If I were a New Year's Resolution kind of person, and I'm sure by now you can tell I'm not, here are a few things I'd be resoluting:

Last year I learned The Lord's Prayer in Old English, which is especially handy to know when some person says he can't possibly be expected to understand the Authorized Version of the Bible because he doesn't speak "Old English." You should see their faces when you say, "Actually the KJV is modern English. Old English is like Faeder ure, thu the aert on heofenum; si thin nama gehalgod..." *wicked grin*

This year I thought it would be fun to learn it in Middle English - you know, Chaucer's English. And John Wycliff's.



The only problem with this is I've been unable to find to find an online recording of someone reciting it as I did for the Old English version. I've found a few Middle English resources so I'm trying to work out the pronunciation. Maybe I'll post a transliteration if I can figure out one that seems reasonable.

I've been interested in Pilates since Samantha posted about it a couple of months ago, and I recently found a Pilates for Beginners kit that has a beginners video, a neck cushion, and a huge rubber band for some of the excercises. The video is mostly breathing and posture excercises, which I've done until I'm, um, well, bored with the video (Anne Marie, don't tell Mom I said the B-word!), so I'd like to get either another video or a book, and do the excercises regularly.

Also on the health and fitness front, I really need to get back on the Protein Power diet. My grandmother was diabetic, and I've always had blood sugar trouble so I need to be really careful about carbohydrates. I did PP in 1999 after baby #5 was born and it made me feel great - more energetic than I'd felt in a decade - but then we had a baby and moved, and moved again and had another baby, and I haven't been as disciplined as I should be.

Finally, and this one I really am doing, I'm trying to read more to my younger kids. I read to my first four a lot but with added homeschooling and household responsibilities as our family grows, I have not made the effort I should have to read to my younger ones. In the mornings I'm reading the Chronicles of Narnia to them - we're on book 3 now, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (the discerning reader will notice that we used the original numbering, not the stupid modern numbering), and the kids love it. Caspian, Lucy, Edmund, Eustace, and Reepicheep have just left Deathwater Island and are headed out to open sea again. In the afternoons we're reading from E. Nesbit's The Complete Book of Dragons, a delightful collection of short stories about real old-fashioned dragonish dragons, not the perverse modern kind with hearts of gold. The kids and I are all enjoying it, especially my 3-year-old son whose specialty is killing monsters.