I know I’m a bit late to the party with this one, what with us being three weeks into 2017 already, but I’ve been thinking a lot this last few weeks about what I want to achieve over the next year.

If I had to pick a word to describe 2016 it would be survival. Getting through the days on very little sleep, surviving a house move with two little kids, managing on one wage after my maternity pay ended in May. It’s not been the easiest of years but it’s done now and I am determined to make 2017 more about actually living than merely surviving.

I’m not one for new year’s resolutions, and often I don’t have much of a plan for life at all but I’ve been thinking about where I want to be this time next year and I thought I would share some of my hopes, plans and goals for 2017. Some of these are personal and some are blogging related, and I suppose some are a mixture of both…

Goals

• Keep blogging! I often find it difficult to find the time and motivation to blog but I’ve been carving out this little corner of the internet of mine for over three years now and I’m not ready to stop any time soon.
• Grow my readership – I would like to double my monthly page views by the end of the year.
• Grow my following on social media, concentrating on Instagram. I would love to have 5000 Instagram followers by the end of the year.
• Earn money every month – I’m not going to specify where this money should come from. It could be from my blog, it could be from my job at Tots100, I may even go back to teaching if I can find the right post for me and my family.
• Lose weight – I put on weight in both my pregnancies and although I lost some in between I put more on with Gabe and I have kind of been burying my head in the sand about it since he was born. He’s now 17 months and it’s time to do something about it. It’s also about eating more healthily and setting a good example to the boys too.

Plans

So I suppose these plans are really a vague idea of how I’m going to achieve some of the goals above…

• Post regularly on my blog – I’m going to aim for at least three posts a week and I want to get back to posting a bit more than just family updates with the odd review thrown in.
• Focus on Instagram – posting quality photos daily and interacting with others.
• Keep looking for suitable teaching jobs – actually one has just come up, to start in September and if I get it, it will be about as perfect as I could hope for at the moment.
• Focus on eating healthily as much as possible. My main weakness is chocolate and cake – I’m not going to cut them out all together but they need to be once a week or even once a month treats, not every day treats! Toby has started to get a really sweet tooth and it can’t have been helped by seeing what I eat so the reducing chocolate and cake applies to him and Gabe too. I’ve got a goal weight in mind and I’m hoping I can get there over the next six months, and then most importantly, stay there. I’m 39 this year and I really don’t want to end up fat at 40!
• Take more time to look after myself. Some days I don’t even get round to cleaning my teeth, let alone having a shower and getting dressed…and although there’s nothing wrong with a PJ day it tends to just make me feel a bit crap about myself.
• Along the same ‘me time’ line I’ve put my name down for a new local dance class. I’ve danced since I was tiny but I’ve not done anything since Gabe was born. I’m really looking forward to dancing again – it’s great exercise and good for my soul too.

Hopes

And lastly my hopes for 2017…

• I hope Gabe starts sleeping through the night…well he has to eventually doesn’t he?
• I hope that Barry and I can start having the odd night out together, or maybe even a night away (although this kind of depends on my previous point!)
• I hope Toby settles well and enjoys going to school when he starts in September.
• I hope my boys continue to develop the relationship that I can already see glimpses of.
• I hope that by losing some weight and making time for me I can start to reclaim a little bit of myself – be a tiny bit less mummy and a tiny bit more Sarah again.
• And it kind of goes without saying but I hope we all make it through 2017 happy and healthy.