Welcome to the new age! Yeah, 2014, I'm talking about YOU!

Earlier this week we pulled this lovely relic from our closet.

Some of you may remember this cardboard member of our family from some previous posts (like this one). 

 

This is our happy new year box.  Every year, the first Monday of the year, we do a special family home evening where we break this baby open and search through her treasures.  She is loaded with tracings of our hands from the last January (the kids always love checking out how much they have grown) as well as a list of some of our favorite things (it is soooo fun to see what everyone's favorites were a year ago versus what they are today, sometimes our children are a bit embarrassed by the things they used to love and we all get a good laugh out of it).  

We also have a sheet with our family goals from the year before.  

Anyway, we pull it all out and get to see how we've done on our goals and how much we have changed.

This year we found we sort of really stunk it up on our goals from last year (check out our link above to see last years objectives...we pretty much only succeeded in one of the three and I'll leave it up to you to imagine which one).

Anyway, this year we opted for some new targets rather than chancing second failure on the same things we already failed at.  

So for 2014 our family goals are:

1. Read the New Testament together as a family.

2. Go on at least two out of the house, family activities every month.  (As you can imagine, this one was heavily influenced by our yeahoos.)

3. Fill up our service jar.

Now, that last one is something new for us.  We haven't ever done this before.  Well, not with service.  I'm a pretty big fan of visual reminders to keep us focused on good stuff (for example, our summer reading challenge a couple years ago or our treat jar).

Josh brought home this lovely, empty pretzel bottle for us, I decorated it, stuck some paper strips on the side and SHEBAM!  Serice jar!

When someone does an act of service for anyone else in the world, they can jot down a snippet about the act and put it into the jar.  Our goal is to fill this jar before the end of the year.  

As an added bonus, this will (hopefully) keep us a little more attuned to the needs of those around us and will help us all better look for opportunities to bless the lives of other people.  

Love it!

To go along with that, our new family cheer for the year (something we chant with vigorous actions after family prayer morning and evening) is "We Serve" (and with each word we bring one of our arms into an L shaped "flexing my muscles" position...does that make sense...so we end up with both arms flexing like body builders...um, yeah, the boys came up with that one).

Anyway, happy new year!  It should be fun to try to reach these goals as a family.

What things do you to to celebrate the new year with your family?

Our happy service jar.

Paper slips on the sides, so you get the idea.