Saturday, January 1, 2011

A fresh start

I love this time of year! I know not everyone gets into the whole "new year's resolutions" thing, but I definitely do. I love the feeling of a fresh start. I admit it may be silly because we should be able to start afresh at any time of the year, but somehow it just feels natural to me to find new motivation on January 1st.

So for the last several weeks I've been pondering what my 2011 goals would be. Part of the pondering has been trying to keep it realistic and not overwhelming. I keep reminding myself that I have two young children who take up a lot of my time, so I don't want to be too over zealous in my goals, but at the same time I think it's good to push yourself to be better.

So here is my list, not necessarily in any particular order...

1. Daily Bible reading. Jeremy found us a chronological reading plan that has you read one chapter each day so we're both going to follow that. One chapter a day feels manageable to me with two little kids. Anything beyond that will be a bonus.

2. Work on my 2011 reading list. I posted this on the sidebar of my blog recently. In 2010 I read about ten books I think, so my list for 2011 is definitely ambitious, but I'm okay with that. I started my first book a few weeks ago so I'm off to a good start already!

3. Get into a habit of having family devotions. We're not sure yet exactly what we're going to do for this, but we know we want to do it. Given the age of our kids it'll probably be just a few minutes each day.

4. No TV or internet for me and Jeremy between dinnertime and when Clara goes to bed. I confess we give too much of our time to these things and this will help us have some better quality time with our girls as a family.

5. Work on Kitchen Stewardship's Top 10 Foundational Habits (found here). We don't eat too terribly I think, but at the same time there is so much room for improvement. In order to keep myself focused and not get overwhelmed I decided to start with this list. My plan is to just work my way down the list, implementing one new thing at a time. A few of them we are already doing.

6. Potty train Clara. Pretty self-explanatory. I think she's probably ready. I just need to work up my own motivation and find a time when we can really focus on it. It helps that Lola recently decided to quit nursing.

7. Work toward a routine for me and the girls. I'm hoping Steady Days will be of some help to me in this area. Given how young Lola is I feel like it's kind of hard to have much of a routine other than meals and naps, but I definitely want to work toward one as she gets a little older.

8. Have two Norwex parties per month. If I can meet this goal I should be keeping my business moving in the right direction and providing us with a little extra income, without taking me away from my family too much.

9. Take the girls outside on every nice day. Now I know that "nice" is a relative term and I also know that there will be nice days when we have too much going on to go outside and play, but I wanted to aim high on this one because I think it's really important for all of us to get out and enjoy nature as much as we can. I don't want my girls to be couch potatoes.

10. Do more crafts. :) This is very vague, but I just know that crafts are good for my soul. I've started a list of some seasonal projects that I'd like to work one, mostly Christmas crafts but a few others as well. Now that I'm not nursing Lola all evening every evening I think I might be able to get a few crafty things done once in awhile.

And that's it. It was tempting to make my list so much longer, but stopping at ten items seemed wise. Now for some tea and toast and a fresh notebook to get myself organized for the coming week.

2 comments:

Brenda and Dan said...

Wow...that is quite a list :)

Nicci said...

Love your book list! Another great one to add is Loving Our Kids on Purpose by Danny Silk. Definitely worth taking the time to read.