Resolutions

I usually don't make resolutions. I feel they are just a list of the first things I will fail at in the New Year. I know, I am such a ray of sunshine.

This year, Jeff and I decided to make family resolutions, because...well, if you're going to fail, do it as a group. No, actually, we realize there are a LOT of things we could improve upon as a family and the new year gave us a reason to scratch the surface.

Here we go.

1. We will be better friends. Jeff and I are hermits by nature. Two months after we had B, our parents practically staged an intervention to get us to come out of the house. It's a miracle, but we have a lot of awesome friends and they often want us to hang out.

Our first resolution is to dedicate more time to all our friends. We have designated Friday nights to be our night to socialize at home in the form of drive-way drinks (awww, the suburbs, right?) or a time for us to try out a new restaurant with our peeps.

2. We will be organized with chores. After 4pm you will often find us in the living room parked in front of a TV, laptop, or phone. It's not very productive or inspiring. Yes, we are exhausted, but there are so many other things we could be doing. We noticed we spend more time on the weekends running errands, picking up the house, or doing last minute planning for the week, when we could spread it out over the week.

We've designated each day of the week with some household chore so we don't spend our well-earned weekend working just as hard. Mondays are for cleaning bedrooms, Tuesdays we take care of the floors, Wednesdays are bathrooms, Thursdays we take care of the upstairs, Fridays we take care of the downstairs, Saturdays are for the garage and/or yard, and Sunday is laundry. We will also meal plan on Sundays for the whole week.

3. We will focus on the family. We love spending time together. In fact, B often requests us "to be a family", which means we head upstairs and play hide and seek, peekaboo, or just cuddle in bed. But we want to start getting out of the house as a family more. Each family member is given a day where they can pick an activity. Monday is Jeff's night, Tuesday is mine, B gets Wednesday, and Cash is up on Thursday. When we explained this to B, he was overjoyed that if he wanted to go to the park with his bike then we ALL had to do it.

So, there they are. After a couple days we are doing a great job. My favorite is cutting back on the TV and a cleaner house. Hopefully we can keep this up, or we are about five years from being the Bundy's.