At the end of each year, we make resolutions, swearing that we'll finally do a multitude of undone things: lose weight, stop smoking, start writing that novel, take that long-delayed trip to Barcelona.

But do we also make a separate list of resolutions solely focused on our jobs as moms and dads? Maybe 2010 is the perfect time to start.

There are probably 870 things I could and should do more effectively as a mom. But since that list would make for the longest, dullest blog post ever, here are five of the more important ones on my list. By all means, share your own resolutions -- and rip mine to shreds -- by posting a comment.

1. Be more mindful of the words I use in my child's presence. I certainly don't curse when my son is around. But the fact that he recently repeated something that I said during a particularly stressful Christmas Eve moment -- "If you don't stop it right now I am going to lose my patience!" -- tells me that I could try harder to take a deep breath, gather my emotions and choose my catchphrases more carefully.

2. Prioritize my time more effectively. This comes down to doing a better job of saying no to the unnecessary things and yes to the right ones. Translation: don't spend an hour reading and writing Facebook status updates or watching crummy movie trailers online; do play a more active role at my son's daycare center and plan more enriching activities (music classes, trips to the library) for us to do as a family during the weekends.

3. Say no less frequently. This is a lesson I learned from, of all things, a Clive Owen movie that about seven people saw. In "The Boys Are Back," Owen played a dad who took permissiveness to an extreme. While I have no plans to let me son cannonball into a hotel bathtub, the film reminded me that sometimes I say no reflexively, for no real reason. This year, I resolve to let my boy eat yogurt with a fork and, when he insists, wear socks that don't match.

4. Give myself -- and other parents -- a break. Moms and dads may hate to admit it, but we can be pretty judgmental of each other. And we're at our "judgiest" when we look at ourselves in the mirror. This year, I'll try harder to remember that we all lose our tempers and make parental mistakes from time to time, and that it's only fair to cut my child-rearing colleagues, and myself, some slack.

5. Make more time for my child. This is the biggie. As a full-time working mother married to a full-time working father, the hours in each day already get sucked up, to a large extent, by commuting, being in the office and dealing with all the tedious, necessary tasks related to home ownership. So during the hours when I am with my son, I'll do my best to set aside the laptop, stop checking that e-mail, put off the bill-paying and just be with my boy. Play Legos with him. Read him another bedtime story without thinking about how much I still have to get done before midnight. Love him fully in every moment, without worries about deadlines or errands that need attending, until the minute he drifts off to sleep.

I am writing this post from my parents' home. They have lived here since the 1970s, and I have spend at least part of the holiday season between these four walls every year of my life, from my first Thanksgiving to last week's Christmas. The house has gone through a number of changes over the decades, but "home for the holidays" has always brought me to the exact same location.

So much of what I think of as "home" is fixed to that spot on the map. It's where the stockings are hung, the mountain ash is at the end of the driveway, the basement remains crowded with years of accumulated sporting equipment and the local swimming hole beckons.

My children will have a different experience. My eldest has rung in the new year in three different homes in two different cities, and it is almost certain that she'll celebrate the birth of 2011 in yet another house.

Because we can't rely on the familiarity of geography, we have tried to forge traditions that transcend physical location. In some ways, this is not a challenge, especially at the holidays. There are special seasonal foods (the ffiggy pudding I mentioned the other day) that we plan to carry through the children's lives, an annual food drive that anchors part of the holiday season and the chili pepper holiday lights.

As easy as it is to build those traditions during the holidays, maintaining a consistent sense of place has been more of a challenge after each new year dawns. How do you create an environment in, say, mid-May that will always scream "home," no matter how many successive houses you've occupied?

In this, I have less experience than many of you (yes, I'm talking about Army Brat ... as well as the the countless others for whom Washington is a transitory step), so I'm curious for feedback. What kind of traditions have you all established that go beyond the holiday?

Things were just humming along on Christmas Eve. The kids were sacked out in the living room, basking in the glow of both a roaring fire and an early Christmas gift (G-Force . . . skip it). The figgy pudding was in the oven, along with the ham, and -- for a moment -- the mental to-do list was empty. So without thinking, I checked my e-mail.

