I started the new year with a fresh coat of paint on the walls and freshly organized file cabinets. Over the past couple of weeks, my friend Megan has been helping me sort, file, organize, and generally deal with everything that has built up over the past year. I feel approximately one million pounds lighter. My husband and I celebrated the end of 2013 with a quiet night at home, feeling better than we have in a long, long time. I’m still not the type to set resolutions, and my to do list is still a million miles long, but I’m hopeful and ready for the fresh start of a new year. So today I thought I’d talk about some of my goals for 2014.

Well, we achieved our 2013 goal of buying a house – but after a difficult house hunt, we found a house that was good enough but maybe not exactly right for us (more on that soon). Now the work of creating a home is really only just beginning. We’ve been in survival mode ever since moving to our “new” house more than 9 months ago, and I don’t think I realized how much that survival mode was weighing us down until reading all of your wonderful comments on this post about juggling life, work, and family. I don’t need to make our house perfect right away (that’s definitely a long term project), but I need it to be a place where we feel happy and relaxed while at home, and a place where we feel comfortable entertaining friends and family. Which leads me to my next goal for 2014…

…making time for our friends. Between house hunting, then moving, then trying to get settled, and general work craziness, we unintentionally withdrew from our friends when we really needed them most. We were so stressed out all the time from being in survival mode, it was hard to find the energy to make plans – and sometimes it was even hard to be around people who seemed so much happier than we felt at the time. But that’s just silly, and we really miss our friends.

Working at home has been a blessing for the last three years, but as my business grows I’m starting to crave more space – and a space that I can truly dedicate to paper projects, cocktail photo shoots, and all the other crazy ideas floating around my brain. Plus, as Sophie gets older, we could really use my current home office space as more living space. I’ve started looking into spaces around my Capitol Hill neighborhood but haven’t found a good fit just yet. This is probably my biggest challenge for 2014, but I’ll be so very excited if I can make it happen!

Travel was a regular part of my former career, and it’s the one part of my old job that I actually miss. For the past three years or so, most of our family travel has involved my business trips to New York for trade shows or visiting out of state family – and not much else. We took Sophie on her first airplane trip when we visited California over the summer, and my next goal is a family trip to Europe. Andrew and I both have a long list of countries we’d like to visit in our lifetime, so I’d love to eventually be able to plan one international trip each year, but I’d also love to travel more domestically – even if it’s just a weekend trip to the mountains or the beach.

So! Those are my goals for 2014. I hope it’s a good year for all of us!

Photos by me via Instagram