Resolutions and balance

Since we are already seventeen days into the new year, I have decided that this year I am not going to make any resolutions. They never seem to pan out very well for me anyway. This year I have decided to set some new "guidelines" for myself and see if that mindset will work out any better.

My first one is to eat better. Eat less. Work out more. Hopefully by doing these things I will reach the BMI desired by my Mii character on the Wii Fit. As I said before, I am seventeen days in and not seeing too much of a difference and finding it difficult to find the "me" time I need to get the calories burning. I realize that it is better to go slow because that is the only way that the weight will actually stay off, but seeing results is what gets me motivated to continue.

I am trying to be more "green". We are trying to use less electricity. Turning our heat down a few degrees and relying more on blankets. My new mantra is "reduce, reuse, recycle" (thank you Jack Johnson). I can actually feel my Grama J smiling down on me every time I save a bread bag to reuse. She was the original greenie - she was SO ahead of the times. I shake the leftover crumbs out of the bread bags and stick them in my diaper bags to use for dirty diapers when we are out somewhere. I also used one the other day when I made an extra meatloaf and was out of tinfoil. My regular zip locks were the wrong dimension to fit the loaf pan so I grabbed a couple of bread bags and voila' perfect fit. If I can get one more use out of something other than the purpose it was intended, I figure one less thing to take up space in the landfill.

I am trying to get more organized. I am feeling extremely bogged down by clutter lately. So much so that I can feel it wearing on me. It seems that every time I open a cupboard or closet trying to put something away I am inundated with things that just don't need to be in there. I was just putting clothes away in Hailey's room and since she received so many new duds for Christmas and her birthday, it is a chore to find a place for the new stuff. I see things hanging and things in drawers that I know are too small yet are still in there taking up very necessary space. The drawers and closet are so chucked full that I forget what is in there sometimes. Forgetting that you have stuff makes you think you need more stuff so you go out and buy it which is bad on our checkbook and my three R's mantra from the paragraph above. The problem is not isolated to her room, our house just seems to have a clutter epidemic right now. I started making a bit of a dent in the laundry room yesterday, but time is a limited commodity and you have to put out the biggest fires first. I just need to motivate myself to tackle one room a week and go through all the drawers and closets bit by bit until the whole house is de-cluttered. At that point, I no doubt will have to start over at square one again!

I really want to get back into scrapbooking. It is something I really enjoy doing, but it is very time consuming. I would at least like to get Evan and Hailey's books caught up to the point of Spencer's and then maybe re-evaluate what I want to scrapbook and what is covered well enough in this blog. I just need to sit down some night and do it, but my scrapbook area is a disaster. (See above paragraph regarding clutter.)

I have massive amounts of photo projects that I plan to work on this year. It seems like almost every frame I have in my house is full of outdated photos. My upstairs hallway/gallery is basically an homage to Spencer. You would never know we had two more children. It makes me feel really bad. So I want to update frames and make things more equal. I also want to get some frames to do the family display on the wall of my basement landing. That wall has been calling out for some love for the past three years. I would like to have some photographs that I have taken developed in large sizes or maybe gallery wrapped onto canvas so that they could be displayed in our home. (Trent actually surprised me by having the same idea - what a good hubby!) I want to get my 2007/2008 blog posts published into a book. This is a HUGE source of stress for me right now because I actually attempted to start this process over Christmas break. The main site that I knew did this is not accepting the Blogger platform right now. In google-ing other sites I found a couple more that would print blog books. The one posted on their site that they have gone out of business and the other keeps giving me error messages when I try to have them download my blog to their site. One of the main reasons I started this blog was because I knew that it could be published to a hard copy book. I don't trust all of my feelings, photos, and words floating around in cyberspace without some sort of backup. I have been burned by computers too many times. So if anyone who is reading this has any ideas...PLEASE, let me know!

One of my resolutions from last year was to try to "live in the moment" more with the kids. This is one that I actually think I did pretty well with. I did a lot of playing and let the chores go by the wayside probably more often than I should have. It is so easy to get caught up in what has to be done and forget about what is really important. This year I have decided that every day I want to make each of my kids laugh (really laugh) and make sure I read them at least one book. (In Spencer's case, he can read to me.) If these two things are happening everyday - I think it will be a good gauge of how much of my time is well spent.

Those are some of my "guidelines"for the new year. The biggest challenge is the balancing act that happens while trying to insert new things into a life already extremely full. I am only seventeen days in and I can already see things sneaking slowly toward the back burner. If only there were more hours in the day!

Hopefully by writing it down here, it makes it a little more concrete and I can make these things happen by staying motivated...at least until February!