2013 – A Great Year

This year has been pretty awesome. 2013 has definitely been our year as a family. Little Man came into our lives and made our family complete – definitely the highlight of the year!

Before that, I went on maternity leave from work at the end of March and have now had 9 months away from work. That has been an amazing time of quality with LP and LM and I have loved every minute. Having 6 weeks of maternity leave before LM was born meant that I had time to dedicate to LP, it was time that I would never get back – she would never be an only child again and so I wanted to make the most of it and I had a great time with her, even though Little Man arrived 16 days early!

Going on maternity leave also meant that we stopped using our childminder and I made the decision to never pay for childcare ever again if we didn’t have to. Giving LP to someone else daily to look after her who wasn’t family was incredibly hard for me but necessary at the time.

Over the course of 2013 a close friend of mine had a baby and another two people in my life have found out they’re expecting their second babies. It’s definitely been a year for babies!

This year saw us decorate LP’s Big Girl Room and her move into it and into a big girl single bed complete with duvet! She managed the transition really well and at the age of 4 months LM moved into his own room too! At the same time as decorating LP’s room we also did a mini renovation of the bathroom and made the house as ‘perfect’ as it can be for a while.

2013 saw this blog move to it’s new home on a self hosted platform and for me to start blogging daily. I’ve now been focusing on the blog properly 5 months and I absolutely love having a hobby in my life. It’s something I haven’t had for a long time and I really appreciate having the space to write and talk to everyone at once. I’ve also started doing reviews on the blog and was crowned Graco’s newest Ambassador!

Overall, 2013 has seen me be pregnant for the last time, give birth for the last time, have a newborn baby for the last time. It’s also seen us start baby led weaning again, go through potty training with LP and it has seen LP generally grow up a huge amount – 2012 she was a baby and going into 2014 she is a proper little person. LP turned 2 this year and is very nearly 2 and a half. Little man is now nearly 8 months old!

2013 has also seen us become debt free, manage on one salary and maternity pay and go on holiday to Wales thanks to a competition win.

2013 has been a pretty awesome year really. At the start of the year I set some resolutions and I’d like to look back at them to see how I got on.

1 – Only bother with people that bother with us – I think I managed this one 100%. I can safely say at the end of 2013 that I have strengthened and deapened the friendships and relationships I have and have stopped bothering with the people that used to drain me. My spare time is now full of people who care about us and people that put themselves out and I love it – Our life is now quality rather than quantity and I always have time to see the people that matter.

2 – Have a working vegetable patch –This didn’t happen. Being heavily pregnant and then having a newborn was harder than I’d expected and I just didn’t have the time to dedicate to the garden. Having said that, I managed to lay more sections of path in the veg patch and we had a huge amount of strawberries from our garden this year so not all was lost – the garden will be finished eventually but it is still a work in progress.

3 – Be 100% on top of our finances –I know constantly how much money we have, whether we’re able to buy something and what we can afford. I’m all over our finances and I don’t see that ending any time soon.

4 – Have another baby – Little Man was born on 10th May 2013 and completed our little family. We’d decided on two children and after an exhausting pregnancy and the tiredness, tears and stress of a newborn there is no way I will ever do that again. Our family is definitely complete.

5 – Be debt free – As of August 2013 we are debt free apart from our mortgage. Something I am incredibly proud of and I will never, ever have unsecured debt ever again.

6 – Read more books – This didn’t happen – I got more into blogging instead so wrote more instead of read more. I think this is a fair swap 🙂