Resolutions, Goals, a Word for the Year, oh my!

If you have been reading here the past couple of weeks, you know that we had all been fighting an illness.  On the plus side, we are all feeling much better, and our daily routine of homeschooling and other crafting fun has resumed.  But, I am still feeling out of sorts.  Why?  Well, not because I don’t feel healthy, but because I haven’t had a chance to do all the typical New Year type things that I have done every year for the last several years.

I rarely make resolutions, I realize that I am going to break them right away, so instead I will make goals.  Goals for the year for our home, for the kids, for homeschooling, for me personally, for our financial life, and for my husband and I, then as an entire family.  That’s a lot of goals!  They are usually mostly manageable, and ideas that my husband and I have been talking about (or more likely I am talking about and he is smiling and nodding), and then maybe one dreaming type goal (long vacation to the Italy? sign me up!).  I like to have that list of goals sitting in front of me, ready for the new year.

But, I am not there yet. 


I have been seeing a lot of blogs out there that have picked a word for the year.  This sounds like an amazing idea to me.  I recently read a post about it on Family Your Way, and I jokingly left a comment saying that it would take me half the year to come up with a word that work for all the things that I want to accomplish.  And then I said, maybe change should be my word.


When I started on my green and simple living journey (which seems to reach every aspect of my life), I knew that there was an end goal, but I didn’t know how long it would take to get there.  And let me tell you, we are definitely not there yet.  No matter how often I talk about how I want to eat all the right foods, we still get takeout from the pizza place downtown, we still spend money on items from other countries, and I still buy plastic (albeit not very often, and usually only of the ziploc variety).

It is still about baby steps.


So, even though I am not posting out an entire list of goals (because, remember, I haven’t written them yet!), I think I am going to go forward and call this the year of change.  I am ready to take action on some of  the goals I have had for a couple of years, but haven’t quite had the courage to tackle.  Will it be difficult?  Oh, absolutely.


I find that the most difficult aspects of change you encounter are always the most rewarding.

What about you?  Do you have a word that you are striving towards this year?  Is it ok to make February 1st the New Year this year because we have all been sick?  Is change something that you are working on this year?