Goal: Raise my children to be intelligent, compassionate, responsible, successful, and unique by providing them with a variety of experiences
At the Martin home lately, we’ve been listening to a Christmas playlist on Pandora Radio. Today was no exception. After Caleb’s morning nap, instead of having the television on, we listened to Christmas tunes as he ate and played. Then, we read a pop-up book version of The Twelve Days of Christmas to extend our spirit into the reading realm. Caleb then spoke his first word: “partridge”. Okay…that last part didn’t actually happen, but I did reinforce the sign language that we’ve introduced.
I added two new goals to my list today. They are as follows: “Continue working hard in the kitchen (splitting dinner duty with Amanda, trying new recipes, experimenting with pairings, etc.)” and “Whenever curious about a topic, do some research about it—continue valuing lifelong learning”. As I work with my list, I find that many goals that I have in mind are not “officially” on the list yet. I look forward to continuously updating my list as I change as a person.
Goal: Pay all of my bills on time
Here’s an anecdote for you, the theme being: “It never hurts to call and ask. In fact, sometimes it feels good—very, very, good”!
Today, we got a bill from our cable and internet provider. We get the bill in the mail every month, so I wasn’t surprised to see it. I was, however, quite surprised to see that we were being billed a higher fee than we had been the previous month. Huh, I thought to myself. That prompted me to pull out my file for this particular bill in order to see how much we were paying last year at this time because it seemed to me that the fees had been going up and up and up for a while. I discovered that over the course of a year, the amount of our monthly bill increased almost $20.00! Over the course of a year, then, that amounts to $240.00. Yikes! With bill in hand, I made a phone call. After finding out about some inexplicable “rate increases”, I was passed off to a higher-up. Of said higher-up, I asked (nicely, mind you) for answers to a couple of key questions, the most important of which was: “What is the benefit of staying with your company as my provider when several other viable and more affordable options exist?” And I’ll tell you what—to this question, the guy gave me a great answer……and then, he gave me an even greater promotion that lowered our bill by $30.00 a month ($360.00 a year). Amazing! Unreal! Inspirational (by that, I mean that I almost started calling all of the companies with which I have bills to “work my [newfound] magic”, but I didn’t want to press my luck—maybe tomorrow?)!
