ok guys i swear this will be the last post with 2018 in the title. enough is enough! i’m not really into making big, ambitious resolutions every new year, but instead i do like to take a little time to reflect on achievable things i can do that are usually in the back of my mind. here are some simple enough goals i’m setting for myself.

leave the house

sounds very simple, but arlo has made me even more of a homebody since it’s such a pain to go out with him. obviously it’s easier to just stay home and do errands while the babysitter is here, but i’d really like to get more comfortable doing the things that are hard and they’ll get easier and easier. arlo is almost 7 months old and we’ve never been to the grocery store, just the two of us, until this week. going to make a point of doing that weekly, as well as other errands and we’ll both get better at it.

focus on me, and also gid

i spend all of my babysitters time grocery shopping and working, and very little time taking an actual break. so i’m going to try to designate at least an hour of her time to take a bath or just to even sit alone in silence. we’ve been getting better at it, but gid and i are also making more of a point to have her come on weekends so that we can do a date night regularly, or as you may have seen on my instagram, to even just get to sit in bed and watch TV like we used to.

experiment with cooking

while i think i’m pretty good at cooking, i usually don’t branch out much with new recipes and pretty much stick to my standards. i own SO many cookbooks that i’m always inspired by, but never really plan to try anything new before going to do a shop, so i end up making all the same things. i would love to try making one new recipe a week, that seems both doable and enough to feel like less of a rut. you may have seen that i made a loaf of bread for the first time this past weekend, and it was so fun to try something new like that! (i’m going to do a post on it too)

de-clutter and stop hoarding

i have so much stuff, everywhere. clothes, notebooks, bags of cookies — (no like i legit lectured gid that we are not allowed to buy anymore cookies until we eat all of the ones we have in the pantry) i would love to make an effort to really get rid of the things i don’t use, because i’m always so much happier when i see less items in a drawer. i’m hoping to start selling and donating the things i no longer wear and use soon.

go away for a weekend with the baby

as big of a pain as it is to go run an errand with arlo, a weekend away seems so daunting. but everyone seems to do it and survive, so i’d really like to try. plus i want to take him to palm springs (where we got married), so it’s just about facing our fears and doing it. and soon he’ll be older than he is now, which will be helpful lol.

go away for a weekend without the baby

i also want to take a little vacation without him, while i’m not ready right now, in a few months i’m sure we could handle it emotionally. and i really really miss mexico and want to go. but i think mexico would be waaay more fun sans arlo. sorry arlo. would love to do that this year.

start entertaining again

i love cooking for family and friends and hosting and actually using all my pretty serving ware (so much so that i’ve been planning arlo’s first birthday since he was 2 months old). now that we’re sleep training, it’s making a much more reliable schedule for us and makes having company over seem a little more doable. would love to start inviting people over again! also you can’t play quiplash with just two people, so we need friends over desperately because i miss it.

get happy with my body

i’ve lost a lot of my baby weight (somehow), and i’m so happy to be feeling more like myself, but i definitely still have my squishy stomach and haven’t exercised. i know that if i take the time to go work out, i can at least get tighter if not thinner, which i’m sure would really make me feel good. but beyond that, i want to look in the mirror and feel ok about how i look, squishy stomach or not. trying really hard to remember what my body achieved this year. also i just need to accept that my shoe size and my ring size went up and might never go back. meaning all my shoes and my wedding ring no longer fit… i knew it was possible but to really have it happen really sucks!

fix up our front yard

tbh i’m ashamed of the front of our house. when they sold us the house, i think they’d spray painted the lawn green because there was actually no lawn at all. and now there is even less of one. it’s just dirt and looks horrible and our neighbors kind of totally hate us for how shitty it looks. so when we did the backyard, i debated also doing the front but decided i didn’t care as much about it. but now i do. that’s first on my list for fixing up… and then our master bath is next, which is very nice function wise, but very ugly eyeball wise.

post regularly and grow my brand

i’m happy with how far the blog has come, but this year i’d love to see more growth and would love to take a next step in my career, not sure what that means but it sounds good doesn’t it? based on the results of the survey i’ve seen so far, you guys would like a lot of posts, so i will do my best to really keep the content coming.