

I often start a new year with the great desire to make great changes in my life, to be a better person, a more efficient home and office manager, less of a time waster, an exerciser.  

Most of any of those ideas last until the first of February.

I started my life changing events the middle of December, reminding myself that the time to make changes is now, not at any future date no matter what the calendar says.  

I plan to make my changes one at a time, a little bit at a time, with more reasonable expectations.  

In the middle of December I modified my wish of writing a letter everyday (snail or e-mail) to three or four times a week.

The last week of December I decided to spend less time on the computer, and that includes facebook.

The first of the year I decided I was going to treat my business work as--well, a business--and do all the work in the office instead of at the kitchen table or the couch.

A few days later, I took the trash out, discovered it wasn't too bad outside with leggings, winter coat, hat and mittens and walked a half mile.  Then I did it the next day.  I think I can do this.  

The last resolution is to blog on Tuesdays.  I really enjoyed that year that I did a picture a day.  This year I would like to think in weeks.  

It will be a challenge.  

We nearly always start out a new year in our family with birthday parties celebrating Zane's on the 31st and Lorene's on the 3rd.  Zane wanted his party 'on his day', so we did.  He and Lorene unanimously chose angel food as the cake of the day so I made two.  My mom was here and helping get things in order for the party supper with the cakes.  I misread the measuring cup and put too much water in the first cake.  I took part of that batter to put in a doll sized angel food cake pan for Zane (which I overcooked in the excitement).  When the finished products were displayed the cake with too much water was half as tall as the other one.  Zane's small cake having been cooked as long as the large ones, was tough.  I dressed it up with whipped topping, gel candy minions and 7 candles.  He manfully ate his way through it all.  I saved two minion candies for the other boys, and it's a good thing I did, since Zane didn't seem inclined to share his. 

I suppose we only really need one photo of Zane with his cake, but I have a hard time leaving out all his different expressions going on. Not to mention Christian hovering in the background.   

Then, we have a party...

...and a very nice party it was.  

Part of my 'resolutions for 2016' is to have more photos of myself.  

Too bad I look like such a goon in this one.