2011 year was a beautiful and challenging year for the Barry Family.  Beautiful: Watching our daughter, Caroline, blossom into an intelligent and spuky toddler.  Exchanging vows and becoming husband and wife. Challenging: Relocating our family to Austin.  Having to work in separate cities (Matt=Austin, Vanessa=Dallas).

We’re hoping and praying that 2012 brings an end to us living in two different cities and that we can continue to grow together as a family meaning possibly adding another Barry to the bunch.  We’ve put together a list of goals for us this year…let’s see how we do.  Last year we had a Family Fitness Goal of doing a 5K…I think we did it but I can’t remember.

  • Spend less time on technology when we are together.   Our time is so limited together and we often find ourselves on opposite sides of the sofa on our laptop/iPad/phone, etc. with the TV on.  I want us to work on having designated technology time and outside of that time, it’s conversation time.
  • Work on speaking to each others love language.  Earlier this year, Matt and I read the Five Love Languages.  We blogged about it earlier in the year, too.  It opened our eyes to how we love and communicate but after a couple of days of bliss, we reverted back to our normal ways.  This year, we want to make sure that we each feel loved dispite our crazy living situation.
  • Make more friends in Austin.  Matt and I lived for Dallas for nearly four years and had quite a network of individual friends and were growing our network of friends we made together.  We need to get out of this apartment and meet more couples!  It just makes life richer.
  • Read a book together so we can have (healthy) intellectual discussions.  Since we’re cutting down on technology time…what are we gonna fill all those hours of talking with?  Well, I read about this in Cosmo magazine years ago and thought it was silly then but now I think it would be cool to read and discuss a book together.
  • Make date nights a priority.  I don’t mean fancy date nights even though those are welcome but just a designated date night maybe once a month or something that we can both look forward to.  We both have very demanding careers and so we’re one of those couples that needs to schedule our together time.  We didn’t do the best job of accommodating that in 2011.

So there you have it folks.  Our resolutions.  Do you have any of your own?

Vanessa Barry
Vanessa is the co-founder of Austin Moms Blog. She is also the Director of Communications for IDEA Public Schools, a nationally recognized network of K-12 public charter schools serving more than 15,000 students. She has a blast learning, loving and laughing with her four-year-old little lady, Caroline Grace.

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