Hey everyone, I hope you are all doing well. We are coming out of a cold spell here, and happy to see some warmer temperatures. We have not set any New Year’s resolutions as we want to develop some lasting habits and routines that help draw our family closer. We will continue to work on routines that we have established, while adding new ones slowly.
I have a lot of plans for our family, home, and blog this year, and I pray that GOD will lead me in a way that I can inspire others and help them to create some simple habits that lead to a peaceful year. We will be focusing more on intentional living, making rest more of a priority, and creating a more peaceful rhythm for our family.
I am also hoping that these new habits will help us to reduce clutter, chaos, and overwhelm in our home while helping us to reduce conflicts amongst ourselves. I am hoping to focus on one biblical fruit or trait each month to help our kiddos develop the character that this world needs more of… we strive to have our children be respectful, responsible, fair, and caring citizens, but we also know that they will model what they see, so these new habits will benefit all of us and those around us.
We have a vision of what we want to accomplish, so making the plan to get there is so IMPORTANT! Below are some of the habits that we are using to get to where we want to go in 2026.
Getting Started
This month, we will be focusing on peace and creating a more peaceful morning routine. I had hoped to have this month’s posts all ready and scheduled, but the past few months here have been lacking a lot of time for blogging. It’s all ok because I know that GOD works in HIS time and that HE will lead me in what I need to do, when I need to do it.
I think the top three habits would be to get your bills organized, start a family calendar, and meal planning, in no specific order. I also feel that Bible Study is important to me and my family, but some families may not feel the same. I would probably start with a calendar, if I had to start from scratch, but below are the things that I have been working on:
Bill Pay
I just printed out my bill pay sheets and transferred all the information over to them for 2026. It is nice having some empty spaces, as we have paid off a few things last year. After the year we had in 2025, it has become very clear that the bill paying needs to be something that anyone could pick up and take care of in the event that, I was incapacitated for some reason.
To help with this, I have made a password keeper to add with the bill pay information so that a designated person could log in to the accounts and keep the house running in the event of an emergency.
This will be one of my main priorities this month… get these forms filled out and put in a safe place!
Here is the printable that I came up with:
There are several backgrounds to choose from, and I have tried to include places for the required information to log into the websites. This could also be done in a simple notebook as well, but why not make something pretty?
The events from last year also made it abundantly clear that we needed to have a log of all of our financial account information in one place… This information will be kept in our safe so it doesn’t get misused. I will be adding the bank phone numbers to the notes sections as well, in case my wallet or phone were ever misplaced or stolen.
Here is that printable:
I was going to wait and link all the products at the bottom, but it is just a little easier for me to link them as I go… so here is my disclaimer:
**This post does contain some affiliate and/or referral links to products and/or services that we use. If you happen to click through a link and make a purchase, we may earn a teensy-weensy small commission (at NO EXTRA cost to you) if a purchase is made through these links. These links help to support our family, our blog, and our homeschooling mission. This means that we can keep bringing you great recipes, ideas, and tips for FREE! Click HERE for a full disclaimer. –Thank you!
Calendar
The other big thing that keeps our household running fairly smoothly is our calendar! We have a few calendars… that may sound complicated, but it really isn’t too bad. We need more peace and less chaos in our home, so knowing what we have planned at a glance can really help everyone.
We have been using our online Cozi Calendar for a very long time, and I still love it! It is my go-to calendar that I use most consistently. I then check this calendar to update my paper calendar in the kitchen.
I have recently ordered a couple of large yearly calendars and some mini post-it notes to see how that works for us… I’ll keep you updated on that!
I’m not sure which one will work best, and they were both on sale, so I will gift the one we don’t use to someone else. Here is the link for the landscape one and the vertical one.
