It's the Little Things...

We will be closing on our first home in less than 3 weeks, and we are beyond excited! Aaron and I have been busy making plans and doing research. We're also becoming frequent "just looking" visitors at Home Depot because we can't actually start the work/making purchases until we have the keys!

I did, however, make one purely-for-fun purchase out of excitement/anticipation. I was catching up on posts from All Things Thrifty when I ran across these great custom address stamps!

They're from Paper Cafe, and I couldn't help myself, I just had to get one. After much consideration and debate, I did eventually decide on a design. Here's the one I ended up going with:

So it's just a fun, little thing, but I can't wait til I get to actually use it. And have a permanent address again! I have moved 11 times in the last decade! Hopefully we will only move once (maybe twice) in the next one :)

Our Family Mission Statement

Shortly after we got married, Aaron and I decided we wanted to have a family mission statement. We wanted to put down in writing those values that are important to us and that we would like to instill in our children someday. Since then, I started following a great blog, Simple Mom, that had a post on how to come up with your own family mission statement. We didn't follow her steps, but if we ever redo ours I think we would revisit her post and give it a try!

Here's what we came up with:

In our family, our mission is to:

Be RESPECTFUL in all that you do. Have reverence for God's people, creatures, and earth.
Be SERVANTS to those who have need, great or small. You are the hands and feet of the Lord.
Have COMPASSION. Especially for those whose cries are not heard.
Be HUMBLE in everything. Your honor comes from God, He will lift you up.

And the foundations of all these fruits shall be LOVE. Love for family, for self, for others, and for God. Love will open the eyes and hearts of the world.

"Let all that you do be done with love." 1 Corinthians 16:14

After getting this all down and feeling pretty good about it, we wanted to display it somewhere central in our home. So we got to photoshoppin' and put everything in pretty fonts, printed it out on some colored cardstock, and then put it in a nice frame. Right now we have the frame on our kitchen counter and it serves as a nice reminder.

Disclaimer: The characteristics/principles that we decided on for our family's statement aren't necessarily things that we ourselves claim to be good at (in fact, sometimes we just plain suck at them). Instead, these are things that we value and want our family to strive for, aka we wish we were better at them and are trying really hard to not suck at so much.