Planning for the future

Hubby and I went away a few weekends ago, just us, to celebrate our anniversary. For years we have wanted to come up with a purpose statement for our family. Pretty much a sentence or two that describes and reminds us what we want to be as a family. We also wanted to make an acronym of our last name that has the characteristics and values that we want our family to have.

So if your last name was SMITH you could make it as S-safe; we want to provide a home that everyone feels safe and secure.... M-Magnify; we want to magnify Christ in our lives through our words and actions to each other..... I-Integrity; we want to be open, honest and truthful to each other........ T-Time; we will devote our time to this family. Family will always come first....... H-Honor; we will respect each member of this family and do what is best for one another.

And when we decided to go away, we thought that this would be the perfect time to sit down without any distractions and put our ideas together. While doing this we really realized that we wanted to have goals and a plan for our family. In every aspect of life, you have goals and plans. Companies put together a plan for the next year, churches schedule events and goals years in advance, couples set up goals and plans for their lives, but I don't know that many families that set goals for themselves too. And that's when we decided to make a list of goals for our family. It includes things like.... pay off credit cards by the end of 2011; have little miss potty trained; run marathons; have a date night once a month; begin devotions/praying as a family; do a service project as a family twice a year; little miss starting Pre-K; less time in front of the TV and more time making memories and so much more.

I am planning on making a family wall coming up our stairs from our garage into our living room. So when you enter our home you see our purpose statement, our acronym and even our goals for the next year. I do that because I have amazing friends who will be like.... um, y'all aren't doing so hot on this one; in the nicest way they can.

Oh and did I mention WHERE we went for all of this fun, bonding, future projecting.... I think I did not!!!! We went here to Gaylord National in Washington; D.C. And it was amazing!!!!




All the while little miss was having an amazing time with her Aunt Ba and Uncle Cory.




And she even went swimming all by herself + floaties + a noodle



She even played doctor and was very worried when she couldn't hear a heart beat...





It was a great weekend. Thanks to Aunt Ba and Uncle Cory for watching little miss so that we could have a vision for our family!