Happy 2015, my friends!  I hope you had a rollicking good time this New Year’s (or went to bed before 9:00, if that’s your thing… sounds pretty good to me) and that you’re ready to make 2015 the best year yet.  It’s no secret that I love celebrating the new year.  Blah, blah, blah, no one keeps their resolutions, and blah, blah, blah, why do you need a new calendar year to make the changes you want in your life, and yes, I know, but I love the thought of a blank slate.  All that time and space just waiting for me to fill it with laughter, and fun, and learning, and adventure.  So let’s talk 2015.

I have big dreams for this year.  We’re finally settled in a town and a house and jobs, and I think we can turn our attention to really living well this year.  These big dreams have been taking up a lot of my head space lately, and here’s what I’m thinking.

Have a baby.  Ideally, a full-term, healthy baby!  Just about two-and-a-half months to go in this pregnancy, if I make it to full term, which I am trying so hard to do.  I feel pretty good about how this pregnancy is going, so far, but I also know how quickly everything can fall apart.  So I’m grateful for every day that Nugget bakes happily away, and I am focusing on doing what I can do to keep him in there as long as possible.  Grow, Nugget, grow!

Focus on immediate family.  Hubby and I have had a lot of conversations about this in recent months.  We’ve leaned heavily on our “village,” really, ever since Peanut was born, and they’ve come through for us in ways I could never have imagined – especially my parents.  But we’ve also learned some important lessons about not letting ourselves get too wrapped up in, or letting our identity be defined by, extended family.  We’ve both been feeling that we need to spend 2015 really focusing on our own little unit of three (and eventually four, when Nugget joins us in March but not before, okay little dude?).  I think it will be good for us to spend more time bonding as an immediate family and less time worrying about what’s going on outside our own four walls.

Keep growing in our new region.  I’ll probably always be homesick for northern Virginia, and I’m not going to fight against that because it’d be a frustrating, pointless battle.  But there’s so much good stuff to discover here.  We worked on that last year and we started to find “our places,” which are so important to making a home in a new city or region – but I know there’s more out there waiting for us.  I expect we’ll be hibernating for a little while when Nugget first arrives, but come spring, I’d like us to get out there and keep making WNY our own, because we plan to be here for awhile.

Those are some major plans for the year, and I expect 2015 to be pretty eventful as a result.  But when I think about what the year will look like, I also think about smaller things – smaller, but still important.  If at the end of the year I can say I’ve accomplished some of these littler goals, I think I’ll be able to look back with a big smile on my face.

Plant a garden with Peanut.  I have been wanting a special activity to do with Peanut, just the two of us, after her brother is born.  I know he is going to need a lot of love and attention, and I want her to know that she’s still cherished just as much as she always has been.  I think some one-on-one Mommy-Peanut bonding is in order – and what better way to bond than by digging in the dirt together?  I’ve never had a successful garden – we tried a few times in Virginia, but it never worked out – but I’m determined to do this one right.  I’m not sure if the first spring’s garden will be a full-blown effort or just some pots on our back patio, but either way it’s going to be our thing to do together, and I hope it will also yield some yummy treats for us to cook up in the kitchen.  (WNY friends with gardening expertise, consider this my plea for help – any tips you can share on planting a successful garden will be much appreciated!)

Marathon or bust!  I really, really, really wanted 2014 to be the year I tackled the big, bad 26.2, and I was hoping that 2015 would see me going after marathon number two.  It didn’t happen last year – although pregnancy is its own kind of marathon – and I deferred my entry to this year’s race.  I’m planning to start building up my running base just as soon as I’m recovered from Nuggetpalooza, and I am determined that this year will be my year.  This is a big, long-term dream of mine.

Start juicing.  When we lived in the city, we were just a short walk from a funky little juice bar, where I would stop a few times every week for fresh juice.  (My favorite was the “Elvis Parsley” – carrot, cucumber, lemon, and parsley.)  Now that we’ve moved to the country, I can’t just trot down the street for my juice fix.  For months I’ve been saying I wanted to start juicing at home, and I’ve even tried a few times with my VitaMix (which works, but straining the juice is a paaaaaaain).  I got a juicer for Christmas and I can’t wait to start using it and get my veggie juice fix whenever I want it.

Use my dSLR more.  I’ve done really well with using Instagram to document our family moments almost every day, and I’m planning to keep that up.  But after I toted my big camera to Knox Farm to capture some pics of Peanut playing in the snow, I was reminded of what beautiful pictures it takes.  Now I’m motivated to use it a lot more in the hopes of getting some special family pictures to display in our home, and making our family yearbook a better product than ever.  And of course, with our new little buddy, I’ll have another adorable photography subject!  The big camera needs to make many more appearances this year.

