New Year Goals
One of Spencer’s Christmas toys
I’m not fond of the idea of New Year’s Resolutions. It seems that I have a stigma attached to the idea, something along the lines of ‘No one remembers them after the summer, so why bother?’ But perhaps part of it is that few seem to record their progress or report on their success upon reaching their resolutions. So I’m challenging my perception of resolutions and entering into a few, and will be noting progress on them as the year goes on.
A favourite pose of hers lately…hand in the mouth
Andy and I talked about what we could do as a family for a resolution or goal this year. It wasn’t too hard to figure it out (after realising a number of the ones we were thinking of couldn’t include Spencer). Simplify. This year we are going to organise ourselves to simplify our lives; specifically our household lives. If you’ve ever been to our place, you’ve come across our disaster zones. Sometimes it’s the whole house (Kate & Jacqui can testify), sometimes the disaster has been relegated to an area (as in, ‘Quick, people are coming over! Shove everything in the spare room! What? They’re staying in the spare room? Crap. Shove it in Spencer’s!’). One way or another, we are dually not organised about our goods and items and we have too much. This year we, as a family, will be working on simplifying what we own and organising it. We have enough disorganisation in our lives, we really don’t need it at home too. The ‘Live simply in order to simply live’ mentality is what we are striving for here. We have definitely found over the years that living simply is harder to do and definitely takes much more work. We are looking forward to the benefits though.
Super cute smile!
Personal goals for me are to lose 10-15lbs and maintain that weight for the year (reasonable enough) and to find more creative ways to incorporate our liturgical year into our daily lives as a family.
Financially, we are looking to drastically reduce our spending to attempt to live off of Andy’s salary so that mine can all be put towards savings. This is one that will definitely challenge us a lot, but it is in line with our ‘living simply’ goal and has a major benefit of actually having savings, which also means more money to be able to give to charities (we’d ideally like to be spending 10% of our income to charities. I think we’re currently at 5%). And I’ll be honest, there are a lot of culinary benefits to this too. I’m looking forward to blogging about how this one affects us :).
I’m actually looking forward to all these challenges. If we can accomplish them, even half of each of them, we will be in a pretty awesome space by the turn of 2014.
My first step to our organisation: a weekly calendar. It’s in it’s experimental stage currently, but it’s permanently mounted. I think it will really help with my daily disorganisation of not knowing what is happening this week. More posts to come about our goals this year!
The hat I knitted (mentioned in my last 7 Quick Takes) and some fingerless-mitts for my friend Kate, just started. Both projects from the book Simple Knitting: A Complete How-to-Knit Workshop with 20 Projects by Erika Knight.
Have you challenged yourself to anything this year?
PS. Anyone see similarities between the two?
5 Comments
A. A.
I prefer goals to resolutions, too. Messing up on a goal may delay the end date of my accomplishment, but I regroup and keep working toward achieving that goal. If I break a resolution I tend to just give up.
I read something this week that said 80% of people bail on New Year resolutions by the end of the 2nd week of January, and 98% bail on their resolutions by the end of the 4th week. Don’t know how true or accurate the stats are, but definitely something to think about. I have a friend who made (in, like,1986!) a New Year’s resolution to never make New Year’s resolutions… so far he’s kept it! Guess he’s part of the 2%!
hawaii52
Grow tomatoes!
andy
🙂 We did a few tomatoes last year. The small ones turned out quite well. I think only 1 roma grew. But they sure were amazing!
Kassie Rutherford
Simplify is my theme this year, too! I’m just shocked at how complicated simplifying is.
I think I’m doing it wrong. :/
jane
Anne – I totally understand the desire to not make any!! Glad it worked out for him 🙂
Dad – we’ll be trying tomatoes again this year. Hopefully it’ll work out better this year…what with not having to move mid-growing season and all.
Kassie – you’re not doing it wrong; it is the narrow, jagged and mountainous trek. It’s much much easier to live a non-simple lifestyle (as backwards as it sounds)