Suggestions for 2014

I don't really like to think of what I do on New Years as being a resolution since that takes a lot of....resolve.  I'm so completely out of my routine groove that scrounging up an ounce of willpower is almost more than I can manage.  My abdomen is proof.  

Whenever a new year comes around, although I recognize it as being an artificial restarting of time, I am always happy to see it.  However arbitrary, I like the idea of a fresh start.  A space in the continuum of life to take stock, rid myself of baggage, see if I can find ways to be a better person.  

In 2013, things felt different.  G began kindergarten, M started preschool, and I started my slow re-entry into professional educational work.  I'm not sure all of this translated into "better," but it was different.

There were some things I saw fulfilled, namely getting through Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities, a task that was two years or so in the making.  Teaching forced me back into classics, which helped make this novel feel do-able.  

Right now, perhaps because of the excess of the holidays (foodstuff and stuff-stuffs) I am less about starting new things as I am about completing things I've wanted to do.  Using up what I have.

So my suggestions to myself for 2014 as as follows:

1. Finish reading the books that are on my bedside table, especially the ones I began in 2013.  And if this doesn't work, MOVE those books to another "holding tank" so that I'm not looking at them every night and feeling like I'm so.far.behind. 

2. Recommit to working out 2 times a week and eating "whole."  I had been doing this fairly well until December when everything went to hell.  The windows, G's tantrums, sickness, an overabundance of sweets and miserable restraint that was stress- and PMS-induced.  I don't own a scale, but I'm feeling more doughy than I'd like.

3. Try, even though it is not in my nature, to stay more calm.  I'm a yeller, a freaker-outer, a blow-my-top gal.  I don't doubt at all that part of G's problem with tantrums is my reaction to G's tantrums.  I am determined, with the assistance of the psychologist and the occupational therapist who will evaluate G on Friday, to try to hold myself together better, to not let G's issues, whatever they are, make me blow a gasket.  I am certain I will fail miserably at this on an almost daily minute-by-minute basis.  But my heart is in the right place, if nothing else.  

(I've got lots of other ideas about what I could or should do, but trying to stay calm in the face of my highly persistent 6-year-old is about all the self-betterment I can stand.  Ultimately, I can't change my basic nature.  I am a bitcher, a whiner, a venter.  I will never be the type of person who oozes love and adoration for anyone, even the people I love and adore.  It just isn't how I roll, and it will never be.) 

4. Save more money.  (This I love to do and even consider it fun.  I gotta have an easy one in here.)

And that is it.

I resolve to consider these suggestions as things I may like to do in 2014.