New Year’s Day 2018

It was just as well that the fireworks roused me at the stroke of midnight last night, as I had fallen asleep on my stomach, with my arms folded beneath me, and my hands were numb and tingly.

This year makes two — or maybe three? — years in a row when I haven’t even attempted to make it until midnight on New Year’s. I pretty much turn into a pumpkin by 10:30 or 11pm, and I know my son is going to rouse me at 8am on New Years Day, anyway. (I long for the day when he decides that really sleeping in is a thing.)

Memaw used to say that whatever you do on New Year’s Day is what you’ll be doing all year, so the half-joke was that we wouldn’t do any laundry or house-cleaning on New Year’s, but Memaw would cook, of course. That superstition never made any sense to me, though, since New Year’s was a holiday. Of course you’re going to be off-schedule and not doing the things you’d normally be doing all year, like going to school (or work).

Even though New Year’s Day is honestly a pretty arbitrary date, I still like to take this opportunity to reflect on my habits and goals. What do I want to accomplish this year? Did I accomplish what I set out to do last year? 

Last year’s resolutions were a mixed bag of successes and, well, learning experiences. I posted daily to my blog until I decided it was dumb. Posting a weekly photo just kind of stopped happening at some point. Cooking 50 new-to-me recipes was a huge success. Shopping Amazon “mostly” with credits didn’t pan out, but I did manage to offset about 13% of my purchases with credits, points, or gift cards, so that’s something. Offloading two pieces of clothing for every one I purchased… well, that ended up being harder to quantify than I’d expected, but I suspect that I hit that goal, given that I shipped off a couple of clean-out bags to ThredUp and donated a good amount to charity. Only shopping ThredUp with credits meant that my clean-out bags started yielding two pairs of jeans for my son plus one item for me, just about. Finally, my idea of mending instead of buying new meant that I did a lot of ironing-on of patches onto jeans and occasional mending of my son’s shirts and other clothes.

I’ve already decided that my mantra for 2018 will be, “I’m on it.” As in, on top of things, taking care of what needs to be done when (or before) it needs to be done. As I’ve been fond of saying this year for some reason: I’m a grown-ass woman. There’s no reason I can’t put on my big-girl pants and do what I need to do before doing what I want to do.

As far as goals and, dare I say, resolutions are concerned, I have a few ideas.

  1. Devote each month to making recipes from a different cookbook. January is dedicated to the Trinity United Methodist cookbook from 1990 (from my late mother-in-law’s collection).
  2. Send at least one card or handwritten letter each month. In January, I’m planning to send a letter to my high school choir director (side note: it is SO WEIRD to refer to your respected former teachers by their given name) and send a couple of birthday cards to friends.
  3. Post at least one long-form blog entry and one photo entry to my blog each week. (Last year’s resolution to post daily didn’t work out so well, as I started feeling like I was reaching for relevant content. My life just isn’t that consistently interesting.)
  4. Get sweaty from exercise at least once a week. Practice yoga once a week.

Any weight resolutions or goals are conspicuously absent from this list. Maybe I should include them here, though. It’s just that I’ve been actively trying to lose weight for so long that it kind of seems like — well, duh, yes, I’m still on Weight Watchers, I’m still paying for the program, so I’m still planning to lose weight this year. I’d like to reach Goal this year (just like I would every year), so that means I’d like to lose about 20 pounds by Thanksgiving. But perhaps this is a topic for a more weight-loss-centric post later on.

Do I think this year is going to have something particularly different in store for me and my family? I’m not sure, honestly. Some things always change, especially with a young child in the house. Some things remain stubbornly consistent, despite trying to change them. And some surprises always come up.

Here’s to 2018. May it not suck.

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