FOR me, this is the best time of the year. It’s all sleep-ins and sunshine, catching up with friends and family and eating food one shouldn’t.

For a short time, work gets put aside and hours can slip by without a care, and certainly without that sinking feeling that all I need to do hasn’t quite got done yet.

With peace and quiet and time to think I try to make a few big decisions about how I am going to do things differently in the year ahead. Yep, we’re talking New Year resolutions.

Because I’m holidaying in Adelaide, a town I left when I was 20, this year my thoughts have turned to resolutions past and how, over the years, my goals and plans have changed.

For example, health is at the top of my list these days. When I was 20 it was not so much about health as appearance. Back then I was going to get myself into some lycra, take up aerobics and eat nothing but grapes all year so I could look like Elle Macpherson. Now my New Year plans include booking that overdue bone-density test, getting my gut flora checked, staying on top of the cholesterol and recommitting to regular appointments with the dietician so that I can lose some serious weight. How things have changed.

The same goes with that old chestnut of work-life balance.

Years ago the challenge was how to maintain my frenetic social life and spend serious quality time with my friends while still getting through my university course exams. These days I’m trying to balance a busy job with family commitments including wrangling kids with increasing homework, huge sporting commitments and parties, maintaining standards that fall far short of a Domestic Goddess, getting dinner on the table and accomplishing the weekly grocery shopping, keeping up to date with the laundry and everything else that has to get done. My social life and sometimes my other half have totally fallen out of that equation.

Then there is the old financial savings resolution one. When I was 19 that was all about saving up for clothes, a car or a trip overseas. Now it’s all about working out how to afford to ever retire.

Priorities change and resolutions evolve over the years. Perhaps the one constant is that when February and March come around, many of the old patterns will have fallen back into place. That was the story when I was 19 and it’s still a bit of the story now. Then there’s the other constant – the March resolutions to try harder and stick to the program.

In the words of the old French saying – plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose – the more things change, the more they stay the same.