Good Lord, are we already two weeks into January?  Feels like a couple of nights ago we were raising our glasses to the dawn of 2015 with Jack and La Verne at our first babies/parents sleepover!

2015-01 new years toast

(photo by La Verne)

Maybe it’s a bit late to be getting my resolutions down on paper screen (resolve to be more punctual?  nah…), but here goes:

Get out of the house SANS BABY with Shane at least once a month.  Sadly, I can count on one hand the number of times we got out for a grownup date in 2014.  Shane and I have always been homebodies, but now it seems it takes extra effort to hit the town, what with finding a sitter and having to dig so deeply in our energy reserves to stay out past 8 pm.  But it’s time – time to sit across from each other and share a meal without being interrupted every 25 seconds to retrieve whatever utensil Juliette has thrown on the floor.  Time to make each other more of a priority.  Time to put away my toddler-chasing boots, pull out my insensible heels, and sip a proper cocktail!

Make art with Juliette.  Get out the paints or the markers or the glitter and glue, at least once a week.  It will be messy.  She may end up ingesting all kinds of art supplies that aren’t meant to be eaten.  But I can’t wait to see what comes of this one.

Learn how to make the best use my camera.  I take a lot of pictures, almost all of them in auto mode.  Some of them turn out ok.  Many others turn out blurry or grainy or too dark or too bright.  I took a picture of Juliette at Christmas – she had just opened a gift and was looking down into the box with utter delight.  Her expression was priceless.  But the photo is junk – totally blurry and way too bright.  I had fiddled with the settings on my camera a few minutes prior, but something was clearly off and I’m bummed to have missed out on capturing that moment the way I wanted to.  So finally, this is the year I figure out what a freaking f/stop is.

Be physically active.  Having a mileage goal kept my butt in gear last year, but I’m aiming for more variety in my fitness regime this year and am going to focus on something different each quarter, with the hope that I’ll eventually find a way to incorporate all four of these activities into my regular schedule.  Quarter 1: Just keep running.  Train for and complete my first (and possibly last) half-marathon (on the books for March 22nd!).  Quarter 2: Renew my online Barre3 subscription and do 2-3 workouts/week.  Quarter 3: Enjoy the sun and go hiking, at least twice a month.  Is this crazy, knowing we’ll have an almost-two year old?  Probably so.  Quarter 4: Swim?  I haven’t done laps since I was pregnant with Juliette, but swimming has always been one of my favorite workouts.  I’m still figuring out how/when/where to make it to the pool on my own, but I’m going to give it a shot.

End the year with less stuff in our house than there is right now.  This one will be a little hard to accurately gauge, but I did snap photos of our closets as a day-1 record and hope to spend the next 12 months purging, organizing, and, most importantly, limiting the number of new things that come through our front door.   I think there’s a minimalist buried deep inside me, trying to burrow her way out of the over-stuffed sock drawer.  I’m hoping to give her a little space to breathe.

 

Jules and I getting a head start on resolution #2 on New Year’s Day – she was a natural with that paintbrush!

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And then all hell broke loose…

20150101 little painter2 sm

 

Cheers to a year of livin’ large (and simply).