A New Month, A New Me?

As you can probably tell by by blog attendance, and my goals for this year, I'm not great at following through on whim goals. Here is what is going on:

1) Today is my 8 year anniversary! Yay me! My parents were married for 32 years this year. My grandparents (both sides) were married from a young age until my grandfathers died. I've been married eight years today, and I have so many more to look forward to! It's a beautiful thing to be married to your best friend and know that he will be there forever! This weekend his parents came over to watch Nicholas and let us go out for a while. I love times like that. I love Nicholas, but I love spending time with my husband alone too!

2) I'm a nail biter! It's a terrible habit and disgusting. I've wanted to quit for a very long time. Before I went to CT, I decided that for mom's birthday I'd take her to get a pedicure. While we were gone she got the cancer diagnosis. When we returned I took her out the first weekend (I think that is when it was). We got the pedicures and decided to go for manicures too! I haven't bitten them since. I'm really hoping that I can keep it up. I've stopped biting a couple of times for a week or a couple of weeks at a time. This is the longest that I've ever gone without biting. My fingers an finger nails are still in my mouth more than I'd like, but I'm working on that. I just run my nail over my teeth or chip at nail polish, I don't bite.

3) My face has been looking terrible for some reason lately. I've heard great things about Mary Kay's Timewise system. I bought some recently and just started using it yesterday. I've never found something that really works for my acne, I'm hoping that this will work.

4) Today starts the Holiday Grand Plan. I've tried to participate in this a time or two, and haven't been successful. I'm hoping to do well this time. We'll see. I'd been hoping to get mom to do it with me, but that isn't going to happen now.

5) Two weeks ago I posted about it being 14 weeks until December. I also emailed my sisters and asked if they wanted to do anything with me. I thought the three of us could challenge each other and the two who lost could buy the winner a pedicure. Something small but none of us spend the money on it for ourselves. One of them replied and said she wanted to take it bigger. She wanted to charge an entry fee for the competition thereby creating a real "pot" for the winner. This would also open it up to the men in the family to join.

I'm including our rules if anyone is interested in starting their own competition. The prizes are going up, because we have another person participating. If you do make your own competiton, I'd love to hear about it. Of course I'll tell you how this goes. Wish me luck, I'm gonna win!

Rules:
1. Entrance fee for the challenge is $25 per person. I have a paypal account I don’t use, but is set up to receive money. We’ll just have everyone paypal in their entrance fee to xxx@gmail.com. If you don’t know how to do this or don’t have a paypal account, let me know, we’ll work it out.
2. The contest will run from September 1 to November 30, 2009 (three months).
3. We will each create a goal for ourselves over this three month challenge. This way the challenge is personalized for each. We’ll then do prizes off of percentage of goal reached. The goals will be public (to the group) and need to be stated by September 1.
4. We’ll do mandatory weigh ins at the end of September, and the end of October. The challenge will end with a mandatory weigh in at the end of November (right after Thanksgiving, yikes).
5. This one might be confusing, but I think it would be good to allow one goal change, on September 30 (the first weigh in will be judged off of initial goal). This allows us to modify our goals if they seem to not be as realistic once we’ve started. The modified goals will need to be announced by October 1.
6. For each of the first two mandatory weigh ins we’ll have smallish prizes (of $20 depending on how many people enter). The prizes will be based off of percentage of the goal reached.
7. For the final weigh in on November 30 we’ll have three prizes.
Prize for most inches lost from waist (boys, let me know if that doesn’t seem fair I’m not sure)
Grand Prize for percentage of goal reached.
Second prize for percentage of goal reached.

Prizes:
We have the following people currently considering joining the challenge:
Dad, Sister1, Sister2, Sister's Husband, Sharon, Jared, Mother-In-Law

At $25 per person that is a total of $175. I’m thinking the prizes will be as follows:
September 30 $20 for percentage of goal lost
October 31 $20 for percentage of goal lost
November 30 $30 for inches lost
$40 for second prize percentage of goal lost
$65 grand prize for percentage of goal lost
The final prize amounts will be changed based on the total number of participants and amount received.