(Yes, I realize it is February, and not really close to the new year, but it was just the lunar new year too, so I can maybe say that’s what I mean?)
It has once again been way too long, but I won’t stress about that too much. In my last post I gave myself permission to do away with perfection, and so I’m going to try and walk-the-walk, so to speak, and publish a post that is definitely not going to be perfect…
When the new year is approaching, I always get excited at the idea of a fresh start and setting new goals. (It was December when I started this blog, way back in 2014…) This year was no different. The end of a year and the beginning of the next always gets me thinking, dreaming and planning. And this year I was fortunate to be on a little weekend getaway for the new year with my husband. (Without the kid too – thank you to the in-laws!) This gave me more time to relax and ponder where I am in life and what things I might want to work on or improve. While I was exploring these thoughts, I started to think about blogging again. It has basically been 5 years since I stopped blogging regularly (if I’m totally honest, I was never blogging regularly, but I was at least putting in a reasonable effort at it). It pretty much lines up with when my kid was born. I guess the extra time that I used to have for myself to do creative things and blog has been taken up by caring for him and doing things with him.
But blogging has always been something that I want to come back to. I always really enjoyed it and it was a great way for me to express myself creatively, while also giving myself motivation and accountability to get other tasks and goals done. So as we move in to a season of life where my little guy is starting to be able to do a few things for himself and is also getting in to activities and playing with friends, I am going to try and take those snippets of time that I am getting back, and put them back in to blogging.
So, what do I have planned? Well nothing too exciting, but I’m going to try and aim for one post a week. And it will mostly probably be about my dabbling in the flylady system (if you don’t know about it, it’s sort of a system for household/life management and organization). To start, I will probably just use the blog as an accountability partner and post about my goals for each week and the results from the previous week.
And with that, I will leave you this week and come back to you next week with my summary from January…
I had started this “postpartum” fitness plan post back in May or June of 2018 when I was thinking it was time to get fit after having my baby in March 2018… I never posted it… And I never finished it… Let’s just take a quick read at what I was going to say…
It’s official… I can no longer use the excuse of being pregnant for my extra weight… And now that I’ve waited the appropriate 6 weeks (okay, it’s more than that… but whatever…), I can get started on getting back in shape…
Of course, as with every new project, this starts with a spread in my bullet journal. For my initial spread, I took to pinterest for ideas and found this one:
I believe I actually did make myself a version of that in my bullet journal at the time… I’ll have to dig back in to that book…
But that was over a year ago… almost 2 years ago now… And I never did “get back in shape”…
“But round is a shape…” Yes, yes, I can always find excuses for being overweight and sluggish, but I want to be healthy, and my current weight is not healthy for me. So, as I mentioned before, one of my themes for 2020 was to “de-frump.”
I left this theme purposely vague because I wanted to allow this goal to change over time, and also to give myself some leeway when making the goals to cover a lot of different aspects of my “frumpiness”… And with the current worldwide COVID-19 pandemic adding anxiety and throwing curve balls at everyone’s regular routines, giving myself some leeway is probably the best thing… Ultimately, though, the goal is to get fit and healthy…
So, after all this discussion… Let’s get down to the nitty-gritty. At the beginning of April, I thought it would be a great time to start my new goal… I started writing this post then, but got sidetracked by life, and am now just coming back to this post to finish it… Anyway… I’m going to try and make these goals cumulative, so I’ll start with one or two habits or goals each week, then add on to them the next week. I’m going to start simple to get myself started with some easy successes.
April De-Frump Goals:
Week #1: (April 1 to 5) Go to bed by 10:30pm on weeknights & brush my hair every morning. The better sleep I get, the more energy I’ll have and the better I’ll be able to tackle other aspects of my life. And I know brushing your hair every morning sounds like a given, but honestly, my hair is so straight that I don’t often *need* to brush it, and normally when I get out of the shower I just throw the wet hair in to a messy bun and forget about it. I think that putting a it of effort in to my hair will make me feel better about myself and my appearance, even if I’m not actually seeing anyone really…
Week #2: (April 6 to 12) Get up at 5:30am on weekdays & take my vitamins every morning. If I want to have any time to myself before the little monster wakes up, then I’ll need to get up before him… He typically wakes up around 7am, sometimes we can push it to 7:30am, so a 5:30am wake up time will give me some time to be productive, either on stuff around the house, my personal goals, my blog, or to get some work done. Also, I have totally fallen off the wagon of taking my vitamins… After years of being good (especially while pregnant and breast feeding), I’m not even sure why I got out of the habit… But it’s time to get back in to it.
Week #3: (April 13 to 19) Go for 2-3 runs & drink 8 cups of water a day. I’m going to try getting back in to running in the mornings. Since I am not “single parenting” my mornings anymore, I can totally get up early (hence the 5:30am wake up goal) and get out of the house before anyone else gets up. I think that getting some early morning exercise will help my mental health along with my physical health, and will probably help me be better focused when I sit down to work. And I’m *pretty sure* that I am drinking the required 8 cups of water (mostly in tea form) a day, but I haven’t been tracking it for a while, so I want to get back in to that too…
Week #4: (April 20 to 26) Wash my face and apply moisturizer every morning. This is another one that might sound like an obvious one to most people, and I do wash my face most mornings, but I rarely put moisturize on my face… And I’m not getting any younger, my skin could use all the help it can get to keep from getting too wrinkly as I get older, and my moisturizer has sunscreen built in, so as we approach summer, it will help keep my paleness from getting lobster red sunburns.
