Happy first Monday of 2022, friends! I hope you guys had a wonderful weekend welcoming in this new year.

We hosted our 10th New Year's Day lunch with family. We were missing a couple people, but it was still a nice day. The food turned out so good. I think this year's black eyed peas were the best I've ever made, and my first-ever attempt at making cobbler turned out yummy, too.

We didn't do anything on New Year's Eve. Alexis is still too young to stay out that late, and there wasn't anything locally that we wanted to attend. So, sadly, all my sparkly outfits were for naught. It was also basically summer, so all but one of them wasn't practical to wear.

Alexis goes back to school tomorrow, so we've spent the last two days getting ready for that, mostly by getting back into a good bedtime routine. We've still got to get our Christmas tree taken down, but I'm not really in a hurry, and my kitchen is still a little destroyed from New Year's, but again, no rush.

I'm excited to get back into my yoga routine this week and have normal deadlines that aren't being impacted by the holidays. I'll also be doing distribution for the January issue of the magazine at some point. Thankfully, our temps are dipping back down into winter territory so I won't die of heat stroke in January.

Speaking of heat stroke, I've recently started having mild hot flashes. I'm not at a point where I feel like I need to take any hormone supplements, but my doc and I will reassess at my next annual checkup.

At the beginning of each year, I like to sit down and plan out the year ahead. Nothing with concrete dates or deadlines, but just some general, practical goals for the year. I've discovered in the past couple of years that writing them down helps with my accountability. So here are the top 3 goals I've settled on for this year.

- Rebuild my financial stability. 2020 was not kind to my finances. Thankfully, I had savings to float us through that year, and 2021 was all about rebuilding. I was able to regrow the magazine to our pre-Covid levels, but everything else has been kind of like playing catch-up. This year, I want to get back ahead of my finances, starting with paying off debt that has accumulated over the last two years and rebuilding my savings.

- Cut back on the number of meals we eat out/order in. Last year, our eat-at-home vs eating-out balance got thrown out of whack. I was putting in a ton of hours working to build momentum for the magazine, we added after-school activities to our routine, and my husband was working more to help make up for my reduced income. Ordering dinner instead of cooking dinner became way more appealing than expelling even more energy on cooking.

- Start a photo album/scrapbook. I have all these pictures just hanging out in the boxes the photo printer put them in. Scrapbooking used to be a really big hobby for me before life got in the way, and I'm excited to create a memory book of Alexis's first years of life.

What are your goals for 2022?