Imagining the New Year

The turkey has been depleted. No more presents sit under the tree promising good times ahead.  Christmas decorations are (coming) down. Everyone’s feeling bloated and tired. I don’t want to see another mince pie in the near future. The fun of indulging in christmas has faded fast. Now that 2014 is in the rear view mirror, everyone’s looking ahead at a fresh and bright new year.  Now is when all the New Year’s resolutions are dragged out of the dusty box they’ve resided in since January of last year. I’m not a fan of them – I find the next couple of months dark, bitterly cold and dreary. Summer months are still so far away. It’s the worst possible time of year for me to try and be motivated to do anything! Over on TheBusyMamas, Helen has a great linky about looking ahead and imagining what may be for the coming year instead.

2015 will bring a scary amount of change for our family. Job changes, selling a house, and buying a house are just the top of the list. We’ve also firmly entered the ‘terrible twos’ phase with our toddler and it’s back to ‘surviving’ some days. I can’t pop to the shops for ten minutes without returning to a disaster movie scene. Floods of tears and wails over my brief absence. A shell-shocked husband at a loss for what to do. I’m looking forward to getting back to our normal routine, and hopefully 2015 will get the kick-start it needs on Monday morning.  Given that we’re not starting from the best of places right now, my aspirations are short, sweet (and hopefully realistic) for the opening months of the coming year.

1.  Re-energise.

The last two months of 2014 were illness after illness stretching all through the Christmas period. We’re all feeling run down and exhausted. So sadly for this Chocaholic, it’s time to bin the chocolate for the next couple of weeks. The sugar highs and lows aren’t doing me any good. I can cut it out completely for fourteen days, right?

2. Go with the flow.

Toddler tantrums. They’re terrifying. They’re apparently inevitable at the moment. Who would suspect that such depths of absolute rage are lurking beneath that cute little face? I have to lower my expectations for each day and accept the constant whinging and contrariness. We may not get out of the house some days, and that will just have to be okay.

3. Connect.

Connect with my son. I find myself spending too much time fighting, or resenting the unreasonable toddler antics. I need to step back, breathe, and reconnect with him every time there’s an ‘incident’. Divert both of us onto a different track before we both get so frustrated.

Connect with myself. The more I feel I need some time and space to myself, the more hysterical and clingy my toddler is. We’re going to have to figure that out as I’m all touched out from the dregs of 2014. Starting with making it to a yoga class once a week religiously.

Connect with my husband.  There’s far too much going on around us, we end up going through the motions. We need to make more effort at evenings and weekends to have better quality downtime for ourselves alone, and also together. Planning at least one activity for each weekend would be a great start.

4. Memory Jar

These are cropping up everywhere. I guess it’s the new ‘in’ thing to do for 2015. I like the idea though, it’s one of the main reasons I blog. It’s nice to have a memory scrapbook of your daily life that you can look back on in years to come. With the memory jar, you keep a special jar in the house which anyone can add to. You then remember to regularly add a note or memento for any nice moment or activity you’ve done. At the end of the year when you’re struggling to remember all that was good, you empty the jar out to remind you of all the little things that made your days special. For our house this may end up being a virtual jar.

And that’s it for imagining 2015. We’ll start out small, and everything else will or won’t fall into place. Check out rest of the linky to see what the new year brings for everyone else!

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