Gratitude and Ramona

Last year I tried to keep a gratitude journal.  The goal was to write at least 3 items a day that I'm grateful for.  I was pretty sporadic with it.  I'd do good for a month, forget for a month, do a week, forget for 2 months.  But I'm no quitter, so I'm trying again.



This time I'm kind of trying a bullet journal type approach.  Except I did very lazy research on bullet journals, so it's probably not all that similar.  I pretty much am making a To Do list for the day, writing my gratitude, keeping track of my walking miles and maybe a little note if there was something significant about the day.  It's only been 6 days, so it remains to be seen if I am better about sticking with it this year.



The reading challenge I picked is from PopSugar.  (<~ link to article)  It's pretty ambitious for me because I don't have an abundance of time to read, and I listen to a lot of audiobooks which kind of slows me down.  I read faster than most audiobooks, but I have this guilty feeling when I'm reading and not doing other things, even things that aren't "important."  It's silly.  I think I counted 40 books on the list.  I doubt I'll get to all of them, but it will force me to branch out a bit.  Probably not as much as it would if I did aim to do it all, because I assure you if I skip anything, the political memoir and an autobiography will definitely be the ones skipped.  I'm working on 2 books already, a Young Adult bestseller (Red Queen by Victoria Aveyard) and a book translated into English from another language (The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo).  Maybe I'll try to give some book reviews afterwards.

My current favorite way to spend my free time (while listening to Red Queen) is coloring.



I got the girls a couple of those adult coloring books.  Zoe didn't really like hers, so I took it and ordered her one with animals.  I love it.  I had ordered some gel pens to go with the books, and then forgot about it and bought colored pencils and markers for the girls. I kept the pens and have fallen in love with them.  The girls are so jealous.  Some are glittery,some are metallic.  They're so smooth.  I am totally giving myself carpal tunnel syndrome with all the coloring I do, but I can't stop.

Don't tell my husband, but my favorite Christmas gift came from my sister this year.  It was a gift certificate.  To the tattoo parlor!  Have you ever?  I'm not sure I ever posted a picture of the tattoo I got last year.   My sisters and I got matching tattoos to memorialize our Dad... it's from that old School House Rocks song "Lolly, Lolly, Lolly, get your adverbs here."  It's super cute.  Well, my younger sister and her husband are very into tattoos. Especially my brother-in-law.  He's working on full sleeves.  They have a particular tattoo artist they use, and he's simply amazing.  He did our Lolly tattoos and when he was working on mine, we talked about another tattoo I want. He was really excited by the idea and gave me a really good quote for it.

So, I got this gift certificate and made my appointment.  The original plan was a 3 inch tattoo, fairly simple.  The actual tattoo is 5 inches, and incredibly detailed.  And I LOVE IT.



Yes, that's Ramona Quimby on my right upper arm. I swear, I want to run around sleeveless all the time, I don't care that it's January.

Well, that's all I have for you tonight.  I need a new keyboard.  My kids have destroyed this one and I can't tell you how difficult it is to write out an entire blog post. =)