Are your lamps filled?

Happy 2010
Or, “Twenty-ten”
Or, Two thousand ten
However you say it, I hope that it has been a wonderful year so far!

I love the beginning of a new year
365 more days
of endless possibilities!

It's sad that the holidays are over.
Two wonderful weeks with my family was just awesome! Yes, Monday, was back to the grind. This is what my house looked like as I grabbed my bag, water bottle and peppermint tea to head out the door for work. Mush bowls full, lunch boxes ready I had to snap this photo as
this is what I see 49 weeks out of the year
Monday-Friday.

This made it all worth it...
coming home and find a love letter in my notebook from the
love of my life "Mr. Smith"!

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WHICH, brings me to the reason for this post.
(BTW...the following photos were all taken with only lamplight---
I set my camera to "night mode")
Having children almost eight years apart, meant that Jade wanted to go and attend the New Years Eve party for the 14-18 year old youth in our area at BYU-I. We were feeling SO blessed to have such a wonderful thing for our son to go to that was safe and free from worrisome things.
This meant, that Ethan and Tracy and I all enjoyed an evening together. Ethan was SO excited to watch the "ball drop" when it was New Years. Needless to say, we all fell asleep watching a movie. Thank goodness I had set an alarm for 11:50 so we could make sure and make it to get Jade from his party at 12:30.

We woke Ethan up and as they were counting from 30 to 1 and we were also counting and we got to see the "ball drop" in Time Square and even got to see Dick Clark while it was happening. (It is SO sad to see what age and a stroke has done to him).
Well, even though Ethan's eyes were wide open, he couldn't remember a thing the next day.

SO, we celebrated New Years
on Sunday night with a special dinner and even watched a "Re-run" of the ball dropping on You-Tube.

We thought it would be fun for the boys to go without electric lights for the evening and a good opportunity for us to experiment with preparedness, so we turned off all of our lights, pulled out our various oil lanterns and lamps and ate chili over baked potatoes by the warm flickering light common to an episode of Little House on the Prairie.
LOTS of Fun!

Tracy getting all of our lanterns filled with oil and lit up.

I've never liked any of these lamps and lanterns very well.
I always thought they were ugly, or for decoration only...that is until tonight.
Tonight I found out just how AWESOME they really were and they beat the socks off of just ordinary candles.

Note: We do have several Coleman mantle-style lanterns for camping. They are very bright but it is not advised to use this type of lantern indoors. Aladdin makes a very bright mantle lamp that is for indoor use but they are expensive (around $150).

We didn't allow the electric lights to be turned on at all and so we did have a "flashlight lantern" that we took to the bathroom and around the house when we needed to go to another room.

We realized how reliant we are on light and it also made us more aware of areas that we need to improve on as far as supplies and what really works best if we were to be for an extended period of time without power.

Ethan couldn't wipe the grin off his face all night.
It's amazing that something as simple as eating a boring dinner of Chili and baked potatoes could be SO exciting to a little kid.
Add a little lamp light and any meal is YUMMY to kids!

We wacked our "Chocolate orange" on the table and that was dessert. Ethan made sure we each got equal amounts of the orange slices

New Year's Celebration just wouldn't be complete without POPPERS!
HOORAY!!

This photo shows we had FUN!!

We enjoyed our lamp light dinner
so much that we did it again on Monday night.
Leftover Clam Chowder never tasted so good either!

What an experience
to be in complete darkness except for one lantern to do the dishes.
I quite enjoyed it!

We even pulled out Tracy's Christmas gift and lit it up for a moment. Money well spent!

SO, I challenge you
to take an evening this month and do NOT use any lights at all for one evening. It will give you a feeling for how you would survive if you were out of power AND it will help you realize and key into "How your lamps are filled" and are you prepared for an emergency if it were to come your way.

We realized we didn't like some of our lamps as well as others, and also realized it would be a good idea to get a better supply of lamp oil and we even purchased some more lamps in the style that we liked best, so heaven forbid, if we do have to deal without power in the future,(which just may happen as we have had two power outages in the past 3 weeks)
we can enjoy the warmth that comes from
"having our lamps filled"
and being prepared for whatever comes our way!

(BTW...to burn a lamp with lamp oil only costs .06 per hour...pretty amazing).

Besides making sure my lamps are filled...
(by LAMPS I mean making sure our food storage is being replenished monthly, making sure positive and happy memories are being deposited in my families memory banks daily and making sure to take a few minutes each day for ME to recharge my batteries so I have plenty to give to others).
These are the things I want to accomplish in 2010
I want to…

Live Simply... Love Generously

Care Deeply... Speak Kindly

Even though we are only eight days into the New Year, I can already tell that this is going to be a wonderful year with many opportunities to grow and accomplish great things and to help and serve others!
"The best is yet to be!"