Making progress on my 2012 goals...

... even if it is only January 2nd.

Resist vacationing (this year).

When I was telling Marc about my goals, he said, "Well, the vacation thing is easy. If you start talking about it, I will stop you." He says that now, but when we are driving around town running errands, listening to Micah G on the stereo, we have flashbacks to the perfect bliss an peace of our Maui vacation, and it is very tempting to make emotional decisions. We have been known to do this before. Once, when we were engaged, we went to Downtown Disney for a date night. We had plans to eat dinner at one of the restaurants, shop, play around at ESPN Zone.... Um, yeah. We bought annual passes and made a year of vacations. We just got in the Disney spirit and got excited. (To be fair, it was a wonderful year- and I have many fond Disney memories from that year. And... we bought them again, not on a whim, when Vinny was 2).  Anyhow... so far so good. I am doing my best to think about Summer of 2013. I am thinking Disney World for 4 or 5 days and the Florida Keys for 4 days. Or maybe a Disney Cruise for 4 days.

Simplify.

I am doing REALLY well at this. I have freecycled dozens of items. For once, the freecycle community has been great about prompt pick ups, which has really helped. I have dozens of items listed on Amazon Marketplace. I brought baby clothes to my sister today. I threw away (Yes, actually in the trash- this is very hard for me- but no one wants 13 year old CPR manuals. They aren't accurate.) a ton of stuff today. There is actually space on the bookshelf in my kitchen. I moved the scrapbooks and photo albums out of the spare closet and on to the shelf in the kitchen where they may actually get looked at. I hung up kitchen decorations that were still sitting on a shelf waiting to be hung from when we moved in 3 years ago. I put together packages of photos to mail to my grandparents. This is actually sort of amusing. I frequently buy packages of photos whenever the kids take them (school, sports, santa, etc.) with the intent of mailing them to relatives. I usually remember to give them to my parents and Marc's parents, since they live in town, but other than that, they sit in envelopes in a stack in my kitchen (someone please tell me I am not the only one who does this). When I actually dumped them all out on the table today, there were pictures of Vinny from 18 months, 2 years old, 3 years old, 4 years old, and 5 years old. Oh my... I called my grandfather and let him know that all the photos I have ordered for him for the last 4 years are on their way.

I am going out of town on a trip for school this week, but when I get back, I have big plans. I will be filling boxes full of clothes for when the charity truck comes to pick them up on January 11th (woo hoo for a tax deduction). I will be going through the giant bag of Vinny's old school projects to determine which ones are actually worth saving in his storage box. I will be continuing my project of tackling the garage disorganization. I feel like I can do it this year... I just do.  :-)
Any tips?