Happy New Year!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/sunrise/ / CC BY 2.0

New Year's is always a little bittersweet for me. I hate taking down all the pretty Christmas decor and packing it away for next year. The house always looks so blah without the pretty, sparkly bells and lights and things. I'm not much of a decorator for Valentine's Day, but I did budge and buy two cute little things from Target recently to put up. All we have left to take down is our Christmas tree, and I'm a bit afraid of Baby's reaction to that. He's already quite miffed that many stores have taken down their Christmas decorations and that we've started to. If only I could explain it in a way that would make sense to his little 22-month-old brain.

The other thing that's bittersweet to me about New Year's is the whole concept of making resolutions. I've never really met anyone who stuck to their New Year's resolutions, and I've never been very good at making them myself. I've always been a very goal-oriented person, and I still am. If I make a goal, I usually try pretty darn hard to stick to it. But for some reason, New Year's resolutions just never quite work out for me. Maybe I'm too ambitious with them. Maybe I set my sights too high.

There's definitely some things I want to accomplish this year. I turn 30 next December, and that's got me mildly freaked out. Not hugely freaked out, because age really is just a number in my book, but I keep remembering a friend of mine that I grew up with having a total breakdown at a party in high school when she realized she was 15, because eek, that was halfway to 30. Part of me feels like I ought to be melting down about this milestone. Fact of the matter is, I think I've felt 30 for a long time. I had a ridiculously crazy period of years in my late teens and early twenties that got all of the wild and crazies out of my system. Then I felt old. Husband says he's felt old (i.e. 30) since we bought our first appliances, a washer and dryer, when we were 24.

I think the morale of the story here is that this is possibly a big year for me, and as such, I do want to accomplish some things. I'm going to call them my 2010 goals. Not resolutions. Goals. Maybe my brain likes this word better. And I'm not going to write 30 of them, as I'd originally intended (you know, a super cute 30 things to do before I'm 30), because that feels like a lot of things to do, and I'd really like at least a remote chance in hell that I might do all these things. I'm even going to try to figure out how to post these somewhere on my sidebar so I see them every day, so I don't manage to forget about them, as I have in the past.

So, here we go, my official 2010 goals are:

* Move to WordPress. I was going to buy www.typeamommy.com, but someone else owns it (and has for a year and has done absoutely NOTHING with it - ARGH!). So I have to come up with a new domain name (ideas anyone?), but I really want to do this. Peer pressure, I suppose.

* Get posted on Tastespotting or FoodGawker. I'm really avidly trying to improve my photo skills (check out my blog later this week for some double chocolate chip cookies - I'm definitely making strides in the photo department!)

* Purge my closet. I really need to do this. Not only of my clothes, but of all the other random things in my closet, like the bow bouquet that was made for me at my wedding shower.

* Do Jillian Michael's 30 Day Shred program at home, now that I've lost my personal trainer (boo, she's out of the training business and instead owns her own tea and spices shop) - I actually started this yesterday!

* Make Baby something non-food related. I'm planning to sew him a blanket for his birthday, with some serious help. He loves Yo Gabba Gabba, and Muno in particular, so I'm going to sew him a flannel blanket with Muno's face on it.

* Do NaNoWriMo in November. And try before then, too. I've wanted to do NaNoWriMo ever since I heard about it several years ago, and every year, I put it off. If I ever want to try to be a real writer, I need to give this a shot.

* Make a peanut butter pie for Husband. He watched a TV special about restaurants in my hometown, including Yoder's, an Amish restaurant known for their pies, and has been silently begging me to make one ever since. It's not my cup of tea, but sometimes it's nice to make things for other people. (Note: only sometimes.)

* Make bread from scratch. I make lots of cakes and cookies, but not much in the way of bread. I want to explore this year breadmaking, in part because of my totally kick-ass new mixer, but also because I really like bread.

* Read a classic I avoided in high school and/or college. I was thinking of The Great Gatsy, but I'm not 100% on it yet. I'm still racking my brain (and bookshelves) to see what classics I haven't read. I'd love to say I'll read them all, but seriously. There's probably a decent reason why I skipped most of them.

* Get into a non-plus size pants size. For real. I'm almost there. I know I can do it. And I know the cookies I bake don't necessarily help, but I've never been one to believe in starvation diets. Moderation is the key. Don't eat 10 cookies, eat 2. Sometimes I'm good at that, sometimes I'm not, but having sweets in the house keeps me sane. Take my chocolate fix away, and it's just not pretty what happens next.

* Make real tiramisu. Yes, another goal that benefits someone else. Yes, the tiramisu cake was ridiculously awesome, and I think I might just be sainted in Husband's eyes now as a result, but it's time to stare my baking fears in the eye and climb over them. Really, it can't be that hard now that I've made the tiramisu cake.

* And finally. Make another baby. I think it's about that time. Even my insurance is going to be on board with that this year. Part of me would love to just have Baby, by himself, because I adore him so much, but I know I want to have more than one child, and I know I don't want my children to be too far apart in age, so I guess the time has come to expand.

So, tell me, what about you? What are your goals for 2010?