Lots of goals have come and gone in my head. But what I keep coming back to is that we'll be raising a newborn and a two-year-old next year. We just don't know what that looks like. There are lots of other variables as well -- we're going to offer to fly our relatives out to meet the new baby since we won't have enough vacation time to take any big trips.

Since we don't know who if anyone will take us up on that (and let us pay), I don't know what our travel budget will look like.

NT is taking a semester off, so his loans may come due temporarily. I don't think it'll affect us too much since we have so much extra money in the budget for education debt, but it's a bit of a wild card.

We do at least know what our pay will roughly look like; we figured out how much of our leave will be paid and unpaid, and I sketched out monthly projected budgets.

And we know what our daycare costs will be, since our lovely daycare provider has already agreed to take the baby on.

Anyway, there's enough predictability in our financial future that I feel pretty good saying we'll hit a few exciting financial milestones, so that's what I'm going to call my "goals" for the year:
Get EF over $20,000
Get household net worth over $250,000
Get student loan debt under $40,000
Get total household debt under $300,000

Another goal: I'm pretty pleased with the weight loss I've achieved this year, so I'm hoping I can maintain my under-140 status through the rest of the month and then create a new goal to get under 130 lbs.

I'm going to be easy on myself in terms of creativity and socializing in 2012. I'll do my best, but setting goals in the face of new motherhood is just apt to make me feel anxious or guilty.

One goal I think I'm going to set is to be more thoughtful about the products I consume. I'm trying to figure out how to frame this in a concrete way so I can know when I've reached it. I want to try and track the provenance of some of our most-used household products; find out what they're made of and how they're made, where the raw materials come from and where the production is done. How the workers who create the products live, and the environmental impact of the product, from harvesting of raw materials, to production, to use and disposal of the product.

There are so many things that are so easy to buy and use without knowing anything about them in the big picture. I want to feel like I have a better working knowledge of that.

If you have any suggestions of how I can make that into a concrete goal, I'd appreciate it!