I have recently become absolutely obsessed with food shows and home makeover shows. The easy scapegoat for my newfound time waster is the baby. I’m nesting, so I like watching shows where homes get cleaned and fixed, and I’m constantly hungry, so I’m totally obsessed with what can basically be called “food porn,” like Man vs. Food and Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives.

I often make the mistake of turning the food shows on when I’m both very hungry and very lazy. You know, the point at which you’re more lazy than hungry, and resolve that once the hungry part outweighs the lazy part, you’ll make something extraordinary, but in reality, you  end up just gnawing on a block of Colby-Jack and eating fistfuls of Lucky Charms straight out of the box.

Not like I’m speaking from experience on that last part or anything.

If it’s not the baby, then I claim I’m finally maturing, and taking an interest in something other than cartoons or pseudo-reality shows where the audience watches as the characters’ lives slowly disintegrate into ugly-crying, feelings-eating mounds of despair. I claim I’m actually interested in getting inspired to make new recipes at home for my family, and probably doing other grown-up stuff, like cleaning up after us throughout the day and folding and putting away laundry after it comes out of the dryer, instead of letting it pile up on the dining room table and just picking items out of it and hoping the pile will feel manageably small before I need to do laundry again.

Again, totally not like I’m speaking from experience or anything.

But really, what I believe is the case, is that those pseudo-reality shows have become absolutely unbearable to watch (Teen Mom, let’s be honest, it’s been the exact same thing every week, for four seasons), and I finally have more than just a subscription to Netflix to provide me with mindless, flat-screen entertainment (like 250 channels of DirecTV goodness), and Andy and I routinely stay up painfully late, and the only channels that have programs on at two in the morning that aren’t about male enhancement or weight loss wonder drugs are the Food Network and the Travel Channel.

Also, I really, really like food.

Anyway, I think watching food shows and home improvement shows (like Property Brothers and Holmes on Homes) has me thinking maybe I should change some stuff. Like the absolutely baffling, tornado-through-a-trailer-park state of our bedroom and the fact that I have, up until this point, always been all about the path of least resistance when it comes to getting food in my belly. Hence my former habit of eating out, and, when that doesn’t work, the gnawing on cheese blocks and eating cereal out of the box thing.

This semester at school is going to be hard. Really, really hard. I’ll be at my parents’ house (an hour away from my own house) three days a week in order to attend nursing school. That’s until the end of October, when I’ll be in school five days a week. Logan is all set in terms of childcare, and my parents and Andy’s parents are helping out more than I could ever ask for, so that’s great, but still. I’ll be seeing my husband four days a week for the next two months, then for two months after that, for two days a week. I’ll be driving the tedious drive between the city I live in and the one I grew up in far more than I’d like to. I’ll still be watching Little Dude three days a week. And I’ll be doing all this while trying to not only complete, but totally ace, what is probably the most difficult Associate’s Degree program out there. I’m exhausted just thinking about it, and classes don’t even start until tomorrow.

So I’m making some school year resolutions, in order to help Andy and me keep some semblance of order and sanity throughout what will otherwise be the most chaotic, difficult, sanity-testing times of our lives.

(Have to keep telling myself it’s a means to an end…means to an end, Kristen)

Resolution 1: Between Saturday and Sunday, every week, the laundry will get done. All of it. When each load of laundry comes out of the dryer, it will immediately be folded and put away, in order to avoid clean clothes pile-ups anywhere in the house.

Resolution two: For the first part of the semester (when I’m at my house four days a week), I will make a REAL dinner for my family, which I will plan ahead of time, three days out of every week. We will eat our meals at our dining room table, instead of standing at the kitchen counter or sitting on the couch.

Resolution 3: Our bedroom and bathroom will be kept clean; I will no longer let random crap clutter the floor in front of our dresser, and the bathroom counter will get wiped down at the end of every day.

Resolution 4: The kitchen will be completely clean every night before I go to sleep (unless I set a load of dishes going immediately before going to bed, and there are a few dishes that don’t fit).

Resolution 5: I will keep a planner. There is too much going on in my life this semester NOT to do this. My cousin is staying with us for six months, starting next week, and will need help getting around town for a while. I basically have my life split between two cities. I’m in charge of keeping track of all appointments of any kind for our family of 3.5. I’m going to have homework to remember and clinical rotations to be ready for. I CANNOT AFFORD not to keep a detailed planner this semester.

Luckily, over the last week, Andy and I have spent a total of approximately fifty-thousand hours between the two of us making sure that we START the semester with a clean house. Obviously, it’s easier to keep a clean house clean while all this is going on than to try to clean a dirty house after all this has started.

So now I’ll take bets on how quickly I will fail at every one of these resolutions and thereby end up reduced to a whiney pile of comfort-food-eating, pregnant, hormonal shame. Any takers?