With resolve, I hereafter do plan...

Happy 2017! I know, it’s a little late for that, but that’s just because I’ve been busy. And procrastinating.

I’m not one to normally make a resolutions, but this year, I decided to go big. For a while I’ve been thinking about doing a Happiness Project, a la Gretchen Rubin’s “The Happiness Project” book that I read a few years ago. 

   I really enjoyed it, though the exact format of her process has somewhat escaped me. But thanks to her website—here are the basics.

First, you need to know yourself well. What makes you happy (in those unexpected, maybe even unsexy ways, like for me it is reading in bed for 10 minutes before facing the day)? What makes you feel bad? (So you can get less of that in your life.) What makes you feel right/what values do you want your life to reflect? How can you build an atmosphere of growth?

The next step is to make resolutions for specific ways in which your life would be happier. Instead of “get more sleep,” I should strive for “lights out by 10:30.” And then you track your progress with a chart, because without monitoring a habit, you won’t know if a) you’re actually doing it and b) if it’s making a difference.

Her book also divided up the year into 12 months, each dedicated to different themes of resolutions, like having an orderly home, developing hobbies, etc. And that is something that I really wanted to do, but when it came to actually coming up with 12 areas of life all at one time, I found it overwhelming. So then I decided I don’t need to have the full plan ahead of time. No one is grading me, this is just for myself. And since I had three immediate areas I wanted to work on, I’m sticking with those for now.

For January, my goal is decluttering. And more specifically, following the old Benjamin Franklin axiom, “a place for everything and everything in its place.” My goal is to go through the house and get rid of everything I don’t love that we haven’t used in more than a year, and to find a specific place for all our stuff we are keeping so things don’t just linger around in awkward places for months, cluttering up the house.

I got off to a great start on this during the last week of December when I somehow effortlessly convinced Rye that we needed to organize his toys better and make room for Knox to use this drawer in our entertainment center where he will be able to access his own toys in the next few months when he starts crawling, standing and walking. Rye loved the idea (yay, he’s genetically-predisposed to organize!) and we got it done in less than an hour, and he even volunteered a few toys to get rid of that he knows he never plays with.

Then I started tackling the wet bar cabinets in our dining room, clearing out about two DOZEN wine glasses we do not need to keep, and bottles of liquor I’m done with but don’t want to finish (doesn’t that sound so grown up of me?). I moved onto the kitchen and got rid of coffee mugs we never use, expired food items and gigantic awkward party platters that take up so much space, are rarely used and do not reflect my personal style. It felt so good that I was amped up to do more.

I wasn't kidding about the wine glasses.

The biggest problem area in the house is our “study” (see previous post about that room and my quest for the perfect rug here), but it had gotten so out of control, what with Christmas stuff waiting in there to go up to the attic, maternity clothes being weeded out of my closet and being held there until they could be sorted to be given back to friends and/or stored in the attic, ridiculous amounts of paperwork on Josh’s desk and assorted “problems” on my desk (such as two broken picture frames that we are debating whether to fix or toss). So I decided to tackle the other stuff first. The easiest areas that I already have accomplished include the dining room table, my bathroom dresser, my bathroom shelves, my closet, the coat closet, the baking cabinet in the kitchen, and this tiny junk area to the left of our fridge. Still remaining on the list are Rye’s room, Knox’s room (which I’m halfway finished with), the entertainment drawer in the living room, the back porch room, and three separate areas in the study. There’s still a week left in January, but Josh already asked for leniency on the study two weeks ago because he’s got a lot of free time coming up in February during which he would like to tackle it. I want his help too so I’ve decided that a self-imposed deadline is not that big of a deal.

As for my other two life areas that I plan to tackle for February and March, these were easy. In honor of February and Valentine’s Day, I’d like to work on growth in our marriage. Josh and I are going through a pretty good stretch right now, minus the lack of date nights to get out of the house sans kids (because Knox wasn’t taking a bottle but now he is!), but marriages rarely get even better without effort. I wasn’t sure what specifically I wanted to do for this month, and since having SPECIFIC goals are the only way you can measure actions and progress, I thought maybe reading a book on marriage might be a good idea and then making a pointed date night with Josh to discuss it. But then I heard a podcast about Shaunti Feldhahn’s “The Kindness Challenge,” and how she and Focus on the Family were sponsoring a 30-Day Kindness Challenge that you can sign up for and be sent daily emails about how to be proactively kind to someone, and how there were specific emails you could sign up for as a wife for a husband, as a husband for a wife, or as a parent to a child. So I signed up! Because this is an area of our relationship I’ve been wanting to work on but hadn’t done much about. I had read somewhere about the concept of how we don’t treat our spouses as well as our friends, particularly when it comes to the appreciation we show them or the language we use toward them. And I felt totally convicted about that. Not that I’m a monster (I asked, and Josh said no,) but sometimes I’ll say something and then cringe thinking “I would never talk to ______ (insert female friend’s name in here) that way.” So I’m looking forward to the Kindness Challenge. If you are interested, you can sign up here (and you can start the emails with whatever date you want, I’m waiting for Feb. 1).

My March goal is to be a more intentional parent. Again, I don’t have my specific resolutions worked out for this yet, but I’m tired of being reactive to Rye’s behaviors and feeling like I’m constantly disciplining him for stupid stuff that makes me want to pull my hair out. I’ve listened to a lot of podcasts on different parenting strategies, and I’ve got a few books in mind to get out and try, so we’ll see how that goes. I’ve got plenty of time before I need to worry about this one. And I can always bump it to April.

And is if that weren’t enough, I’m also still thinking about choosing a “word of the year.” I had heard about this before, but it somewhat oddly really caught my attention after hearing a Fresh Air podcast with Francis Ford Coppola and how he said he always picked one word to focus on with the making of every film, because whenever he came to a point where he wasn’t sure where to go with things, the one word brought him back to focus. And then on Gretchen Rubin’s podcast Happier, she recommended picking a word of the year because it can help you make choices and also make that year particularly memorable for something. So in the future, you could say something like, “oh yeah, we did that in 2017 because that was the year we were focusing on ‘outside.’” My book club is looking into this, because a member’s mother did it with her group and they found a way to help you choose your word, which I kind of need, because the endless possibilities of words are daunting. And I’m kind of a word person; a big vocabulary leads to too many choices.

Did you make any goals/resolutions for this year? I’d love to hear about them! And any success stories from previous resolutions?

I’m hoping to write about my Happiness Project/resolutions throughout the year. And I’m making a resolution to write a blog at least once a month, which seems quite possible as I’ve been able to ramp up more each year. If you write a secret blog I don’t know about, please feel free to send me a link too, I love reading other people’s blogs too!