Let me next say that I don’t really believe in resolutions. Either it’s a part of you or it isn’t. Deciding to start something January 1 can sometimes be only a disaster. I don’t think anything special changes inside us with the change of the calendar. (As Bono sings: “nothing changes on New Year’s Day”!) But I suppose the turn of the year can help provide some motivation.
Here are three things I find myself wanting to change right now, and areas where I am beginning to live life differently.
1) eat more vegetables
2) get more rest, sleep and running
3) evaluate and be more efficient in my days
I’ll elaborate a bit below…
1) Eat more vegetables – I’ve noticed that when I’m hungry, I’m often lazy. If there are cookies or chips around for a snack, I’ll eat those instead of something healthier. I used to eat much better, but I’ve changed some of my habits as I’ve had more and more children! Now at lunchtime I am trying every day to have a fresh raw vegetable on the table. So far, since I decided to try to do this a few weeks ago, I think I’ve only missed a day or two. It doesn’t take that much time to chop up peppers or wash grape tomatoes or unpack a bag of carrots. I plan to try to continue this, and to try to encourage myself to choose to eat healthier as much as I can. It’s great for the girls too! We already often eat broccoli or other veggies in our quesadillas/sandwiches at lunch, and we have fresh fruit too. But there’s something about crunching on a carrot or piece of pepper that’s especially good raw, good for the vitamins, good for the tastebuds….
2) Getting rest, sleep and exercise is also related to the one above – getting rest and eating right go hand in hand – eating junk makes me feel tired, and feeling tired means I don’t have energy to eat right….
I want to learn more about rest, what it means to rest. I want to try to take one day a week as a more restful day, whatever that means at this stage of life. So far I think it means trying not to do any laundry! 🙂 I want to have more quiet time and to let myself get more sleep. Right now, having 45 minutes to myself to exercise in the morning seems almost more than I could imagine, but I’d like to try to do that soon. I’ve noticed that when I feel rushed for time, my running suffers, but when I have more time, I run much better. And my running time depends on how much rest I got that night….
3) In order to get more rest, sleep and running, I need to learn to be more efficient in my life. This means right now I am re-organizing my stuff (more on that later) and re-evaluating how I spend my days. Two big ways I spent time and energy each day are homeschooling and blogging. So I am thinking about what I might need to change or do differently. For homeschooling, I want to be more relaxed, less rushed, but also more organized and flexible. For blogging, I’d like to be more thorough and also more efficient somehow…I need to find a way to work writing time into my days better, and maybe even think about doing writing that is not blogging 🙂 (may blog more about blogging later too)
So I don’t know where I’ll be when the end of 2004 rolls around, whether I’ll be eating more veggies, running more miles, sleeping longer and blogging better… but I hope I will be!
And speaking of rest I need to go soon and get some:)
