New Years Resolutions: An Update

Towards the end of last year I decided to make some New Years Resolutions. 6 in total. You can read about them here. I thought I would do a little update to let you know how I've been getting on......



1) My first resolution was to learn to bake. Which I sort of have. I probably have a 65% success rate. My Biscotti is awesome (even if I do say so myself) and I am inundated with orders for Raspberry & White Chocolate Blondies. I made a pretty good White Chocolate Easter Cake (as pictured) but a fair bit of my baking including my Coffee & Pistachio cake ended up going in the bin and I threatened to throw in my baking towel. But I'll keep going because I'd love to be able to bake with Ava when she's a little older. But I have come to one conclusion: my love affair with cooking is pretty much limited to cooking and I'm not a great lover of baking cakes. In fact I find baking a bit of a chore.

2) My second resolution was to 'get buff'. I found a gym that didn't actually open until January 3rd which was really cheap if I signed up in November. Perfect, I thought. Ava will be 3 months by then. I can nip out for an hour or so in the evening when my bloke comes home from work and finally start exercising again. I looked incredulously at anyone who laughed at my plans (and anyone who has kids did). "Yeah, wait and see how that goes" they all said. And they were right. For one, by the time my boyfriend gets home from work I am frazzled and shattered. Once Ava is bathed and finally in bed (around 7pm) all I am interested in doing is laying on the sofa with a glass of wine, eating my dinner and then disappearing to bed. Rarely after 9pm. So they were all right. As if this wasn't reason enough not to go out, Ava has taken to wakening up every 30 mins or so right up until midnight. I'm not sure if it's teething or separation anxiety (although I reckon it's the latter). Whatever it is, she won't settle with anyone but me and screams blue murder when her Dad tries to get her back to sleep. Meaning I am pretty much housebound after 7pm these days. However, through diet alone I have done pretty well. I've lost alot more weight and given that I am a teensy bit skinnier than I was when I got pregnant I'm not going to give myself too much of a hard time about skipping the gym.

3) This is the resolution I haven't stuck to. Buoyed with a false security that my baby would actually SLEEP between the hours of 7pm - 12am I talked of all kinds of plans of seeing more live bands. Given the reasons I have just listed, I can't even nip out at night for a pint of milk never mind a 3 hour concert at the SECC.

4) At the turn of the year I was stressing a little as my teeny penguin would only sleep if there was white noise on in the background. Meaning our little flat was always alive with the constant whirr of the hoover or blast of the hairdryer. I just felt that we were depending on these little cheats way too much and had visions of her being 3 years old and refusing to sleep unless we installed the tumble dryer in her bedroom. Fortunately, it just sort of peetered out on its own and our house is now officially a white noise free zone. The hoover only comes out on housework days and I think I've actually deleted the whitenoise app from my iphone. She just sort of grew out of needing it. 

5) I promised to dedicate more time to the blog and I have. I'm not very technically minded but I did manage to change the layout to a slightly more aesthetically pleasing one. And I definitely blog more than I used to. I'll never be a 4 posts a week girl but I have done 23 posts so far this year which is double the amount I did in 2011. 

6) The hardest one. The saving money one. The no longer paying £16 for a bronzer one. I'm doing ok. In fact I would say I am doing better than ok. I only really buy make-up if it is something I use everyday and it has run out. I have found a couple of really nice cheaper alternatives to the more expensive face products that I usually use. I also have a great mother-in-law who buys lovely gifts meaning I still get my Clarins fix. And I am a total bargain hunter when it comes to the supermarket. We sometimes cook with chicken thighs now instead of breast (way more flavour), I've stopped spending a small weekly fortune at farmers markets and I am like a vulture in the reduced section for anything I can freeze and use at a later date.

So what do you think?

5 out of 6 ain't bad.

Continuing with the resolutions theme, I have managed to talk the lovely Miss Smidge and Pollypoptart into doing some guest blogging for me. Their posts will be coming over the next couple of weeks....