I also check out the upcoming birthdays and special holidays to put on the calendar to make sure I can get prepared for them… see the next section on Meal Plans for more information. Having all of this information helps me to see what things I can pencil in places, and sometimes I can ‘stack’ things together… ex: I have a croissant recipe that I REALLY want to try and January 30th happens to be National Croissant Day, so I could cross something off my list and make it fun too if I have the kids help. An extra bonus is that we could count this as our Life Skills lesson for the day!
It is hard to plan special events when you don’t keep things in mind … our calendars help us to keep track of things and make plans ahead of time. I’m hoping that these larger calendars will help even more, as we won’t have to flip pages or wait for an app to load to see what we have going on for the year. In the future, I would love to make a dry-erase calendar or something that we can reuse from year to year.
The kids also have a fun calendar that they use for school, and we make fun little printables for special holidays and such. It helps teach the younger ones the importance of dates, and the fun pictures give them something to look forward to.
I think that calendars and planners are a really great tool for everyone, so I try to give out pocket calendars with our Polar Express party favors as well.
I can’t send out calendars to everyone, but here is a variety pack of printable calendars that can be edited to suit your needs. You can also make your own calendars and planners on CANVA.
Update: The calendars came in but I’m having a hard time deciding! The wider one would have to be folded at the top to fit where our current calendars go. It is my favorite as it has the lunar phases and Biblical Feast dates already written in!
The taller one would fit perfectly on my door, or maybe the side of the fridge, but it has the bare minimum of holidays. Both calendars have about the same size squares, the mini post-its will need to be cut in 1/2 to work. The wider one is made of paper while the taller one has a plastic coating to it and would probably be more durable over all. It also has a goal section at the bottom that I’d probably never use.
Decisions, decisions… so much harder than I thought it would be, but I think I’m going to go with the wider one… the colors are a little more vibrant than I’d like for the kitchen, but I’m thinking it might work the best. I’ll try to post pictures when I decide and get it up.
You might also find our planning notebooks to be helpful:
Meal Plans
Our Perpetual Meal Plans have been working out really well for us, and with the FREE CHOICE days that we have included, it gives us a chance to try out different recipes. I may need to update these sometime, as we do have more family members in our home now, and they have some favorite meals that they would like included in the rotation. I encourage everyone to try at least one new recipe a month!
Our PMPs also have special holidays included, so I will be looking over those as well as the upcoming birthdays, so I can plan for those special meals. I will also be printing out a new batch of grocery lists to have ready on the fridge. It is handy to have them where everyone can access them and write what we need when we get low on something.
I also have a list of all the upcoming holidays and fun menus for many of them on our blog… search for ‘Special Holiday Meals’. Here is a link to January’s meals:
Special Holiday Meals: January Edition
Here is a link to some of our FREE printables that can get you started:
Weekly Meal Planning and Grocery List Printable
perpetual-meal-planner-blank-1
Bible Study
I am working on a Bible Study Devotional that we can use with our homeschool this year. I also hope to use this with our Sabbath dinners, but we will see how that goes. I will post the link to that as soon as I get it ready!
We will also be learning more about the Biblical Feasts and trying to incorporate more of those aspects into our lives.
Find more links here:
Sabbath & Biblical Feasts
Not everyone needs to think about the following areas, but we do homeschool, and we have a family garden, so I have included these areas in this post.
Homeschool Plans
As I said previously, I do plan to have a special devotional on PEACE for this month. We will also incorporate the song, ‘Peace Like a River’, into our lessons for the month. There is so much we can do with this that I haven’t completely written out all of my plans, but I will get them together so you can use them as well. I have divided the different school subjects by months so that I can FOCUS on one area at a time.
I plan to make a printable about how to integrate FAITH into your homeschool, but this month we will be concentrating on adding more FAITH-based works through Financial Literacy. Just one subject at a time, and we will make it happen!
