Twenty Fourteen: New Year. New Goals

Happy New Year!

It's that time of year where I think about all my goals from 2013 and then divulge to you dear readers if I managed to accomplish them or not. So I looked back to my old goal post (har-har) and I realized something kind of weird: I managed to accomplished almost all of them! There were only four, but they were biggies.

A place for everything

Ok so this one isn't quite done, but I managed to figure most of it out. I reorganized my kitchen (the pics in the post are before pics!) last year so that it made more sense to me, bought some bins for the kids' toys and the linen closet upstairs, but there is still a lot of work to do. More on that later.

Go Veg

I managed to do this for the most part. We decided a few months in to add fish to the mix mostly because Mark was training for an Iron Man and needed a bit more protein. There are elite athletes who are veg and vegan, but it takes a lot of work and I'm already in the kitchen 90% of my day so decided to add fish instead.

Also I did have some regular 'ol meat a few times during the year. I really wanted a burger on my birthday and over the holidays I made a free-range organic turkey breast roll and decided to try it and it was freaking delicious so I ate more... At one of our family gatherings my cousin made a toutiere in honour of my grandmother and I felt that I should have some of that too :). But I don't cook meat at home usually and really, we only have fish once every two weeks or so... not often.

Become a better cook

I realized as I wrote this that this is a subjective accomplishment. I still have so much further to go to become the cook I want to be, but I feel like over this past year that cooking vegetarian (and a lot of the times vegan) dishes forced me to figure out how to make things taste better. Now there were a lot of times that things tasted like crap, but my husband still ate it and didn't complain (he's sweet that way).

Eating this way has become a way of life now and we'll continue to do it in this year. I may add in some more of that turkey though we'll see...

Get Leo potty-trained

My goal was to get this done in the first half of the year, which didn't happen, but it wasn't too much after that that the little guy was donning Lightening McQueen undies and peeing like a big boy. Ok it's not quite like a big boy... he either pees sitting down or kneels backwards on the toilet seat but it's in the toilet and not in his pants so I don't really care. He still wears a diaper to bed but wakes up most days with it dry, so I'm sure the nighttime undies will come soon enough.

So that was then - what's coming for 2014? Here's the biggie:


I'm giving up coffee.

You read that right. 

I'm actually tried to do this several times, but failed. The reason I failed is because I freaking love coffee and yes, it will be hard.

So why do it?

It's for health reasons. I have what are called fibro cysts and the caffeine makes them grow. I've also had a weird tender spot in my abdomen since Leo was born and it tends to feel different after I have some caffeine as well. No one can quite figure out what's going on in my abdomen after xrays, scans and ultrasounds so I figure why not try to eliminate some things to see if it helps. Funny enough I got a zillion different kinds of herbal teas over the holidays so I'm prepared (somewhat - who am I kidding). I might resort back to decaf coffee but we'll see.

So that's the biggie.

I've also been really struggling with having too much 'stuff'. It's just freaking everywhere. This feeling is likely a result of having kids and the stuff that comes with them but I'm starting to wonder if it's all necessary. Why do we need all of this stuff?

This year I'm going to go room-by-room and get rid of anything that doesn't really have a meaning for me or that isn't useful. I'm going to be cut-throat.

I'm feeling the need to clean house, pare down, get rid of it. Simplify. (This seems to be a growing trend in the blogosphere!) (I should start with this post - it's getting a bit wordy!)

Those are the two big ones friends. That's what I'm focussing on. There will be other things like taking an online class or two, working on getting back into working (freelance... I'm working on a proper website!) and trying to be more conscious of my surroundings and how I live my life.

What are your goals this year?

2013!

Well that pretty much flew by didn't it? One second I'm scrambling to get some gifts wrapped and today I'm polishing off a box of Pot of Gold.

We.were.busy.

I think Mark and I decided to get all of our hosting out in one week because we did a lot of it. Christmas Eve we hosted a neighbour visit, we had 14 people for Christmas dinner the next day, then came an unexpected break over the next two days due to the snow storm, but reconvened on the 30th for a dinner with my dad and his wife. Then we decided, hey why don't we have a few people over for New Years Eve? Don't get me wrong... it was all fun. But somehow it went by in a flash!

So here we are today. The hubster has gone back to work. We had a play date this morning and now the  kidlets are sleeping and I decided to write something in this darn blog.

Why not see what I got accomplished from 2012 and see what's on tap for the big '13?

Let's see:

Last year I wanted to add some finishing touches to the main floor powder room: Guess what? This is DONE! Well almost done, but if you can believe it, we got 99% of it done a few days before Christmas. It wasn't even something we were going to do right now, but the guy who built our fence said he could do it in a day, so why not? Pics to come soon!

Also on the list were some finishing touches to our bedroom: Not done. We've done a couple things here and there but nothing that really makes a big difference yet.

A relaunch of my etsy shop was another addition to the list last year. I kind of started to do this with some pillows I made, but I just wasn't feeling it. Some of the pillows are now on my couch and I rather like them there. We'll see if I come back to this. I kind of like sewing on an ad hoc basis and not having pressure to fill a shop. Maybe one day. I do, however, want to sew some things this year for myself so we'll see what fun projects I can come up with.

The last thing on the list was to get some photos framed around the house. I did manage to do this in the basement:

Was that really this year? Man seems like a long time ago! I also have some frames around the rest of the house that I'll share later.

One other thing that wasn't on the list was my office/sunroom! It's almost done. The bench is done and new shelves are up! I'm just waiting to get some pillows and get all the Christmas crap outta there...because of course it was a catch-all for everything over the holidays.

Ok so what's up for 2013?

Just a couple things:

1. A place for everything: Since cleaning out (for the most part) my office, I've decided that this year will be the year of organization. We're well on track for getting things organized, but I really want to put an effort into it this year.

2. Going Veg: I've decided that I'd like to try to be a vegetarian - Mark is on board with this too which is great. We watched a movie over the holidays called Vegucated that literally had me in tears (mostly hormones I'm sure!!) and it's really making me rethink my meat-eating choices. It won't be hard at home - we don't really cook a lot of meat dishes although it does make it more challenging to come up with dinner ideas sometimes! We'll see. We might just keep it as a 'Week Day Veg' type thing where we're vegetarian at home and eat whatever is offered to us when eating with friends and family.

3. On a related note, I want to become a better cook: I love cooking and looking up ideas for cooking, but I'm not a great cook. My cooking lacks flavour many times and it's something I want to change.

4. Get Leo potty-trained: It's a biggie, but I'm really hoping to get this done in the first half of the year.

So those are the big goals to obtain, but I think I can do it!

What are you going to do this year?