Resolutions Revisited
For the past two years Tyler and I have taken the challenge to make New Years Goals. While I am an excellent list maker, and a big idealist and dreamer….deciding on a few things to commit to prioritizing is not easy. My 2012 goal was basically to survive – I was drowning in the daily drum of a 2.5 month old and a 16 month old and hearing Tyler describe all of his grand plans actually made me really sad because I knew I didn’t have the bandwidth to do anything. Well, I’m happy to say I succeeded, and part way through the year I started believing I could aim for something again and wrote a few goals beyond survival. Progress! This year was far better. To me the whole point of goals is to plan to do the things I really want to do but seem to forget about or set aside for other priorities. Goals are no longer guilt-inducing or enslaving….they get me excited about not letting another year go by that I’m not being and doing what I’m passionate about.Goals 2013. Here’s where I’m at halfway through this year….hopefully it inspires something in you.
COMMUNITY
- Start a blog, write at least bi-monthly family updates (Boom! I love blogging, this one was the best goal yet!)
- Cook with my sister 12 times (oops, guess I never told her this goal, I think we’ve done 3), I think I’m going to broaden this one to include driving adventures, too, so that makes 4.
- *Bonus* I wanted a goal about hanging out with friends but didn’t define it. But we hit a huge success in that we’ve found 3 other families who live within 5 miles of us and have had a few impromptu gatherings with them. While we love our friends who live far, we’ve been longing for a while for some connection that doesn’t involve the freeway. Yay!
HOME
- Fill out the rest of my “Kitchen Adventures” cooking journal with new recipes (ok. I’ve gotten more selective with what I put in there….but I’ll totally rock this goal by the end of the year, only a few dozen pages left)
- Re-think every room of the house – what’s its purpose, deep clean/remove stuff that doesn’t belong, and solve a challenge/make at least one improvement (inspired by the book Organized Simplicity, I’ve slacked a bit on this one, did the family room, the kids bath, and Tyler’s office…but there’s quite a few rooms left to go…)
- *Bonus* Grow Seeds: I didn’t want to commit to it at the beginning of the year but hoped that I would grow stuff from seeds, and I did! I used my germination station and also planted some seeds right in the ground (here’s a post about it from back in April).
CREATIVE
- Photography – intentionally do 3 projects as “service” (I’ve done 2 for friends who I have never shot before, but would like to donate services to a non-profit. I also have some ideas for business projects I want to pursue, so I’m unofficially adding that to the goals list)
WELLBEING
- Grow more disciplined: spend a month each focusing on the disciplines in the book Celebration of Discipline. (yipes. I love what I’ve read, and did well with my first month on Meditation, but month two was prayer and I bombed and haven’t moved forward yet because I feel I still need a lot of work. Discipline lacking. There are 12, so I think I need to press on with more gusto and focus on a different one every two weeks.)
- Read Books: finish the stack (pictured) and write about each. (I started off strong knocking three books off in the first two months, but have since lost speed, the list has also grown…so I need to get my fanny in bed earlier and get reading again, lots of books started that need to be finished). So far, I’ve written about one of them: Bloom, by Kelle Hampton, and referenced another: Family Feasts by Mary Ostyn (a later add).
- *Bonus* Attended a class on Life Calling. It wasn’t an official goal but one that I hoped to do, and did – it spanned about 8 weeks and there were definitely some aha! moments I appreciated, and some peace about my here and now.
Happy half-year. May we all find personal growth of some sort the next six months.