Some ways we are doing this are:
- Biblical Stewardship:
- teaching financial principles through a biblical lens
- emphasis on the fact that EVERYTHING we have belongs to GOD
- learning to FAITHfully manage our resources
- Budgeting & Generosity
- researching what the Bible says about charity, giving to the poor, and tithing
- creating budgets that allow us to give to others in need
- Bible verses related to contentment, greed, money, and giving
- Discussing needs vs. wants
- ex: Luke 12:15, Proverbs 21:20, Psalm 24:1, Hebrews 13:5, etc.
Some of these ideas have been incorporated into our devotional to ‘stack’ things, and make it so much easier for me. It also helps that our homeschool schedule can be planned around other events, so it helps to see when we have time to devote to longer studies or if we need to plan for something a little shorter.
You can find more Homeschool Printables here:
Homeschool Printables
Garden Plans/Planting/Preserving Schedules
I just realized that we only have 6-8 weeks before planting time comes around here! It is so crazy how quickly time flies. I need to get my seeds started, which means I need to get a few things ordered ASAP.
I have been working on some very special gardening guides for this year … we really want to plant some more edible flowers and try some more CHAOS gardening, so that will be a big FOCUS for us this year. I would also like to review some of the permaculture ideas that I have been learning about and maybe share some of my own ideas with others.
I plan to visit the Flea Market more to stock up on some of the fresh goodies that we aren’t able to grow, so that we can get more food preserved and in our pantry… this will hopefully be a project that we get to this year. This will provide us with better nutrition and hopefully some savings on our increasing grocery expenses.
Here is our post from last January for some inspiration:
Victory Garden Planning – January 2024
While our animals are not technically part of the garden, I will include a little about them here. We do plan to add some more critters this year, especially more ducks! They have been a steadier source of eggs for us than our chickens have been, so we want to add more of them. We also plan to build some better tractors at some point, but for now, we are using what we have.
We have been trying to consolidate the animal chores and the garden chores to make things a little easier for everyone, so we look forward to sharing more about that with you later.
Most people would rather read blogs or watch videos instead of adding the stress of what to write or make to their lives, but we do both, and that does take a little time. When things are crazy, these are the areas that get neglected first, but I’d like to make a plan so that I do have something coming out on a regular basis.
Blog/YouTube
There’s more? Yes, we have a busy, busy life, but we try to share our experiences with others, and we plan to continue to do so. I don’t know to what extent we will be sharing or how often, but we do have plans to continue working on our blog and our YouTube channel. I have written out a very loose outline of things that I want to work on for both areas, as time allows.
As I said before, I have tried to ‘assign’ a theme for each month and will try to coordinate posts and videos to go along with that, so hopefully it will make things a little more streamlined on our end here.
Be sure to check out our channel, subscribe, and like, so you don’t miss any new videos.
Other
We don’t want our schedules to be so FULL that we don’t have time for other stuff. We have several HOME IMPROVEMENT projects that NEED to be completed ASAP, so with some careful planning, we should be able to find some pockets of time to get these completed.
There are plans for other things as well, like some massive decluttering, but we will tackle these one thing, one area at a time. We also have some plans to do a bit of visiting with family that don’t live close, so we will be finding times that work with them and us.
Here are some more printables that you might find helpful:
Ultimate Holiday Planning: A 12 Week Strategy
If you haven’t started a Holiday Planner yet, then that would be a good thing to put on your To-Do list right now!
I will update this post as the corresponding posts/printables are ready, but hopefully, this will give you a starting place on what you can focus on for the upcoming year. If you have something that you would like us to write about, then please let us know in the comments.
Don’t get overwhelmed! This post may sound complicated, but we already have the backbones of most of this in place, and we just need to add a few tweaks here and there to get to where we want to be. The most important thing is to decide WHERE YOU WANT TO BE at the end of the DAY, the WEEK, the MONTH, and the YEAR.
Once you know where you want to be, you can make a plan or map to get to where you want to go. Our hope is that our experiences can help you get there!
May GOD BLESS you in all that you do!
Pollywog's Place Blog 
One thought on “Embracing a Slower Pace: Simple Habits for a PEACEful Year”