…manage my home:
68. Set up a school/craft cupboard.
69. Make croissants.
70. Maintain a tidy (company-ready) home. (30 days)
71. Replace mattress.
72. Develop the habit of a weekly “Sabbath dinner.” (30 days)
73. Create a “Sunday box” of toys/activities (or an equivalent solution).
74. Purge files.
75. Make a household inventory for insurance purposes. (Use www.mythings.com, www.shelfari.com as tools.)
76. Make a gift wrap organizer/station and purge bags as I fill it.
77. Declutter kitchen and master bedroom.
78. Try one new recipe a month for a year.
79. Try all 19 (!) remaining muffin variations.
80. Try 10 new smoothie recipes/variations.

Wow. I would have expected this to be one of the most self-explanatory sections, but most of these tasks/projects need explaining, I think. Taking them one at a time:

#68 refers to creating a place for all of our “school-ish” toys, and arts & crafts materials. We’ve been accumulating these, but they don’t have a “home” yet.

#69 probably seems a little silly at first blush. I mean, really, other people are listing more useful things, like “make bread.” But I already make all of our family’s sandwich bread, dinner rolls, tortillas, hamburger buns, muffins, etc. Although I have not been successful in making pockets, I have tried pitas several times, and I have made crackers (although we haven’t found a recipe that produces a texture we really like). Croissants are the one somewhat “mainstream” type of bread I have never attempted because, frankly, it’s a daunting prospect. Croissants involve rolling a block of butter into layers of dough over and over. It sounds labor-intense and finicky. But I want to at least try it once!

#70 is pretty self-explanatory, in general, but I want to clarify the 30 days thing. The establishment of habits is a hard thing to quantify. When do you determine that something has become a habit? One of the blogs I read while doing research for this list used this method, which I thought was very clever! The author marked a habit as “completed” when she had stuck with it for 30 consecutive days. That’s what’s going on here.

#71 refers to replacing our waterbed mattress with a real mattress, for the sake of hubby’s back.

#72 is a little harder to explain. As I understand it, most traditional Jewish families have a special dinner at sundown on Friday (the beginning of the Sabbath). Some Gentile believers have adopted the custom, as well (although not necessarily right at sundown), for various reasons. (For more information, from a Gentile perspective, see Nancy Campbell’s The Family Meal Table and Hospitality.) The appeal to me is twofold. First, I like the idea of making the effort to have loose ends from the past week tied up, and preparations already made for the weekend, as much as possible, by the time this dinner rolls around, so we can sit down and enjoy a restful dinner as a family as the introduction to a weekend free from the bustle of the rest of the week. Second, I like the idea of regularly making a pointed effort to do something “special” for my family – kind of a “company meal” for the home-folk. 🙂 I don’t know if I would actually do this on Friday night, as Michael finishes up his workweek away from home, or on Saturday night as we prepare our hearts for Sunday’s corporate worship. Either way, this is not one of my most pressing “to-do’s,” and will likely be one of my later projects.

#73 is likewise intended to make Sundays truly restful. On Sundays, either I run all over the house, constantly on top of Ariel in an attempt to prevent the house’s turning into a disaster zone (that child can trash an entire house faster than I can walk across a room), or I begin Monday completely behind and spend the rest of the week trying to get caught up. I am giving serious consideration to limiting Sunday’s after-church play to a certain box of special toys set aside for Sundays – so Mom can get a little Sabbath rest!

#’s 74 & 75 – self-explanatory, I think

#76 – Making the gift wrap organizer is probably not too hard to get. 😉 The purging bags part might be, though. We have dozens of gift bags saved, mostly from our wedding and baby showers. We rarely attend weddings and baby showers, though, so most of these bags are a waste of space. As I load my wrapping supplies into the gift wrap organizer (made from a kitchen trash can, as I saw someplace – Martha Stewart Living, maybe?), I intend to get rid of most of these and only keep the ones we might actually use.

#77 & 78 – self-explanatory

#79 & 80 – These also go together with the “gaining weight” goal from the health category.

It’s also worth noting that this category, in particular, is affected by our current situation.  Growing a vegetable garden, for example, is not possible in our current yard.  (The whole yard is in shade.)  In different circumstances, that would probably be a goal.   Also, we are so “in limbo,” regarding where we live and Michael works, etc. that it’s hard to plan some of this stuff out almost three years!  I tried to set goals that will not become obsolete with a move.  Hopefully by the time the beginning of the [i]next[/i] list rolls ’round we will be moved into a semi-permanent situation and some longer-term goals will be realistic. 🙂