is it loud in here?

After a much too long estrangement, I finally decided to visit my poor lonely blog today. Not much had changed as you might expect. The same old posts were still here to greet me, the pictures hadn't faded, and my tired old template was still looking springy and fun. - Deep breath - time for a facelift. I had more trouble than I'd like to admit changing backgrounds and headers, and while I'm giving up the blog decorating for the day, I can't say I'm done for sure. I took a few minutes this afternoon to read through my not-so-numerous past posts as a way of maybe taking stock of what has changed since I started the blog. The answer: everything and nothing. In the last year we have had a job change, location change, family vehicle change(which will undoubtedly be changing again due to our growing family) 2 new dogs, and the list goes on and on. Looking back, some of those changes have suited us better than others. Looking ahead to 2014, there are still many to come. What hasn't changed? We are undeniably blessed with a healthy family, steady job, solid marriage,and a house full of beautiful children. I don't make New Year's resolutions. I've always sort of felt that if you see something that needs changing, you just do it. Time of year shouldn't matter much when it comes to self improvement. For this reason I pretty much always have a crazy long list of goals(ironically, I am choosing to list them during the first week of January :). They work out about half the time. Some are big goals, some are pretty minor, but all are equally important to me. This year I added teaching German to my 2 older children as part of our homeschool curriculum. If you'd ask me now, I'd say it's going pretty well. They seem to be picking it up pretty quickly thanks to a little app called "Duolingo" (as a byproduct, I'm learning quite a bit myself) Other goals on my list are to seriously simplify our lifestyle from our eating habits, to the things we own. As blessed as I think we are, we just have WAY. TOO. MUCH. Last but not least on my goal list is to cut down on the horrific screeching noise level in our house. There has to be a way...I'm welcoming comments or suggestions from other moms of many on what you do to keep a reasonable volume in your house when the winter energy overload seems to be audibly spilling out of your kids. With any luck I'll be back a little more often this year to keep you posted on my New Year's resolutions that aren't...