The Time Has Come

My dear friend Andrea has motivated me to finally sit down and write out my goals for the upcoming year.  January is never a good time to start new things if you ask me.  You are winding down from your holiday craziness, your house is typically a mess, it is too cold to work out...  You need a month to meddle things around in your head and come up with a plan.  And that is what I will convince myself I have done rather than holding off for an entire month :) So, without further ado, here are my goals for 2012...

1) Stop the "I should have..." syndrome.  There are multiple times throughout the week that I think to myself "I should call so and so", "I need to send a card to such and such", or "I should take something to whatsherface because she just seems busy and needs a pick me up".  It is time to put these thoughts into action.  My hope is to be more giving to others and hospitable.  We love having others over, but rarely do because we don't invite.  Let's face it, our house is on the smaller end, but no excuses.  My goal is to do something weekly on my "I should..." list and not allow it to be an "I should have..."

2) Organize, organize, organize.  As stated previously, our house is small.  I bought it with myself in mind as an investment before Chris even came along.  It has been wonderful and continues to be wonderful, just gets crowded at times.  I have been fairly religious with the declutter in 2012 calendar found on Pinterest and so far so good.  Granted our house never appears to be clean and is always a work in progress, but we are getting there.

3) Prioritize.  The past seven months since getting married has been an adjustment period.  Not in a bad way, I just think most couples have that season of getting used to living with another, working with new schedules, adapting to life as married folk.  I truly believe we have been pretty good about prioritizing our time, but feel we can be better.  At the end of the day we are exhausted and I would love for this to change.  I am working hard to rearrange my work schedule a tad and being realistic about what I can handle.  

4) Save.  When it was just me, I lived as if it was just me.  Now I've got this other body in my house who has an opinion ;)  We have lived a much more minimalistic life style since being married and it has been kinda nice.  We are attempting to save for all kinds of things in our near and far off future (new car, new house, paying off bills, etc.). 

5) Grow.  While in grad school and dating someone who lived three hours away, my life was in constant motion.  I'm still busy because I'm adult (which blows sometimes), but I have much more free time on my hands.  I have made some great new friendships with ladies at church who are full of encouragement.  I still have my wonderful friends from teaching, college and along life's way.  This year I hope to invest in these friendships more and enjoy them all.  You grow a lot when you are surrounded by fabulous people.

6) Picture a day!  I wanted to start this January 1 but, yup didn't fit in with my whole don't make goals in January theory.  So, beginning February 1 I plan to take a photo a day and do a recap weekly on the blog.  I thought about doing it on facebook, but figured this would help with the always looming goal of blogging more.  

Welp, that's all.  I think six goals are manageable and many of them are already in place, just a matter of improving.  I have no doubt 2012 will be quite the entertaining year.