We have come to a new year. I don’t look back especially fondly on 2022. There were good times, certainly, but we lost my soulmate dog in November, and I just don’t think that’s something I can easily recover from. As the days go by, I don’t see him as often from the corner of my eye, and I don’t as often plot out strategic shutting of baby-gates or placement of cat food to ensure he goes where he is supposed to and nowhere else. Regardless, he still isn’t far from my mind.

I normally try to think of some sort of New Year’s resolution, whether a big one I won’t do or a small one I might do, but I didn’t even attempt this year. I’d like to come up with some sort of resolution about exercising, but after work, I’m always tired, and there’s always a lot of things to be done in the house. It feels like it has been alternating between being rainy and being cold of late, so that isn’t exactly conducive to encouraging me to force the family to go outside.

Does anyone have any easy or fun resolutions to share? My husband has been considering trying us on a Mediterranean diet, and while I am certainly not opposed, I do not know how long it will last. Still, I get to reap the benefits of things like homemade lasagna, so I’m not exactly complaining!

In high school, a friend and I made the resolution to go without soda for a year. I made it the entire year and guzzled Mountain Dew on New Year’s. Since then, I can take or leave soda and have no dependency on it. That was certainly my most successful resolution – and my most productive one.

As I go into this year, I have been planning on having more family time. When I was a child, my family went to lots of different places – Six Flags, Sea World, Ripley’s Believe It or Not, Roswell (alien museum please?), Disneyland, Universal Studios, Disney World, the Bahamas, and so on. I feel I really need to step up my game, and I’ll be doing so to a limited extent this year. I’ve already planned out some amusement park trips, and I am excited to share the time with my family.

I say we all need to try to make each year happier and more exciting. I think maybe my New Year’s resolution can be just to be better about things – better about laundry, better about cleaning the house, better about spending time out of the house with my family, and so on.

Let’s do this!