The New Year and preparing for Disneyland

About a year and a half ago the girls became really aware of Disneyland after hearing about it from their cousins. They asked us if we could go and, trying to stall them, Lance and I told them that once they had saved 100 dollars we would plan a trip. This all happened before we had ANY idea that we would be moving an hour away from Disneyland. :)

Well come January they reached their 100 dollar goal so thanks to Grandpa for getting a package put together and planning the trip we were all set to go in February. Of course living so close we could have done a day trip but our original plan was to make a big family trip out of it, so we stuck with that and did 3 days.

It was so fun to watch the girls save their money this past year and to really see the lights start to go on in their heads as far as money is concerned. It's been a huge learning experience for us and them and it's so nice to see them accomplish this goal. I thought after a year of saving almost all of their money that they would have a greater desire to just spend it as it came in (maybe they honestly haven't realized that this is an option!) but it was cute to see them talking about their NEXT thing to save for.....American Girl Dolls. I will be interested to see how this plays out for them...especially since it involves saving about 100 dollars EACH as opposed to saving 100 dollars between the two of them. This prompted a great discussion about ways that they could earn money more quickly (like finding EXTRA jobs around the house to do etc etc).

It was nice too that this all coincided with the New Year. It's funny because we've never made a huge deal out of celebrating New Years Eve in the way of parties and all of that (in fact Lance and I always joke about how our New Years Eve is almost always a flop) haha but we do make a big deal of sitting down with our kids and taking inventory on our life from the past year and what we are hoping for the coming year. We always try and write down all the things we enjoyed about Christmas (while it's still fresh in our minds) and any of the things we would do differently (such as spend less on gifts, do more service, be less busy etc etc) and that way when we get ready for the holidays the following year we have a guide to go off of... it's amazing how quickly we forget things.

We also try to see what things we can take out of our life to accomplish the goals and desires that are most important to us. I've always been a journal writer and setting goals and writing them down has always been really important to me. I find saying that when you write a goal down you are 10 times more likely to accomplish it to be very true in my life. Someone shared another idea with me that I found insightful on this topic and that was the idea that part of setting goals is being able to alter them and change them as life changes and your needs change. In other words sometimes it's better to let go of or change a goal rather than spend time trying to accomplish something just to say you've accomplished something...if it's really not that important to you or if your priorities have changed since you first set the goal.

Anyway...on to 2011...and yes I realize as I write this that we are now almost half way THROUGH 2011. :)