How are you holding up? Are your New Year's Resolutions still intact?

If so well done, apparently by today most resolutions have already been broken. Like Katie's! Who says: I thought about making a resolution to go to bed earlier, eat less, exercise more and put healthier foods into my body, however it didn’t last long, so my new year’s resolution is to get my kids to help around the house more, I’m sure I can keep that a bit longer!! You might have noticed a few people are advocating not saving resolutions for the New Year, in the belief that the long, cold dark days of January are not the best time to test your will power. Amy doesn't bother with New Year's resolutions, she says, "I find the best time to make changes is after the school summer holidays, September is like the beginning of a new year."

We're sort in the don't save resolutions camp in that we don't 'do' resolutions in our household in the traditional I'm giving up, going to do etc. but instead we make a list (in December or earlier) of [year] will be the year in which I…. Do something positive, walk a particular route, take up / reinvigorate a new hobby that short of thing. These can be done at any point through the coming year and even renewed carried on into following years. Many years ago Mum decided to learn to identify the wild flowers we saw on out and about, she got a big book of flower keys and I got spotters guides (I was still at primary school) and we learnt together, I added birds, trees and butterflies in following years.

This year, however, I am making a resolution - well it began in December if I'm honest! I've always been in favour of reducing the resources we use and recycling, reusing as many as possible. Long before recycling became compulsory or even fashionable we had a magnet on the fridge to check which cans were steel and which were aluminium, the steel ones were binned (I know, it seems incredible now!) and the aluminium ones bagged up and sent off somewhere. I had a bit of a rant about pointless, ridiculous packaging on my blog back in September. So you won't be surprised to know that I'm taking my recycling to next level this year. Our local council uses a co-mingled system for recyclates which means most of it is useless by the time it gets to the end point - wet paper, contaminated with food dregs from the cans mixed up with bits of broken glass and drips from the household cleaner bottles. I can't do anything about that so I have signed up with Terracycle  and am separating out what I can to send direct to them making sure as much as possible is recycled properly. They also take things that our local council doesn’t, so I now have a big box full of packaging from the dog food (sacks, bags and pouches), one with bits from toiletries packaging (shampoo tubes, tops from pump action dispensers), a couple of toothbrushes and tubes. We're on the waiting list to recycle pens - as I'm sure you can imagine the office uses quite a lot of those!