Today, I had my first lazy day in a long time. With frigid conditions outside, I couldn't really drive around and do anything, which is a good thing for my pocketbook. I couldn't go shopping, which meant I couldn't spend any money. Ryan was happy.
What better way to spend the day than in front of our fireplace and lounge around watching television?! Okay, I know a million better ways to spend the day, but it was too cold outside. On top of that, we just signed up for Netflix, and Ryan decided to force us into watching documentaries with him. The two that he picked out were "Food Matters" and "Food Inc". Well, let's just say he's gotten us into an #organic #eat healthy #eat at much raw food as possible #try to cut out meat DIET...I mean, 'lifestyle change'. He volunteered on taking the following chores on for at least a month:
- creating a grocery lsit
- going shopping
- prepping breakfast, lunch, dinner
- running a quick errand when we didn't have an ingredient
- cooking
- prepping our lunch for work
Seriously. This is awesome. If I would have known that getting Netflix would do all this for me, I would have gotten it sooner.
With this lazy day, we have also now completed our first official set of annual family goals. I saw that one of our friends made a comment about their own family tracking on their annual goals, so I decided that ours should do one too (shout out to Jayme and Mark). We created a top ten list of things we wanted to accomplish. These goals are now printed and posted on Ryan's side of the bathroom, kidding. Not really. The goals range from where we want to be in our finances to being a diaperless house.
As for this past year of 2013, honestly, we didn't accomplish anything major this year and didn't have anything big or exciting occur. In the last five years, we've always had something big or exciting happen - forced adoption of a kitten, being pregnant, having babies, buying a new house. Nothing like that happened...and I'm totally okay with that (I think).
By the end of next year, I really want to blog that we'll have at least one new piece of furniture in the living room, but I'm pretty sure that's not going to happen. With our finances, we have separate sinking accounts for all of our BIG family "wants": Furniture/House Maintenance, Disney World, Duck/Fishing Boat. I have found this to be the most effective way for us to save for big purchases. We create a new savings account, and systematically with our paychecks, automatically deposit a certain amount of money into them on payday. We prioritize which big purchase is the most important, and put the biggest chunk towards that savings goal. At this rate, I don't think our house is going to be fully furnished until 2020 because its down on the bottom of the list!
What we do have enough money for is....drumroll....putting in a new garden!!! Ryan is going all out with this. Do you guys remember this garden that we had in the boonies?!! It was about half an acre ... when we had time to garden 😉
This one probably won't be the same size obviously. But we're wiser now and we know what grows and what doesn't. And Ryan is planning on not buying any "generically modified" seeds (I swear, every day he is becoming the guy that talks about "getting off the grid") for our garden. Hopefully, our kids will love gardening too!
With hunting season out of the way, you'll see drafts of our garden in the next few months (and hopefully pictures of our newly painted living room) 🙂 Trust me, I've got goals that I'm supposed to be completing too...its not all Ryan.
Here's to a happier and healthier 2014!!