It’s resolution time again, y’all. I absolutely love planning my New Year’s Resolutions. I am all about the planning over here. If there was a gold medal in planning, I would win hands down. However, that is only a small piece of the bigger puzzle, which should be more focused on the completion of those resolutions. Here is a painful admission for you: last year, I only completed about 35% of my resolutions. Because of this miserable failure, I have made a decision to revamp the way that I make resolutions.
I used to make New Year’s Resolutions that would almost force me to fail. I would take an idea, make it extreme and write that down as a goal for the year. For example, one of my resolutions last year was to put up a blog every day. That is a perfect example of setting yourself up to fail. I am a busy mom with 3 kids who live with us, a full time job and took college classes most of the year. I barely had time to breathe, let alone put energy into writing a blog every day.
This year I have decided to make my goals more open ended and thus more attainable. This sounds like a cop out, I know, but hear me out. You will be able to see from my resolutions below that I am still going to be working hard throughout the year to achieve these goals. I know that taking a step backwards like this and making goals in this format would make some of you absolutely bonkers and that is fine. If you are looking for SMART goals, you need to look elsewhere.
It boils down to this: I want to do everything that I can do to help myself achieve more of the goals that I set for myself at the beginning of the year. I want to end the year feeling positive about my performance on said goals and ready to tackle the next year. I also want to provide more updates than I did last year. I need to be held accountable for these resolutions and am going to use this blog as an outlet for that accountability.
I have divided mine into four different areas: family, personal, money, and extra. I certainly didn’t intend to have the same number of resolutions in each of the four areas, but then the pattern-maker in me took over.
2015 New Year’s Resolutions
Family
1. Go on more dates with Corry – we did a decent job of this last year, but ultimately a successful long term marriage takes work and time away from other responsibilities. Ideally I would like this to be monthly.
2. Have personal dates each of my kids – as sad as it is to hear, rarely do I get alone time with any of the 3 kids that live at our house. I normally have all of the kids together, or the two younger ones. I would like to take them out every so often by themselves to make them feel special and increase my bond with all three of them separately.
3. Establish and keep up a bedtime routine – chastize me now, but I have never had a bedtime routine for my kids. Some days we read, some days we stay up late, some days we don’t eat until 9. In a perfect world, by December, I would like for there to be a familiar routine for the kids when it comes to bedtimes.
4. More playtimes, less screen time – my kids are screen junkies. Please don’t judge me. The ‘no screen time before 2’ message did not make it to my house. I would like to change some of that and limit the TV/screen time to a minimum on a daily basis. They do a good job of this, but I want my kids to play without interaction with electronic equipment, especially with the large volume of toys that have been collected over the Christmas and birthday season.
Personal
1. Work out 3x per week, 30 mins per day – in the last few years, my office has opened a fairly impressive small gym in the top floor of our building. For months I was working out before work and I would like to start that again. I just need to get my butt in gear and get started again. I am hearing the ‘it takes 21 days to make a habit’ mantra.
2. Take care of me – for a few years after I had my children, I felt like I lost myself. I was overwhelmed and swamped with the complete life change and to be honest, I feel like I am just now getting back to close to the person that I was before I had children. I would like to focus time and energy this year on taking care of me, as selfish as that sounds. I am lumping a bunch of items in this group, like journaling, getting a good ‘face’ routine, wearing makeup more, getting back into wearing heels, etc.
3. Lose 60lbs by December 31, 2015 – 2014 was a decent year for weight loss for me. According to my thyroid doctor, I am down 40lbs last year, and I would like to do better than that in 2015. Corry and I have had grand success with some of the Advocare products and, more importantly, just realizing that healthy eating habits need to be a focus for the family. I have confidence that I can blow this goal out of the water in 2015!
4. Drink at least 100oz of water daily – in the height of my weight loss in 2014, I was drinking 180ish oz. of water per day and feeling awesome. I had more energy. I was sleeping better. I could clearly think. Yes, I was going to the bathroom like 95 times per day but it was worth it and I would like to make that a habit.
Money
1. Save at least $2,000 by December 31, 2015 by taking meals to work – in order for me to maintain weight loss, I have to take my breakfasts, lunches and snacks to work every day. The good part about that is that you also save money by not eating out during those meals. Even if you assume that I spent $4 for breakfast and $6 for lunch and $2 for snacks every day, which are relatively low estimates for eating out, that could still save $240 ish a month just by taking those meals to work.
2. Meal plan & weekly grocery shop – I need to reiterate: I love to plan. Based on how my Pinterest looks, I love to plan meals for my family. As much as I love to monthly grocery shop, I can’t always give that the attention that it needs and it is ultimately quicker for me to weekly grocery shop. I can think about what I need in the car on the way to the store instead of spending at least an hour trying to go through 25ish recipes and trying to determine what we need to last us for a month.
3. Eat out no more than 4x per month – let’s face it: sometimes I am lazy and just want someone else to do the cooking, especially if Corry is out of town. I want to resolve to eat out no more than 4 times a month but ideally I would like for it to be no more than twice per month. I am keeping track of what we are eating every day for dinner/weekend meals in my planner so I will be able to remember when we ate out and what we had.
4. Save $3,000 more in our emergency stash – we have a relatively decent sized stash for emergencies saved up already, but it could always be bigger. I would like to increase that by at least $3,000 by the end of the year.
Extra
1. Complete RAK Facebook challenge – this is the Random Acts of Kindness Facebook challenge that I just signed up for. Last year I signed up but never did anything about it. This year I added it to my resolutions for the year, so I would be constantly reminded of it and not quite as forgetful as I was last year.
2. Store at least 7 days’ worth of water – it is time for me to get serious about storing some water for emergencies. In my opinion, water is one of the most important things that you can store for any kind of an emergency. Seven days certainly isn’t a lot but it is a start.
3. Build rocket heater/stove with Corry – we talked about building one of these last year and never did. 2015 will be the year.
4. Blog 3x per week – this should be self-explanatory and completely achievable.
