Reflecting on This Year's Resolutions

href="http://peterpollock.com/2010/12/reflection-blog-carnival/">Today's One Word for the One Word blog carnival is Reflection.   Since we are almost at the end of 2010, I have decided to reflect on my progress with this year's New Year Resolutions.   There have been years where I didn't make any resolutions, but at the beginning of 2010, I decided I need to work on some things.
href="http://randommusings-helen.blogspot.com/2010/01/yes-i-made-couple-of-new-year.html">I made two New Year resolutions this year: to pick something to be grateful to God for daily, and to be a friend to myself.

First of all, I did not tweet daily about something new I was grateful for having.  I may have lasted a week or two.  I later gave myself permission to be repetitive, and  then later, to not tweet it, but to thank God privately.  I don't purposely sit at my bedside any longer thinking "Hmmm... what shall I be grateful for today.....", but I do find myself blurting a thank you to God when I find a lost passport, or send an email and remember that it wasn't so long ago that "snail mail" was the only mail, and that it took some effort for people to get back to you (and vice versa), so that a response would take more than a week if lucky, or use a pen to paper and thank God that I can read and write...   I'm sure there are days when I forget to thank God for something, and other days where I thank Him more often.

Secondly, how good of a friend was I to myself?  I would say that I worked on it and did better than I have in the past.   I ended up choosing one thing a month to improve on.   I drink more tea than coffee, I choose water more than soda pop, I was eating less sweets (until the limited edition fudge mint covered Oreo cookies came out, anyway...), I eat only wheat bread, I choose the whole wheat pasta, I was cooking a vegetable with every meal until Bob's allergy scared me, I do stretchy exercises (no, not yoga.   I'm not that stretchy), and my "self talk" has improved (I think the Women's Prayer group has a lot to do with that, BTW....).  I was supposed to do more exercising, but in the summer was short of breath and six weeks ago hurt my toes....  It didn't happen.  I haven't given up though.  My toes are fine now and I am not out of breath.  It's too snowy to walk outside, but then that's why God invented shopping malls and Costco, right people?

Are the changes I made lasting changes?  Some are.   I like wheat bread and whole wheat pasta.   I find tap water is available as I do my daily tasks and easier to get to than a bottle of pop (which then creates garbage for me to throw out).  I like the way it is easy to get variety with tea rather inexpensively compared with coffee.  I'm not fond of stretchy exercises though, and I need to get back "on the wagon" with sweets.  I found in October that some clothes that hadn't fit me for a while (and didn't give away because it felt like giving up) now fit, so I must have done okay with my resolutions (though weight loss itself was not the resolution... too many years of disappointment to set myself up again).  I think realistically, I can get back on the wagon by January 3.   Honestly, I still have places to go and people to see who know my fondness for the fudge mint covered Oreo (and I have two boxes left).