New Year's Resolutions

Yes, it's a little early for the beginning of the year resolutions, but I've been thinking a lot about them. A lot of people don't like New Year's resolutions, but I am not one of them. Of course, I think I go at them a bit differently than many people do. My resolutions are not going to be an all or nothing proposition. I'm not interested in setting myself up for failure with outrageous changes that I'll never have the time or energy to complete. I want my resolutions to reflect the positive changes I want to make in my life, and I want them to be a continuing journey - not something I'll think about for the first two weeks of January, and then forget about. I think I'm going to add a sidebar item to my blog, so I can keep track of them, and I'll be blogging about them throughout the year. Pretty much every self help guru in the country tells people to set goals and to write them down. Well, my resolution list is essentially my written down goal list I guess.

My first resolution is to reduce the size of my (and my family's) carbon footprint. We already try to constantly live a "greener" life, and this will just be a continuation. Hopefully, it will be a more aggressive continuation of this goal. Our children are learning about things like carbon footprints, global warming, and recycling. I hope that living close to the Earth will become something that is just second nature to them. Tonight we had a talk with them about the effects of diet on the environment. We had a mostly living foods gazpacho tonight for dinner. I've been doing a lot of Internet searching and reading about living foods diets recently (it's been an interest of mine for years actually), and apparently my daughter has been paying attention. While we were eating dinner, she asked me if I was planning on "becoming raw." What a smart kid she is!!! I told her that no, while I wasn't planning on become "raw," I was trying to incorporate a larger percentage of living foods into our diets. We talked about the health benefits, but we also talked about how living closer to the Earth (and in doing so - eating closer to the Earth) are so much better for the environment. We told her that one of the reasons that we choose to be vegetarians is that it is better for the environment. I did stop short of using the meat eating Prius driver having a larger carbon footprint than the vegetarian Hummer driver! LOL. She really gets it, and I think the younger kids are getting it, too. Food is just one way to lower our carbon footprints though. We do it in many, many ways. My goal is to become very aware of how everything I do is a part of my carbon footprint and how I can tread softly to make that footprint smaller.