New Year's Resolutions

Okay, it's taken me way too long to write this post, but what's important is that I'm doing it! We've been sick all last week so I feel like I've wasted a week, and I'm totally ready to start these resolutions!

1. Be more organized.

This is with my time, as well with everything important in my life. I really haven't totally unpacked yet from the move and I just feel like everything is scattered. By the end of the month, I want to have my office completely unpacked and organized.

I want to have a weekly schedule where I sit down on a Saturday or Sunday and write down my goals for the week. I've always worked best by thinking about stuff weekly. If it was something two weeks in advance, I would completely forget about it and put it out of my mind. By writing it down, I will have more of a chance of getting it done.

2. Decorate my home.

Each month I have allotted $100 towards decorating my home. This month I am focusing on painting (which doesn't count toward the $100), and setting up our entryway. I am so excited for this! I am going to get a table for our shoes/mail/whatever, a nice mirror to go above it, a coat hanger thing for guests, a long runner rug for the hallway, and then decorate the long wall with a ton of pictures. I am going to put up pictures of us through out the years and then put up vinyl narrating our journey. It is going to look so awesome!

I am pretty sure that I won't be able to finish the living room in one month with my allotted money allowance. So instead of saying which room will get each month, I'll just list the order I am going to decorate in.

Living Room
Kitchen (minus the backsplash and dining room table)
Ryan's room
Bathrooms
Master Bedroom (this will be pricey, which is why it is last)
Kitchen backsplash and table

Somewhere in there, I'll get a piano. It will definitely not be part of the $100 allowance. :) We just need to get our debt paid off first, which leads me to the next one...

3. Pay off credit cards and start saving.

By the end of the year, I want to have one credit card of about $1,800 paid off and have at least $1,000 in savings. We have one credit card that has no interest for two years, and it doesn't make sense to pay it off while we have other debt charging us interest. This is going to be tough for us to do, because we will start paying for a bunch of maternity insurance in March. Our maternity deductible is $6,500 so we want to try to go through 2-3 companies and see if we don't have to pay for it at all! :) Doing this, though, we will be short on the cash until next baby is born, so budgeting will be very important.

Budgeting is something that I am terrible at. This goes along with the first part which is being more organized. I want to know where our money is going, how much we are going to spend on what, and more importantly, how much we are saving/paying off.

4. Be more physically fit!!

Notice I didn't say LOSE WEIGHT? Honestly, I don't care too much about my weight or even my size. I would like to be smaller and cuter, but I've given up on that image of me in my high school years because I am not a teenager any more. I am a woman. As much as I hate my saggy stretched skin, I love it too. I want to be able to look at myself and be happy with myself no matter what I look like.

I know that physical fitness is so important to our health. I want to be around for a long time. I watch The Biggest Loser, and I know that you don't have to be fat to have those scary problems. Exercising and eating right is so important. I don't think I will lose a lot of weight by exercising, so that is not my goal, because if it is, I will probably quit. My goal is to be healthy and love myself for who I am.

My goal is to exercise three times a week. It would be nice to say everyday, but come on, I hardly exercise now so I am going to start off slow and ease into it. :)

5. Be more charitable.

In our world and time, it is so easy to think about ourselves constantly. I'm guilty of this every single day. I want to be a much more giving person, who thinks of others before herself. The number one person who needs this is my husband, Jared. I need to be a much better wife emotionally.

I heard a comment, I don't remember where I heard it, that a lot of the time women give of themselves so much to their children, friends, communities, churches, and people they don't even know, and not that much to their husbands. In fact, there is only so little left for their husbands that when their husbands want something, the woman gets upset that he wants anything, because she hasn't given anything to herself. How selfish of him to want that last little bit of herself? I am so guilty of this. I complain vocally and inside about Jared WAY too much. I need to be attending to him and our marriage before giving myself to all of these other things, even our child. If our marriage is good, everything else will follow suit.

That said, I still do need to work on being a charitable woman. I am training myself to think positively about service and looking for ways I can serve in my family, ward, and community. I don't know how to quantify this, but maybe I can write down the times that I do charity and how my marriage is improving.

6. Start food storage.

I have this awesome book I got from my old ward that helps you get a year supply by buying one thing a week. I really like this idea, because it seems so easy and is pretty cheap to start off. By the end of this year, I'd like to be close to being done. This will take a little bit of extra work because I'll have to watch the sales. I've never been one to care for the case lot sales, but now I'm going to keep my eye on it. This will need a lot of help from #1. Do you see why it's my number 1 resolution? Without it, everything falls apart.

I have so many little goals for myself this year, and I really want to get them done. I want to end the year a much better person than I am now. I didn't say anything about my spiritual or "mind" goals, because once I am more organized, they will fall into place. I am so excited about this year and I can't wait to look back in 2011 to see how well I've done. *Positive thoughts!* :)

Do any of you have some awesome plans to make sure you keep your resolutions? If you have any of the same resolutions as me, let me know. It's always helpful to know you have someone else going through the same thing.