Starting Off Right

I want to be intentional this year. Intentional about what I do, what I say, how I say it. I want to spend more time with my kids and less time with Facebook. It's important to be intentional with our time or it can so easily get away from us. I've really been convicted lately about my poor attitude and my laziness, and I want to intentionally make changes that impact my family and my life in a positive way. I'm tired of just following the current, of being apathetic, of letting myself do wherever sounds good at the time. (I sort of feel like the ship captain from Wall-E: "I don't want to survive, I wanna LIVE!" Haha.)  I'm ready for my life to be different. And what better time to start than with a fresh, new year?

That said, I'm not really much for New Year's Resolutions. I always think they sound good at the time, but I keep up with them for about 5 minutes, if I'm lucky. This year I'd like to do things a little differently. I'm setting goals for myself instead of just throwing out a "resolution" or two; written, tracked, measured goals. And in order to help keep myself a bit more accountable, I'm going to post them here and update every so often about my progress. I hope this helps me stay on the right path!

The first, and biggest, goal that I'm setting is to read my Bible and spend time with God every day. In the past I've been very here-and-there about this one. I will go in spurts and read my Bible every day for a month, and then forget about it for much longer. That's no good! I have a Bible reading plan to read through the Bible in a year, and even if I don't get all the way through it, I want to read a little bit every day. It's the 4th of January today and so far so good! (Baby steps, right?)

My home keeping binder

I also want to get (and STAY) organized around our home. I had previously been using The Fly Lady's system to clean and de-clutter the house, but I've fallen off the wagon. Again. So I pulled my binder out, dusted it off (see what I did there?), and signed back up for her daily reminder emails. It's a great system and I've really had success with it in the past if I keep it up, so I'm going to to my best to stay with it this time! To me it's great to be able to find what you need, when you need it, and not have to dig through the mess to locate it, and I know Rob appreciates a clean house, too. If you need help getting things in order at  your house, check her out! I think you'll like it.

Finally, I have a goal to become a more healthy cook and save us some money on groceries if I can. I use Plan to Eat for meal planning and keeping my recipes organized, and I really love it! I sit down at the end of each month and plan all our meals for the month ahead. It makes dinnertime SO much easier if I can just look at the calendar and see what I've already planned for the meal. And we have limited our going out to eat to once a week also, which is a huge money saver.

And there you have it! There are lots of other things I want to work on this year as well, but these are the big ones for now. It feels good to have a plan of attack for the year! Did you set any goals for 2014? Share them with me! We can all keep each other on track. :)