"This is stupid," I thought. "It's Christmas Eve. No one in their right mind should be e-mailing at this hour." And, indeed, I was right: no new mail. Feeling sheepish, I walked away from the computer. Ten minutes later, in another fit of downtime, I hit "refresh" again. Again, no new mail, only an even bigger sense of foolishness. I'd repeat that sequence twice more before the pudding had firmed up.

Before the night was out, I'd settled on my first big resolution of the new year: no more using the quick excuse of e-mail to get out of really engaging with the family. Let me be clear: I'm not completely ignoring the children by assessing the state of my inbox every 15 minutes, but last week, I began to realize how unconsciously I do it and the way that it keeps me from giving anyone my undivided attention for more than a dozen minutes or so.

E-mail is only the most obvious way that I let myself get out of the rhythm of family life. Between the time everyone gets home and the time everyone goes to bed, there are a thousand good reasons to disengage for a moment. There is laundry to fold, slow-cookers to check, mail to sort. Each of these interruptions has the potential to disrupt a conversation or disrupt the flow of family time.

So, in 2010, I'm not going to let the allure of quick status check -- on anything -- take me away from meaningful family time. That doesn't mean that I won't occasionally use the TV or the Wii as a way to let me take one more phone call or do my sauteing in peace, but I'm going to make sure removing myself from family life, even for an instant, is something that I think about first. That might mean dinner gets burnt every once in a while, and my boss might have to wait a little longer for a response from me, but it's a small price to pay for a little more mindfulness as a parent.

Of course, I could use your help here: in a world of distractions and endless demands, how do you make sure that family time withstands interruptions? Is it only a matter of willpower, or have you all arranged your lives in a specific way to keep distractions at bay?

Have yourself a very merry Christmas Eve panic attack... (Bloomberg)

For those of us who a. procrastinate, and b. live on the East Coast and recently got buried under several inches of snow, the last-minute Christmas panic is even more intense than usual.

"We don't have all the presents! We are notably lacking in the stocking-stuffer department! We don't have all the ingredients we need to make the cookies we just have to bake so that we can share special, unforgettable holiday moments with our children!"

For parents, the holiday season often turns into the time of the have-tos. We feel an enormous sense of responsibility to make Christmas "perfect" for our kids. My mother was that way when I was growing up. Which, I guess, partially explains why I found myself flying through a Toys R Us at 11 p.m. two nights before the holiday, filling a shopping cart with toys to make sure my son's Christmas morning will be as merry as possible. (Side note: all that stuff about Zhu Zhu pets being impossible to find? Total nonsense; I saw roughly 85 of them sitting on the shelf at that Toys R Us in Rockville, Md.)

Of course, I realize that Christmas is not about the presents. When I think back on the holidays of my own childhood, I can only recall a couple of the gifts I got. (The Sindy townhouse with working radio? Awesome. And that goes double for Colecovision.) I remember even less about the things I wanted but didn't get, with the notable exception of the original copy of "The Wizard of Oz" script I specifically asked Santa to bring. (Still don't understand why he couldn't make that happen. If that guy doesn't have Hollywood connections, nobody does.)

What I remember most fondly and vividly is drifting off to sleep on those anticipatory nights before Christmas, my eyelids starting to droop as I gazed at the soft, green glow of the fake candles that stood in my bedroom window. I think about how comforting it was to fall asleep in my own house, knowing that my parents -- and, of course, Santa -- were watching out for my well-being. I think about what a gift it was that I could take all of those things for granted.

So tonight, on this Christmas Eve, when I start freaking out about all the have-tos I still haven't gotten to, I really hope I remember that ultimately, the thing that makes the season bright for our children is our presence. Just being there for them and showing them love -- and, what the heck, maybe a Zhu Zhu pet or two -- is enough to make any Christmas more than merry enough.

This is the time of year for lists, so I would like to present for your consideration 2009's five most over-hyped parenting stories:

1. Killer Zhu Zhus: Earlier this month, a consumer safety group warned that pretty much the only must-have Christmas toy -- Zhu Zhu pets -- were toxic. Except that, in the real world, the electric hamsters were harmless. The government finally ended the uproar, but not before the first holiday panic of the year set in.

2. Bad Parenting: The publication of Ayelet Waldman's "Bad Mother" and the success of sites such as truuconfessions.com made it cool for parents to brag about how they weren't crazy helicopter parents who really do care deeply about whether a piano recital goes perfectly. But being publicly laissez-faire about something as important as parenting is just as irritating as trying to win the best-parent-ever crown. There is a middle ground, but I'm guessing it doesn't sell books.

