I mentioned in the last post but my birthday was on January 1st and I turned 32! Ah! Where are the years going? Haha! Really though I love my birthday and I love celebrating and if you know me you know I will try and keep celebrating through the very end of January.

What I have been contemplating is my need to make the day and surrounding days super important. There is this natural feeling when the new year begins to make goals and work extra hard for the things we want or to contemplate the future and what’s next. These thoughts also come about when we turn a year older. Thinking about what we’ve done up until this point and what we would like to do next. I get a little overwhelmed because for me these 2 events happen at the same time. Therefore I think I place a huge importance on this time of year. Frankly it’s a tad exhausting and has me wanting to do nothing. Yikes.

Luckily I found a few posts to help me not take things so seriously, to add to some of the things I’ve already been enjoying and loving, and using prompts to help further growth and change. Jesse from Style and Pepper talks about adding more “ingredients” to her life so it feels more like whipping up something fun when looking at the new year and not like a chore. I love the 5 simple reminders from The Fresh Exchange-especially the one about cutting yourself some slack-I really needed to hear that. Finally my gal Moorea Seal wrote a book called The 52 List Project and it was featured on Oprah! In case you want to join in the fun but aren’t quite ready to purchase you can find a few of the lists here.

(P.S. These pictures were not taken on my birthday but during the weekend and we were still celebrating so Walker kept saying that the snow was my birthday miracle. I agree! It was simply magic and I could have stayed out and watched it all day but my husband is a Texan and he got cold. Haha!)