mathmom's blog

I have been thinking about discipline lately.  My father-in-law mentioned that my brother-in-law was a very disciplined person.  I don't recall his wasting any time, ever, although he may have.  But mostly he spent his time working on things that were important to him, and accomplished a lot. On the other side of the equation, he told the story of someone he knew who had been very undisciplined about treating his diabetes.  The diabetic was chewed out by his doctor. In my life, I feel like I don't have very much discipline.  I'm constantly getting distracted by trivialities, or time wasters, and much of the time I can't make progress on some of the things I want to do.  This is unsatisfying, and I'd like to figure out how to change it. I think discipline comes in two parts.  First, you must figure out what is important, and then, you need to make a system to actually do the important things.  Sometimes what is important becomes critical and obvious: make these

We were talking about the importance of toothbrushing the other day, and Eleanor came up with a new theory.  She said that teeth really wanted to leave your mouth, but you kept them in your mouth by brushing them every day---that made the gums stick to them more effectively. To which I replied, that is why they call it tooth paste , after all.

Must people don't keep their New Year's resolution. This year, mine is to write a letter a week. The good thing about this resolution is that even if I only keep it for a month, that is 4 more letters than I would have written otherwise. The other good thing is that even if I fall off the wagon for a week or a month, I can always get back on. We will see how it goes. I am planning on writing on Monday mornings. However, my biggest problem with writing letters is not the writing, or even putting them in an envelope, but finding the address putting s stamp on them and pouring them in the mail. I have piles of Christmas cards from years past with names but no addresses or stamps. But I think this is important, so I will try to do better. Maybe the kids will help. Eleanor says that her resolution is not to make any resolutions. Unfortunately, she's already broken it... I love my family :-)

So, for New Year's Eve we decided that the kids needed to go skiing. Michael's cousin had some discount tickets to Welch's Village in MN, so we decided to head on over there. They had fireworks at 7, and our relatives had season passes so would come down just for a few hours.  We would ski in the afternoon, eat dinner, watch the fireworks, and leave. But with one thing and another, we didn't manage to leave the house until 12:50.  We got to the ski place after 2, and our cousin didn't get there until almost 3.  We tried to get skis and by the time we had everything all ready it was almost 4.  Oh well.  I left Michael to be in charge of feeding the kids (we had brought a dinner for Amanda) and went off with the "girls." My mother-in-law and sister-in-law and I went to a nearby county park with three pairs of snowshoes in our trunk, but we decided not to use them.  We went for a lovely 1 mile hike by the Cannon river, then went for dinner in a Chinese re