Resolutions

The older I get, the more I like that my birthday is so close to new years. Making resolutions makes more sense this way. And there are quite a few things I want to try to keep up with this year. I'm actually pretty good at keeping new years/birthday resolutions. For example, last year my goal was to take more pictures and document our lives better. I took over 2000 pictures with my phone and another 700 with my camera plus about 100 videos. It helps that I had such a great little model to take pictures of :) Anyway, these are my goals for 2013:

1. Look up from my phone a lot more often. Be present. Leave my phone in my purse so I'm not tempted to keep browsing. This will be hard, but not impossible.

2. Plan an activity for every week. We work a lot of hours and barely ever see each other but we have some mornings together, just enough time to have some family time. I want Raiah to experience new things all the time and be well versed in the world. So every week we'll do something fun. Like this week we went to a petting zoo. (yes, even though I hate animals...) I think this will get easier when she's better at walking because, it's hard to keep her in a stroller :). Also when she's a more stable walking toddler, I want to do more service oriented things. I remember my mom doing things for our neighborhood all the time when I was little and I did a lot of service in high school. I don't want to be too busy for that.

3. Take care of my skin. Wash my makeup off every night. Keep up with a skin care regiment because let's face it, all the fun-in-the-sun times are starting to show on my poor face.

4. Say YES before talking myself out of things. Just say YES more often. To everything.

5. Not feel guilty. This is a big one for me. I think a lot of working moms feel this way in the age of excessive social networking and pinterest when everyone else's craftiness, cooking and creative parenting is shoved in everyone else's faces. If I don't have time to repurpose furniture or grow our own food or sew little dresses out of pillow cases, that's ok. The truth is, even with my limited time, I do a lot of creative things that make my heart happy. Planting an edible garden is NOT one of those things and I'm going to be ok with that. When it counts, I do enough "homemade" and I do it whole heartedly.

6. Drink less coffee, more tea, NO soda. Less coffee will be hard but no soda will be super easy because we don't drink soda at home anyway and it'll be easy not to order it at restaurants.

7. Not dwell on things (or people's behavior) that are out of my control. This is my resolution every year... and I fail miserably every year.

8. Speak and read more in Farsi to Raiah. I always forget to talk to her in Farsi. She's going to be bilingual. I'll have to make sure of that :)

9. Use the china, the fancy soap, the expensive towels/sheets, etc. Who the heck am I saving them for exactly?! Why not enjoy them ourselves!?!

10. Speak kindly about others and be less judgmental. (another resolution I fail to keep every year....)

and here's Raiah dancing.