I’m not big on New Year’s resolutions. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with them, I just haven’t ever felt moved to make one – until this year. This year there’s something I want, something I’m willing to work at for a whole year. It has nothing to do with weight, or cleaning, or eliminating a bad habit, or reading the Bible all the way through, or posting on this blog every single day.

November and December are crazy-hectic around here. They are for everyone, I know.  But we’ve got more than the usual holiday parties to deal with. We have a lot of family nearby  – parents, brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, cousins… I’m not complaining. I wouldn’t change it for anything, not even the chance to spend the whole 2 months in Hawaii. (Well, ok, maybe just once, but not every year.) If it was up to me we’d have ALL of our family members living close by. It is hard, though, to find time for everyone, especially around the holidays. We often find ourselves trying to split our time between my mom’s family, my dad’s family and my in-laws. I remember one thanksgiving that we didn’t eat at all. We visited one side of the family in the morning, left the next one when they started to eat and arrived at the last destination just as they were finishing putting everything away.

On top of the normal Thanksgiving/Christmas gatherings we have no less than 10 birthdays in November and December. There are usually at least 2 soccer tournaments (that means 3 or 4 games in a single weekend) and at least one game the rest of the weekends. Add shopping, wrapping and baking to my regular schedule and you might understand why I have moments when I hate this time of year.

It’s exaggerated in November and December, but I do feel overwhelmed and tired almost all of the time. Soccer is an all year thing around here, and just the everyday obligations leave me feeling like I can’t keep up with everything. I don’t enjoy time with my friends and family very often because I’m either too busy or too tired to enjoy it.

That’s what I want to change.

I want to make time to hang out with my kids – they’re getting older and won’t necessarily be living here much longer. I need to take advantage of having them handy while I can.

I want to get together with my extended family more often. We’re so lucky to have most of them close by but we still don’t see some of them more than once a year. Again, I want to do more of this while I can still boss my kids around so that they’ll know and appreciate their family later.

I want to cultivate closer friendships. We have a lot of acquaintances that we like and enjoy spending time with but it doesn’t grow much beyond that because (say it with me) I’m to busy/tired for more.

I want to schedule some alone time with my husband. It’s so easy to live in the same house (and spend every night sitting next to each other on the couch watching TV/surfing the internet) and still wake up one day not knowing each other anymore. I don’t want that to happen to us.

Wow, that’s a lot of wants and I’m feeling a little overwhelmed just thinking about it. But you know what? I spent most of the day today sitting in front of the computer doing a whole lot of nothing. I didn’t even get this posted until after 9 at night. I could have played a game of Clue with my daughter or gone out to lunch with a friend.

While I want to minimize the time I spend on everyday chores, cooking, cleaning, shopping…, what I really need to do is stop wasting time on other things that don’t add anything to my life. That’s going to be harder for me and not as fun. I don’t watch a lot of TV but I do love my internet. It’s like living at the library. I find all kinds of great ideas and learn lots of new things on here. As much as I enjoy that, it’s not important in the long run, not like people.

I don’t expect to be posting next year about how I’ve accomplished everything I talked about today, but I do expect to have eliminated some of the time wasters in my life and, just by making this a priority, I hope I will have spent more time focused on what’s important.