Yesterday my little family took a tour of the house and looked around. I mean REALLY looked at things: the socks on the floors, the fingerprints on the walls, the dishes on the coffee table, the unmade beds, etc, etc.
Then we had a little refresher talk about kindness. We’d talked at church about ways to be kind to others at church (holding doors, handing out hymnals, bringing water to the disabled during fellowship time) and out in public (again holding doors, giving someone with less stuff the first turn in line at the grocery, etc). We needed to think about how to be kind to each other at home. We talked about things like putting away items (clothes, dishes, toys, towels) when we are done with them so other people don’t have to, cleaning up our messes as we make them so they don’t get stuck on so someone has to scrub (rather than wipe) later, and wearing headphones when we’re with our personal electronics so we’re not disturbing the people around us. Then we talked about our 2013 Family Motto. We’ve never really had one before, but as I was reading FlyLady and trying to get back on my cleaning schedule, I’d really liked hers and thought we’d co-opt something like it. “Be as Kind as can be in 2013”
My resolution this year is simply to take a bit better care of myself. To choose ME this year instead of others more often. Because I haven’t done that in a long time and when I look at myself and pay attention, I see that I am another year older, another 20 pounds heavier, and stressed out beyond belief. So I’m going to just be good to myself this year and see where that takes me. 🙂 My best friend mentioned that I need to break that down into a list of Things To Do, so I can check things off at years-end, which is not something I’m very good at remembering to do. In fact, looking back, I fulfilled NONE of mine this year and didn’t appear to make any resolutions at all the several years before that (at least on the computer. I might’ve on paper, now that I’m thinking about it).
Resolutions as Things To Do:
1. Exercise a couple or three times a week. This can include, but is not limited to: walking, swimming, yoga, some kind of Wii sports, whatever gets my heart rate up, actually.
2. Drop a couple of my less-than-enjoyable obligations. I already have two in mind, but I’m not sharing those here yet. 🙂
3. Investigate the idea of going back to school to be a media specialist for schools. I’ve been asked about doing that a lot lately and while I don’t know if I am interested enough yet to go through with going back to school, I’d at least like to look into it.
4. Plan our trip to the UK. Go there. Enjoy ourselves as a couple, rather than as parents.
5. Date my husband more this year. By more, I mean at least once a month go somewhere not chore related on our own and smile at each other. Whee!
6. There is no #6.
7. Figure out a better daily schedule, so each day doesn’t feel like a crisis situation.
8. Pay attention to what I’m eating and drinking so I don’t eat a billion pieces of chocolate or all the french onion dip in just two sittings. I don’t know how to make this one quantifiable yet, as the last two programs I tried that kept track of that stressed me out more than helped me.
9. Scale back on my internet time somehow. I think this will involve dropping some of my newsreader subscriptions and the facebook friends I am not terribly close to will go to unchecked for updates. I’m also turning off a bunch of notifications, as I spend half my time these days seeing double updates, as facebook sends them to my inbox and the phone posts them twice. So that will be done, too.
So that’s quite a lot for now. Some steps have more than one step. So exciting. I’ll set myself a phone reminder to check the list midyear and see how I’m doing. 🙂
Lisa Holcomb 
I love your list. 🙂
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