Inn of the Mountain Gods

I just said the other day that I would not make New Year's resolutions this year. But I find myself thinking about them a lot yesterday and today.

I think some of it is caused by the holidays ending and needing a psychological substitute. I know for me, cleaning up the mess and packing away the holiday decorations leaves the house feeling like a clean slate.

Another part of it is all the articles on making resolutions. They are EVERYWHERE. Even dLife has several.

So, if I were going to make New Year's Resolutions for 2008, here they are.

• Exercise at least 15 minutes every day. Sounds reasonable, right? But say you are going to walk - you have to decide if the kids are coming or staying home. Either way, you have to set them up - at least 10 minutes. With an infant make that 15-30 minutes. Then you have to get your shoes on and bundle up - another 10 minutes at least. That makes it about an hour to get 15 minutes of exercise. It's even worse if you're going to do an exercise DVD and have to put on appropriate clothes, entertain the kids and clean up all the toys in the family room to have space to move. This is just the intro to my excuses.




• Test and log my blood sugar at least 2x daily With type 2 diabetes, it is very easy to get into the habit of only testing when you feel "off", at least it's easy for me. It would be more useful to know what my daily fasting and pre-dinner levels are.




• Blog at least 5x a week. This is pretty far-fetched, but you all can hold my feet to the fire on it.




• Get back on my nutritionist's food plan. My husband and son are already complaining, but I have started on this one by not replacing a lot of junk food on my weekly shopping trip. If there are only apples and cheese sticks to snack on, I will have no choice. Unlike this weekend, when I baked peanut butter cookies just because there wasn't anything sweet to eat. Note that I didn't call it a diet, because it's not, it's meant to be my new way of eating, even though the month of December proves that other ways of eating are still available.




• Feed my family fish once a week and a meatless dinner once a week. This is not only healthy, but going meatless once a week is also a green thing to do.




• Practice Gratitude Studies and experience show that this step can make you much happier. I have so many wonderful things and people in my life, it would be easy to find things to reflect on if I remember to take a moment and do it.