43 New Year’s Resolutions. Well, 8. But they are going well.

NAILing it - get it?? I know, my pictures are getting more obscure.

So it’s February. Almost the end of February really. So when am I going to start my new year’s resolutions?

Actually, I’m being slightly disingenuous here as I have a confession to make. I am NAILING my resolutions. Nailing them I tell you. Usually February finds me glass of wine in one hand, chocolate bar in the other with the same five kilos hovering somewhere around my middle discussing the 10km run I almost signed up for and the career change that is juuuuuust around the corner.

But this year I found this iPhone app that would help me. Yes, there’s an app for that. (There is not however an app that grows your phone little iPhone legs and brings it running home after you drop it off your lap from the car onto the road for the second time in three months never to be seen again. Until they give me THAT app, I’m not writing home to anyone.) Anyway, the app is called 43 Things. It’s also a website. You get to type in your goals or your resolutions and then track them online/on phone. There is some sort of social aspect to it – you can compare yours with others, be inspired by stories and share them with the world at large, but that’s all a bit too much sharing for me – I am already exhausted at having to keep up appearances on Facebook (how totally chilled and fun and cool and wacky is my life everyone?), I can’t be competing with my resolutions too. Anyway, you set it up so it sends you regular reminders. For mine I set them to check up on me monthly. I also set up the Captain’s for him and super annoyingly, set most of his to remind him every day. (He needs it, he is extremely disobedient at times – excellently he’s also too much of a luddite to work out how to change the daily reminders). Yes, I suppose you could just type a list and send yourself email reminders, but where is the fun in that?

(Don’t hate me for being a geek and LOVING this website. I can be cool. OK, I can’t, but I can wear sunglasses inside and pretend if it makes you feel better. This also has the added advantage of sending the Captain’s blood pressure soaring given that people wearing sunglasses inside is his bête noire.)

You can make up lots and lots of goals (the clue is in the title, I think 43 is the max), but we decided to do eight each. Well, I decided to do eight each, and then forced gently coerced the Captain into doing his eight. I’m not going to bore you with the details of my eight resolutions. Suffice to say I have not yet achieved world peace and I am still not employed as McDreamy’s personal assistant. However, we have successfully achieved almost two months of not bickering in front of les enfants. Don’t get worried, we weren’t previously throwing plates at each other, but we did decide that the two year old was unable to pick up the nuances of when Mummy and Daddy were playfully debating. The clue was in him telling his imaginatively named soft toy elephant that a ‘’a good song might bit you in the a**e Elly.’’ See also here for examples). So we aimed to call it quits and thus far we’re sticking to it. I had a few other kid-related ones, and some health, fitness and financial resolutions. The marathon might be next year, but for this year I made them relatively achievable, whilst still a stretch, and they were certainly things designed to make me, the Captain and the family happier. And did I mention I am (mostly) NAILING them?

Of course, the most terrifying one has not yet been started – at some stage before June I am to have an entire month of non-essential spending. No blow dries. No books. No make-up. No Amazon. No net-a-porter. No Ben & Jerry’s Phish Food Frozen Yoghurt. HAVE YOU TRIED IT? IT WILL CHANGE YOUR LIFE. Sorry, lost my train for a moment there. Anyway – that resolution is a ‘comin. And I am a ‘feared. But with 43 Things reminders popping up at me thick and fast, I have no choice but to do it.

Anyone else having any success?

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