Happy New Year, guys! We hope you all had a fabulous NYE celebration. Our “party” consisted of Andy having the flu and us sitting on the couch drinking milkshakes and watching Flashdance (seriously, that movie is so bad). We may have been in bed by 10:30. But, I mean, homemade milkshakes, that’s pretty awesome, right?

So I’m excited about this new blog series we’re starting called his and hers, where we talk about random things we like. Haha, kind of vague, but you’ll just have to stay tuned, I guess, and we’ll see where this takes us! We’re starting with our New Year’s Resolutions. We decided this year to try a general resolution and then a challenge for ourselves.

**HIS**

My resolution: My resolution is to stop having the flu. Because it sucks. But beyond that, my first real resolution is to get better at our budget. We tend to waste a lot of money on going out to eat, or buying groceries we end up throwing out, or getting that new video game even though it’ll be half price in two or three months. This year I want to focus on our spending and make sure we aren’t going overboard. We signed up for an account with Mint.com, which is a budgeting software. It links up to all your bank accounts, tracks your spending, allows you to set budgets and goals, and shows you where you’re overspending. We’ve only been using it for a few days now but I really think it’s going to help. Kerry and I love to travel so we want to start being able to save more and travel even more, and we’re hoping this allows us to.

My challenge: Year of the No Beard. In 2009 I did “Year of the Beard.” I went 365 days without shaving or trimming my beard. It got real long and real gross. I raised money while doing it, through t-shirt sales and fundraising events, and was able to donate over $5,000 to the Domestic Violence Center of Cleveland. Nowadays, I still only shave about once a month. I almost always have a beard. This year I want to try to the opposite of Year of the Beard and keep my beard away. So my challenge this year will be to shave every day. Because of this flu, I’ve already messed up on day 1, so hopefully I can get back on track for the rest of the year.

**HERS**

My resolution: My resolution is to schedule my time more efficiently. Similar to how Andy wants to work on organizing our monthly budget, I want to organize my time. We have a pretty… aggressive… to-do list for 2014 that I’ll post tomorrow, so I really need to work on figuring out how to get big projects done around the house while also having time to exercise, write blog posts, do the dishes, and maybe even have some time to catch up on the DVR. My idea is to write out a plan for each day, with daily to-do lists, and see what works best for me.

My challenge: Take more pictures and do something with them. When we got married, we decided to take a picture of ourselves every day for a year as a fun way of documenting our first year of marriage. It was a ton of fun and I love looking at the pictures… but they’re just hiding in my computer. Boo. Last year, I wanted to keep taking our picture every day… but we only remembered to do it like maybe once a week. Boo. So this year I’m committed to taking more pictures AND I’m going to actually print them out… Then we can laugh at them for years to come!

So what are your resolutions? Anyone doing anything really fun this year? Maybe you’ll give us some great ideas!