Happy Valentine Year!

I hope you all had a wonderful Valentine's Day! The day came and went without much excitement in my house. Which got me thinking. This year as I'm making my business goals and coming up with new art projects and starting Mops and my Son starting school it's going to be a very busy year. How will I be able to keep my marriage healthy , it's the most important relationship I have in life next to God. I think I came up with a solution for this year. & it just so happens to include a craft project and a journaling opportunity.

What I materialistically would've liked for Valentines Day was Wine, Roses, Jewelry, Candy. All of the usual lovely things that gets a girls heart melting but what I really needed was not any of those things. It was to stop everything for my husband & show him he is still the #1 relationship I will have here on Earth.
A great and wise friend taught me a lesson in my marriage that I hope I will always remember & that must be shared. I even have to use some of her own words to explain it because it's so new to me I don't feel I could explain the concept as well as she did.

So here it is. ... None of us deserve roses and wine and chocolates and our husband don't deserve a clean house to come to. We do those things because we are loved but NOT because we earned them! We have to follow Christ's example in this - We love because He loved us first. Practicing this in our marriages for a few months will show huge changes. We learn that we are not keeping tallies for each other that we are doing things for each other simply because we love each other. God's example of love isn't 50/50. It is 100/0. In a truly Godly relationship, the ratio looks like this 100/100. You are responsible for only your 100, even if your spouse does a big fat zero in the relationship. But it is your 100 that will move your spouse to respond. I've learned that I cannot give 100% on my own but that I have to ask God to help me. Otherwise we might get upset when our spouse doesn't respond the way we want.

Didn't she say that so simply and beautifully? Thank you so much Jenny for opening my eyes to this lesson. So on a daily basis, maybe even hourly I will have to be very conscience of the energy I'm putting into showing my husband my love.

Right after I had my second child my husband was in a job he hated and yet he worked so hard at this physically and emotionally draining job. Since we were on such a tight budget I also had to make his lunches everyday so to show my gratitude for him taking care of our family financially and in all other aspects I wrote in my notebook 365 reasons i loved him. Then I decorated some notebook paper and wrote down each one individually. I cut out these pieces of paper and put them on top of his lunch so that every day no matter how hard a day he was having I hoped he would know how much we all loved him for taking care of us. Now that he has a job he loves he was able to relay that when I did that for him it was really helpful to keep his mind on the big picture.

Everyday I will write something down that I loved about him. Whether it's something he did or just something I admired about him that day. Since I started on Valentines Day. My journal looks like this so far.

By next year on Valentine's Day I will have 365 more reasons I love him. It might even serve as part of his gift next year for him to see all the good he's done that year and how I appreciate him.

It sounds complicated and time consuming but you can try and conform this project how it will work for you. Maybe you have a daily planner you could jot something down in everyday. Maybe you can only remember to do it once a week. However you do it. I guarantee it will be appreciated.

I chose to use these Crown tags with Studs to write my daily affirmations to my husband because of the masculine feel these tags have but here are a few more options I have put in my Etsy shop.

Happy Valentine Year!