Life Goals: 2015

Every year, I come up with resolutions and if I’m being honest, sometimes I don’t even make it to the end of January. I actually did pretty good with last years’ resolutions {even though I called them “goals”…they were hardly goals}. I’m about 75% of the way through my Bible, we went to Rwanda which caused me to have to pray more and at times, I felt like we did good at building our emergency fund and about 6 months out of the year, I was organized in my blogging.

This year I decided that rather than listing a bunch of resolutions that I would probably never get to, I would have two life goals that I would try to live my life by: simple and healthy.

Simple.

The last six months of 2014 were busy, busy for the Sloans. Turns out, working full time jobs, running a non-profit, traveling to a foreign country, running a blog, and being heavily involved at church is not for the meek or mild.

And while catching up on my favorite blogs the other day, I came across this quote by Marquis at Simply Clarke:

It’s okay to be happy with a simple life.

In order to be happy with a simple life, we must first live a simpler life. To achieve this, we’ve got plans to stay at home more and not always be on the go, spend less money {hopefully by staying at home more} and cooking more meals at home. We also have plans to downsize and consolidate our four-vehicle fleet to three. Four is pretty ridiculous, isn’t it?

Once we are living a more simple life, I want to be content. I want to be okay with staying home rather than constantly being on the go {sounds glorious right now but I get bored easily}. I want to be okay with what we have and not constantly seek more entertainment and earthly belongings.

It’s been our plan all along to stay in our house for 5-10 years because we’ve always said once we have a family, we will quickly be out of room. But a bigger house just means more stuff. On New Year’s day, it was like a light bulb went off when we had the idea to turn Cory’s shop {that he doesn’t use anymore} into an office and freeing up the back bedroom of our house. By staying in our current house, maybe we can pay it off sooner and be free of a mortgage.

How’s that for simple?

Healthy.

Okay, so I know this is like 99% of peoples’ New Year’s resolutions but more than just losing weight or getting in shape, I want to live a healthier lifestyle.

Looking back over the past year, Cory and I realized just how unhealthy our lives are especially when our schedules are slammed. There were weeks {not just days} where we wouldn’t eat a complete meal all day. Often times our suppers consisted of popcorn for me and cereal for him like we were in college again. Many days, I’ll work through my lunch and don’t even take the time to step away from my computer until the end of the day. And I work long, 9.5 hour days.

Don’t even get me started on our sleep schedules. I don’t think we went to bed before midnight this summer while trying to plan our fundraisers for Rwanda. Even if we do get to bed early, we still don’t get a good nights rest because our mattress is way past its expiration date and two rotten dogs like to wedge their way between us.

As you can imagine, we didn’t make it a priority to fit any kind of exercise into our schedule.

So in 2015, I’d like revamp the entire way we live our lives.

Not that we are gonna do any kind of strict diet and intense workouts {who really knows where it will take us, though!} but we’ve decided that we will eat more complete meals at home and try to add as much “color” to the meal as possible. If we cook more in the evenings, the idea is we will have leftovers for lunch the next day.

For exercise, we’ve started the C25K because neither of us are big runners but we know that we need some cardio in our lives. I’m also following the Love Your Body series from the lovely ladies at  Tone It Up.

Probably one of the biggest changes we decided on is to wake up 4:45 throughout the week. Now, if y’all really know me, you know that I love to sleep. I thought I would eventually grow out of being able to sleep late but I can still sleep until lunch time and I’m really not much of a morning person.

No more of hitting the snooze button every nine minutes for an hour. Yes, an hour! We got up at 4:45 this morning and I have to say that it was nice to be able to clean the kitchen, eat breakfast and get a load of laundry done. Plus, I wasn’t rushed to get ready.

Obviously, we have some huge lifestyle changes that we are hoping to make. And while I know it won’t be easy, we are ready! Hopefully, by keeping it simple with just two goals to focus on and specifically listing how we will live simple and healthy, we are setting ourselves up for a successful 2015!