My New Years Resolutions

I did this last year and updated it at the end of December. I am doing it again this year to help me see how much I will accomplish, with the Lord's help. Here are my thoughts:

Home:

Our home is still in transition. If you have been reading my blog in the last year, you know my hubby has been unemployed for three years and we decided in 2011 to sell the house so we don't have a house payment any longer and buy another house. We have a lot of equity in this home. We began taking things to storage to make our home more presentable for sale. Then hubby was diagnosed with extremely high blood pressure and was given strict instructions to not do anything strenuous. This put a halt to our moving plans. We just had too much to do. Fortunately, and praise the Lord, he was offered a job and his blood pressure began dropping. It was at it's all time lowest on the day of his physical for this job! We agreed with our realtor to wait until spring 2012 to put the house on the market as things slow down so much during the cold weather. That gives us additional time to do all the things we need to do.

So, with that in mind, it has been very hard to stick to any kind of cleaning schedule with the house in chaos. Yet laundry continues, meal preparation and cleaning up goes on, vacuuming up cat hair has to be done. But the house is not fit for visitors on most days. My dining room is full of boxes and it is obvious we are moving.

I want to teach daughter homemaking skills, but that may wait until we are in our new home. But I can teach her some cooking and dish washing skills in the meantime. She is also going to get a few new chores added to her nonexistent official chores, when hubby begins his new job. One is cleaning the litter boxes. I despise litter boxes. The other is taking out trash and recyclables and getting them to the streets on Tuesday evenings as our pick-up day here is Wednesday.

Our garage is still a work in progress. I swear you would never know that anything was taken to storage, but it was. There are still many things in there that need to be sold or given away and stored and thrown away.

We have a small plumbing issue that popped up the other day. My sink in the master bath has started leaking. Our plumber put in new faucets and drain recently and has to come back and fix it. Not a big deal. I am just using husband's sink on his side of the vanity.

We have a kitchen window that needs repaired. It's just the outside wood trim. Which reminds me, hubby did get the wood replaced in the garage door opening that was rotting and caulked and painted that during the summer. I left that off my post in December where I took a look at our resolutions and accomplishments in 2011.

We have the ceiling in the den that still needs repairing. A professional drywall man will have to be hired to do that.

Front door didn't get painted in 2011 but hubby did paint all the trim and the railings and some of the deck's french door trim. I may paint it as well as the interior garage door.

We will need to get the yard professionally done, trimming and mulching, etc. right before listing it in the spring.

I need to pressure wash the porch, walkway, driveway, fence and deck. Then I need to stain the deck.

Paint has to be touched up throughout the house and smudges removed from the walls.

Blog:

Continue to try to post at least three times a week. Add more pictures to my posts. I want to make a household notebook and blog about it and a menu notebook and blog about that. You can find these all over the internet and I have wanted to do these for a long time. I think this is the year for that.

Family:

Faithfully attend church as a family.
Do more things together as a family, like bowling, movies, walks, museums, board games, wii games, picnics with excursions. Dollywood will be on our agenda this year thanks to hubby's aunt who bought us all season passes. We had to forgo those the last few years.
Re institute meal-time devotions and dinner at the kitchen table on most nights.
Eat more fruits and veggies.
Drink more water.
Implement age appropriate chores for daughter.
Do more volunteering at church.

Homeschool:

Include some bible studies that I have purchased into addition to her school curriculum (which already has bible).
Hubby is going to teach daughter about Photoshop and get her into more photography. She has quite the eye.
Daughter has shown an interest in guitar lessons. Check into that.
Take daughter on more field trips.
Teach her some homemaking skills.

Personal:

Take my vitamins daily.
Drink more water.
Exercise (ugh, this is so hard for me)
Daily Bible and prayer time.
Journal more often. (My blog is a journal, but I also hand write in a personal journal)
Get to bed earlier (so hard for us, we are all night owls)
Continue to learn to crochet.
Get back to scrapbooking (just had 100 photos printed this week-great deal at Walgreens, so excited to work on my albums again!)

These are my goals for this year. Most of the ones listed under Home, will get done in the next few months. I am hoping that posting this will help me to be more accountable and I intend to check back and update my progress throughout the year. You can't make resolutions and then never check back. You have to do that after the novelty of the new year wears off.

Pam