Haaaaaaaaappy new year!

Aaaaaaaaaah! Hi!

I don't usually make formal new-year resolutions, mainly because I simply don't usually feel like it, but I have some awesome ones this year. I'm really excited about how it's going to improve my life to even try to do this stuff.

First, the littler ones:

• No more eating anywhere other than at the table. I want Daniel to follow this rule, so I have to model it for him. I also want to have more of a social thing around eating our meals together as a family, the way I was raised, and there's no way to do that except by...you know. Actually doing it

• As a corollary to the above, no reading while I eat unless I'm alone. This one will be really, really, really painful at first, but I think it's important, so I'll do it.

• No checking my email, facebook, or anything else until I've said a prayer in the morning. My routine right now is basically to roll out of bed and across the house into my computer chair, and to very rarely get around to praying at all. This is lame, because my life, mood, and behavior are way better when I pray more. So I'm using my natural, built-in motivation to check email to remind me to do something that is generally more useful.

• No going to bed if the dishes are insane. "Sane" here can mean something as major as "all put away" (yeah right) or as minor as "rinsed and stacked." In any case, no more unstable heaps of days-old filth! IT ENDS NOW!

At least the first three of those are going to be pretty easy to keep. They're just tweaks to the items within my existing system of doing things, not a big change to the system itself. Well, okay, the last one is going to be hard. But it's also going to be amazing. And for the most part, I won't have to think about this stuff very much except to notice whether or not I'm trying to cheat.

Then there's the bigger resolution clump, and this is the one I'm really really jazzed about. When I got engaged, my #waitility friends (mainly _Quinn) wrote me a funny list of life advice parodying another, more famous list, that was already floating around on the internet. The original one suggests, "Do one thing every day that scares you." The one my friends gave me replaces this with, "Do one thing, every day. This should not scare you."

Even though this was mostly a joke, it lodged itself in my mind as being actually really good advice. Do a thing every day. It sounds like a low bar, and yet there are certainly a lot of days, even now, when I totally fail to do even one thing of my own accord, and where instead I just spend the entire day reacting to my circumstances. Not because I'm actually overwhelmed at the moment (some people are, and are doing awesome just to keep reacting), but just because I'm not really trying to do anything more. I mean, I am doing more art stuff these days, so that's something, and that's very good and vital to my sanity. But I don't do much for my home.

So I've listed out seven of the things I really would like to be finding more time for, and designating an official time for each of them. My big resolution this year is to do one thing, every day. This should not scare me.

• SUNDAY'S THING: Writing in a journal, whether it's this one or my even more sadly neglected paper one. Whatever miscellaneous writing I do during the week in my fuzzy notebook is good, too.

• MONDAY'S THING: Menu planning and grocery shopping. I'm tired of not being able to cook, so I'm going to start doing it now. It's become necessary anyway, because last month I found out I have celiac disease (more on which in another entry). As it turns out, most of the stuff I love is still available to me in gluten-free forms, so that mitigates the angst considerably, but eating pre-processed food has become really expensive. I'm not a terrible cook, though, just a negligent one, and when I do get the inspiration to do it I often don't have what I need. So, I'm setting aside this day in the week to pick things I want to eat, see whether we have the ingredients, and go get them if not. (We don't go to the store nearly often enough anyway and are always running out of weird things, so this will be great in many ways.)

• TUESDAY'S THING: All the little local errands. This is magic number day at Bi-Mart, and also story time at the library, so this "resolution" is actually just marking what I usually do without being told. :P I'll throw in other walking-distance errands as needed, too (like post office trips, bill-paying, bank deposits, etc).

• WEDNESDAY'S THING: Working on Runewood Abbey stuff, both by myself and in "office hours" with Michael. By the way, because it's the new year, our hiatus is now over, and a new page is going up this coming Saturday! SO EXCITED!

• THURSDAY'S THING: Laundry day! I don't mind laundry, but I procrastinate it, so here's a day for it. As a bonus, I will also make this my day for treating myself to an awesome movie while I fold my way through the mountain.

• FRIDAY'S THING: This is my wildcard day, mainly dedicated to making sure I have a date with Heath. Spending time together is not currently a challenge our marriage faces (talk to us after a few more kids, maybe), but it will be fun to have some dedicated time, whether we actually rope in a babysitter and go out, watch a million episodes of something on Netflix, play board games, or on super busy Fridays just sit on the couch together for five minutes before going to sleep. (Hopefully not falling asleep on the couch, but our track record so far is less than perfect on that. (We've been falling asleep on our dates together since the beginning, including while sitting up decorously straight in non-private locations. Yeah, we're awesome.))

• SATURDAY'S THING: Cleaning, also known as rescuing the remains of the house from the tearing jaws of the week. This is not something we currently do unless we're having visitors. It never has been. But my self-esteem suffers when my house is ugly, so I'm really stoked about having a time for this, because it doesn't happen by itself. I'm really looking forward to occasionally having a clean-ish home sometimes, maybe, possibly, even for five minutes. :D Also, I have cannily placed this Thing on Saturday, when Heath is usually home and can make the whole process more social and therefore less boring. This also increases our chances of going into the Sabbath with a more pleasant abode. It will probably take us several weeks of Saturdays to get around to some of the more entrenched heaps of random paper and baby socks and whatnot, but at least I have a plan.

So yup! There you have it. Do one thing a day, eat at the table, pray before email, and rinse dishes before bed. I think it's both significant and doable, which makes it a pretty good set up. It can only help to try, anyway! Wish me luck!

Aaaaaaaaaaaand day one: Thing Done. Aw yeah. (As a bonus, I also made dinner, which here means "threw five things in a crock pot and went to church." Looking good while acting lazy! Go me.)