Do at least one home project every month.  Our house has great bones and a lot of potential, but it’s very dated and needs a lot of cosmetic help.  (Unless you think the eighties were some kind of decorating renaissance, in which case… well, I’m not sure what.)  I have a few high-priority items, including painting the brick fireplace and installing a new mantle in the family room, updating the paint colors in the rest of the house, and changing out some dated fixtures.  There are also a few longer-term goals we have, including new windows and new floors, and we’re exploring whether one of those items might be in the budget for the year.  And then there’s the little fella who is joining our family and is going to need a cute nursery space all his own.  We have a lot to do!  We’ve already done a bit (scraping the popcorn ceilings before we moved in made a huge difference) but there’s still a lot to do.  The good news with all of this is, we have plenty of opportunity to make it a really personal space.  I have lots of ideas for updating and personalizing the house, and I hope to put quite a few of them into action this year.

Get back into yoga, and try out barre classes.  I love yoga, and it really bugs me that I haven’t made more space for it in my life.  Now that Stroller Strides is over (sniff) I have more free workout time and dollars, so I need to get back to the studio.  That means prenatal classes for a little while, and then hopefully a regular vinyasa practice.  I also want to try barre classes, which have intrigued me for some time.  Pregnancy’s not a great time to start new workouts – even though I hear barre is a great prenatal workout – so I’m sticking with light jogging, walking, and weights, all of which I’m used to doing – and saving the barre classes for a fun new workout adventure post-Nugget.

Get organized.  I’m counting on late pregnancy nesting urges (if I get that far, please stay in, Nugget!) to give me a boost of organizing energy, because my closets and pantry desperately need it.  I am always staring wide-eyed at those impeccably organized storage spaces in Martha’s magazines and wondering why I can’t seem to get that organized.  (Toddler?  Law firm job?  Life?  I dunno.)  Once again, I’m going to try.  Hand-in-hand with getting organized, I think, will go efforts to live greener.  In past years we made a habit of certain green practices around the house; some of those, we’ve kept up, but others have fallen by the wayside as we have been focused on settling into our new space.  I expect that the more organized I am, the better I will be able to re-establish those green practices that we’ve slacked on recently.

Lose the baby weight.  Duh.  It’s for a good cause and I don’t mind doing what I need to do to grow a healthy baby, but I want to be back in my jeans in a reasonable time frame after Nugget arrives.  We’re not supposed to say that, are we?  It’s all about how I feel, etc.  Well, yes, but dangit, I want to lose the baby weight.  There.  I said it.  I did lose all the baby weight after Peanut, very gradually, so I’m confident I can do it again.  That’ll mean a few Whole30s, for sure – tried and true for me at this point – and I’m also hoping to join the Y and make a habit of going.  But if I focus on making the healthiest choices possible each day, I’m sure I’ll get to where I want to be.

Hike in a different place every month.  This goes hand-in-hand with my ongoing mission to explore and learn to love our new environment, but I also think it will be a fun project for the year.  We’re planning to continue our seasonal hikes, this time at Reinstein Woods Nature Preserve in Depew, but I also want to explore some different trails and profile fun local hikes in this space.  Some might be repeats – I’m sure we’ll be back at local favorites Tifft Nature Preserve and Knox Farm State Park – but I hope to discover some beautiful new outdoor wonders and of course I’ll share.

Take a family vacation – or two!  Hubby and I have not been on a real vacation – one where we are away, unwinding and exploring, for a week or more – since 2011.  2011, people.  For two people who love to travel as much as we do, that’s just unacceptable.  A lot has happened since our October 2011 jaunt across the pond to England: a pregnancy, a preemie, tough times at work, a big move and new job for hubby, a stint as a SAHM and resulting budget-tightening, a new job for me, another pregnancy…  We desperately need to get away.  The good news is, we have one vacation already in the works for this summer, and I’m hoping that we’ll both be established enough at work and comfortable enough with two kids to make another one (probably closer to home) work for the fall.  We need it.

Date nights, for realsies.  Another thing we have let slide.  I can count the number of date nights hubby and I have had since Peanut was born on one hand.  One hand, people.  And I don’t even need all of the fingers.  That’s just sad.  And it’s another thing we’ve talked about a lot lately: the need to focus on keeping our marriage strong.  With another little one on the way, it’s not exactly going to get easier to leave the house.  So finding a trustworthy local teenaged girl to call on for babysitting services is high on the agenda.  And then I am going to need to figure out how to drag myself out the door and away from the kids when the time comes.  But we’ve got to make this a priority, and we’re both committed to getting out and enjoying some time as a couple, without being Mommy and Daddy, for a few hours on a regular basis.

Wow, that’s quite the list.  In reading it over, I’m sure I won’t get to all of these things.  But that’s okay – 2015 is going to be all about doing what I can do, and adjusting to life with two kids (whoa).  Some of these plans are more important to me than others, and I really, really hope the garden and the vacations happen, but really I’m just looking to have a good year, enjoy life as a family of four, and try to be as healthy as possible every day.  I think I can do that.

What’s on your agenda for 2015?