3. The Triumph of the Dad: Though the economy was sinking for much of the year, there was a boom market in stories about suddenly involved fathers who had turned their economic misfortunes into an opportunity to become model family men. And while some progress may have been made, it's not as if the PTA has suddenly been turned into a boy's club.

4. Parents on Facebook: Over the past year, Facebook has become the primary mode of communication for most of the parents I know. And -- at first -- I enjoyed seeing baby pics and the bon mots of my handful of Facebook friends. But as more parents have jumped on the bandwagon, I've become overwhelmed with the snapshots and kids-say-the-damnedest posts. Enough, already.

5. Evidence-Based Parenting: For a brief and shining moment, it looked like the publication of "NurtureShock" would change the way that parents (and parenting journalists) looked at the world. No longer would academic rigor in pre-school, perfectly obedient teenagers and gifted-and-talented testing in kindergarten be seen as unquestionably good. But parenting behaviors are hard to change, and I'm fully expecting that we're in for another year of glossy parenting magazine parroting convention wisdom.

Those are my five. Let's hear yours.

At some point, we all have to come in from the snow and figure out a way to fill the days between now and that distant date when the kids will have to head back to school. We faced that moment here yesterday morning: I'd had it with TV, and we weren't in a position to go down our list of indoor activities.

The solution, according to my daughter? Baking. The problem was that the cupboard was pretty bare, but the would-be chef was enterprising. She took a small stack of cookbooks into the dining room, in search of something that she could make with just the staples.

Thirty minutes later, I had two different kinds of flour spread all across the kitchen counter, dusting the floor and sticking to her sweater. It was as if the blizzard had blown inside, with white powder everywhere. Thirty minutes after that, she had a hard, immobile lump. Then it was just an infusion of yogurt and some quick kneading, and -- thirty minutes later -- we had fresh, hearty soda bread cooling on the counter. Total ingredients: flour, salt, baking soda, sugar, egg and yogurt. (The recipe called for oats and raisins, which were nowhere to be found, and she just left 'em out. No harm done.)

I liked the idea of fashioning good food from stuff we have laying around the house, and we've spent a good portion of the rest of day looking for similar cupboard-staple recipes. High on the list for today will be snickerdoodles (butter, sugar, baking soda, egg, vanilla, flour, cinnamon) and flan (sugar, eggs, milk and vanilla). Of course, on the next trip to the grocery store, we'll be able to get the components needed for proper baking: yeast (for breads) and chocolate chips (for everything else).

I'm sure some of you, during the weather-imposed family time, raided the pantry for some cooking fun. When it comes to throwing together kid-friendly culinary masterpieces from what you have laying around the house, what are your go-to recipes?

It is my genuine hope that all of you are celebrating the snow day today and -- therefore -- have little time for reading blogs. It's not every day that Washington gets socked with a White Christmas-guaranteeing blizzard. So go on, get outside!

Though there is no wrong way to play in the snow, I wanted to leave you with some snow-day related guidance (just in case) as you search for that missing mitten:

Snow Forts: Wikihow has a great guide to building snow forts, relying on those wonderful snowdrifts that are all over the place. For those looking for something more involved, I grew up building forts using a big piece of plywood. You throw the plywood on top of a drift, hollow out the drift under the wood, throwing the snow on top of the board. Voila! Instant ceiling.

Snowmen: I'm a big fan of the classic "Frosty" snowman: a corncob pipe, a button nose and two eyes made out of coal. The corncob pipes can still be had at the drugstore. The coal is a bit trickier to track down.

Snowball fights: I love that this site has a set of rules for snowball fights. (I mean, does any activity need rules less?) Remember, snowballs are the only acceptable form of weapon.

Snowy Day: Once you're in, no matter how old your kids are, you owe it to them to read "The Snowy Day," by Ezra Jack Keats. Pure poetry.

Hot Chocolate: Yes, you can just dump one of those powdered packet into hot water. But -- in honor of this historic storm -- you should make the effort to make the good stuff. Or, if your roads are passable, try your luck at Artfully Chocolate/Kingsbury Confections. I recommend the "Lucy."

When you get in from your adventures in the winter wonderland, let us all know how you celebrated.