Rather than setting 10 goals that have all year to complete, I’m going to set some short-term goals and revisit them on a regular basis.  This should help keep me motivated and prevent me from abandoning them.  With a regular review I’ll be better able to track progress, as well as adjust the goal if it proves to be unrealistic.

To start with, I’m going to set the following goals, all to be reviewed in one week.  After the goals have been “proven” I’ll adjust the review frequency.

• Maximum of 10 hours of TV per week.  This excludes news and non-entertainment related shows, such as business and financial shows.  I’m also going to add an exception for what I call background shows such as “Cops” that I may “watch” while I’m working on something else.  As long as it doesn’t interfere with the task at hand it doesn’t count against the allotment.  Most of what I watch is semi-educational anyway, but I’m hoping to free up more time to do more constructive activities.
• Read at least 2 books per month, one fiction and one non-fiction.
• Make a minimum of 3 blog postings per week. 
• Weight loss: I’m hoping to lose 100 lbs over the next year.  In order to meet that goal I’ll need to average 2 per week.  As long as I’m careful with my eating this should be “easy” to do.
• Financial: We’ve been a little too relaxed in sticking to our budget during the holiday season.  We overspent some (we underspent on some budget areas and did not put that surplus into savings, and actually dipped into the savings a little too much) but that is behind us.  Now we want to tighten down and make sure we’re following our budget.

Depending on how those initial goals work out, I may replace some with similar goals, or I may add additional goals as time goes on.  The important part is to make sure I am realistic with the goals and that I don’t bite off more than I can chew and wind up forgetting about the whole thing.

This year the kids woke us up around 7:30, we leisurely got out of bed, got dressed, and started opening presents around 8:00.  Normally we make oatmeal for breakfast on Christmas morning, but the kids said they’d rather have cold cereal instead.  Silly kids…  Anyway after doing our own Christmas thing, we headed up to my mom’s house at about 10:30, and my grandparents arrived at about 11:00.  We exchanged gifts, had lunch, and actually got to sit and enjoy it.  Later on in the afternoon we went out to my grandmother’s house (my dad’s side of the family) and had dinner with her, again not feeling rushed.  We left probably a little earlier than we wanted to, but that was because the kids had reached the point of no return with the excitement level and lack of nap during the day.  Even Gillian was developing quite the attitude and normally she does fine (and doesn’t take a daily nap any more.)

Another thing that made it so enjoyable was that everybody cut back on “stuff” this year.  On our side we cut back because we’re working on paying off our debt and decided over-spending on holiday junk was counter-productive to that goal.  We concentrated on picking up a few gifts that we felt would be more meaningful rather a bunch of gifts that would be looked at a time or two then discarded.  Even though we really hadn’t discussed our plans with anyone, for the most part everybody seemed to do the same thing.  I don’t know if it is the economy or just everybody saying “enough is enough” but it was nice.

The kids got a lot of nice things including, an Xbox 360, a VMotion console, tons of books and coloring books, cars, dolls, clothing, etc.  I got a lot of nice shirts (I was getting short on them, ) a hair trimmer set (mine was limping along on life support), and some universal gift certificates.  Cristi got some clothing, a necklace, scrapbooking supplies, and some universal gift certificates.  We got some smaller things this year too, but its is all things we’ve wanted or needed.  What was missing overall was the large abundance of “plastic” from years past.  You know what I mean, the plastic things that people buy to give as gifts that look really neat in the packaging (which itself is plastic that would survive a nuclear blast) but won’t last more than a couple of weeks before they break.  Nearly everything exchanged this year were all either meant to be consumed (coloring books, food) or meant to last a long time (books, electronics.)  That reminds me too, we made it through this year only receiving a couple of small boxes of candy.  Normally we’d receive enough candy to last through Haloween, but would normally be gone within a couple of weeks.

Overall this has been one of the more relaxing and enjoyable Christmases we’ve had in a long time, and I hope we can maintain it in future years.  Feeling stressed out through the holiday kind of takes the true meaning out of it in my opinion.

May your festivities be as enjoyable as ours.