Thank you all for the overwhelming response to our web site! The bulk of our e-mail is both exciting and a sidetracking nightmare. While we eat, it come. While we sleep, it comes. While we travel, it comes. It comes from every state and many foreign countries. We are so thankful for Molly at The Columbian newspaper, who is there to help us at every turn. We just learned that our site received a "2 Hot to Handle" medal from The Cybermom Dot Com site!
Isn't it great that we only have to live 365 days and then we get to start all over again? We can, if we want to, wipe the old slate clean, and embark on this year with renewed hope. We can bring with this fresh start a whole year of education gained from the last 365 days, and expectations that we will do better this year.
That happy prospect is the same feeling we get when we wake up in the morning and see a blanket of new-fallen snow covering everything. It's like Mother Nature covered up the mess that we made the day before and gave us a brand new place to play. So let's play!
Well, we got through the entry way at Thanksgiving and then we dropped you there. We'll blame it mostly on E-mail, but then Christmas hit, we got buried and you've been left standing in the entry-way wondering where to go next. We have chosen the living room. As you sit at your monitor, picture your living room. Is your Christmas tree down? Are all of your decorations put back in storage? If not, TURN OFF YOUR COMPUTER AND GET THOSE TWO THINGS DONE!
If you are fortunate enough to have a living room and a family room, you should be very thankful, because you can live in the family room and still have a room that doesn't look "lived in." That's really what a living room in a house with a family room is. It's a room we don't live in. We live in the family room and we look at the living room. We should really call it a looking room. A good, but very organized, friend told us that she was so adamant that her family not go into the living room, that her oldest child threatened to push the younger one into it so he'd get in trouble.
Think about what the purpose of your living room is. Do you want it to be strictly a looking room or do you want to use it. It's all up to you. If you want it to be a show place where the family and guests are given a door-way peek before they move on to the family room or the kitchen, great. If you want to spend more time in your living room that's great too.
Start by standing in the door-way of your living room with a blank 3x5 card. Very slowly, scan the room clockwise and take notes. Picture the room entirely rearranged. In your mind's eye, put the couch in the middle of the room or at the other end. If you have a good mirror that's not to big to hold, use it to look at the room backwards. We get so used to seeing things a certain way and a simple glance in a mirror puts you into an entirely different house. When you actually move your furniture around, use a mirror to see if you like it backwards. We never change things around without a mirror.
The seven words we are going to permeate our homes with in 1997 are: Love, Peace, Joy, Beauty, Abundance, Health and Order. Look at your living room through the "nature" of each of those words. Follow through with the thoughts that come to you and you will create a room that will be irresistible to your family and friends, whether they got to go in there or not.
See you again soon.