Week #5: (April 27 to 30) Don’t eat anything after 9pm. I’ve heard that not eating after a certain point in the evening can be very good for your health. I believe this is probably true for multiple reasons, but for me, the big one would be that I never eat anything healthy late in the evenings. I have heard 8pm to be the magic time, but honestly, the little monster’s bedtime often bleeds close to 8pm these days, and I typically need/want to have a bit of a snack after he’s gone to bed so I can actually pay attention and enjoy whatever it is I am eating… So I’ve picked 9pm for my time. If I’m still doing the 10:30pm bedtime, it still gives me an hour and a half between my last food and bedtime. That should be good enough to mostly digest the food…
Of course, setting goals means a new spread in my bullet journal:
Of course, now that it is midway through April, probably best to show you an updated version of the page:
These goals have been created with the assumption that we will be remaining in this current social distancing lock-down until at least the end of April, which I’m pretty sure is pretty safe to say based on all the news I’ve seen.
What do you think of my goals? Too simple? Too complicated?
So… Thursday is the same as Tuesday, right? I guess my blogging goal is still a work in progress… Anyway…
One of the four themes for goals that I mentioned in my first post of 2020 was decluttering…
A couple of years ago now, I had a goal of getting 1000 items out of our house. I stopped keeping track part way through the year, and while I know I got further along than my last update in May of 2018, I did not make the 1000 goal.
So what are my 2020 decluttering goals?
2020 Decluttering Goal #1: Track the number of items leaving the house & work toward a total of 500 items for the year.
Not quite as ambitious as the 1000 items from 2018, but figure that 500 is a bit more realistic (especially since I am starting mid March)… And of course, what do I do when I have something I need to keep track of? Create a bullet journal spread!!
With this spread I will colour in a block for each item that leaves the house. Since I started tracking last week, I have got rid of 4 items:
2 pairs of toddler shoes (could maybe count this as 4 items?)
1 baby carrier backpack
1 baby bathtub
So here’s the updated spread:
In order to help myself with meeting that 500 item goal, my second decluttering goal is a bit more task oriented goal:
2020 Decluttering Goal #2: Pick and complete 1 small decluttering task each week.
The idea being, I will use this blog to give myself accountability for a small task each week to work on organizing and cleaning up my house, and in doing so, work toward my 500 item goal.
Of course, this means another bullet journal spread!
This week (we will call this week 1), I am picking the computer desk area. Obviously my spread only goes until July, not for the whole year, but I am not sure that this particular notebook will actually last that long, so I will deal with that when I get there…
I chose that spot for this week because with all this craziness with the COVID-19 pandemic, I will likely be working from home as much as possible going forward, so I need to get myself a nice tidy spot to set up my computer. I could use the kitchen table, but if I use this desk, then I can keep my computer set up and also close off from the little monster who is also home right now…
For the goal going forward, I will try to do an update with some before and afters every few weeks. I personally LOVE before and after photos…
So there you have it… My decluttering goals for 2020.
In my last post I went over my four overall goals for 2020. I guess they were more themes for goals rather than specific goals… So I want to revisit each one with a bit more details, hopefully working towards a “SMART” goal that I can eventually say that I have definitively met.
I’ll start with #3 from my last post because once I commit to blogging, then I can use the rest of my goals to fulfill the blogging goal…
Yes, I am well aware that it is the beginning of March, but I can still say “Happy New Year!”, especially since this is my first post of 2020.
As I mentioned in my last post, I am really hoping to get back in to blogging this year. I really enjoyed it in the past, and not only do I feel like it is a nice creative outlet for me, it is also a good means of documenting and staying accountable for my goals.
I had thought I would get started blogging right away in the new year, but life had other plans for me… I won’t go in to the all details of it, but the short story is that my husband is moving up the ladder at his current job, and unfortunately for me, this means that he is now working out of town for 4 days a week (started at the beginning of January). Adding in the time for travel, that basically makes me a single parent for 5 days a week… A single parent who is also working full time and is responsible for the zoo at our house (1 giant dog + 2 cats)… So, needless to say, it has been an adjustment and I’m still not totally sure I have it under control… But that’s a discussion for another day…
So, what are my goals for 2020?
I’m actually not 100% sure on all my goals at the moment because I think I may take a more fluid approach to my goals this year, rather than making big promises in JanuaryFebruary March that are no longer relevant later in the year… But, I have a few overarching themes that I want to address…
One of my goals for this year is to get rid of 1000 items from our house. The last time I did an update on this goal, back in February, I had parted with 54 items. Since then I haven’t really been putting any effort in to removing things from our house… in fact, we have probably brought in more than 54 new items while preparing for the new arrival.
When I pulled out my record sheet to see where I was at, there did appear to be 1 more X on the sheet, so we were sitting at 55… so, sometime in February or March, I got rid of 1 thing…
In any case, after a few weeks of maternity leave, I started to have enough energy to tackle some projects around the house… which means I’ve started to go through things that have been down in the basement for months and months with our renovations. And things started to leave the house… it helped that my husband was also motivated to get things out of the house!
And then… Barb over at Decluttering the Stuff put out a challenge to get rid of 100 things before May 1st… I joined the challenge thinking it would be motivation to catch up on my decluttering… Continue reading →
I am finally back at home after what seems like an extremely long 3 weeks away for work, and so I was taking a look at what I had posted while I was away…
Did you read my last post? The one where I was supposed to do a monthly review my personal goals for 2018? Did you wonder what happened to the last 2 goals? (My original list had 5… My review only covered 3…)
Yeah… Basically, I just flat out forgot about them… And I didn’t take the time to review my blog to make sure I was being consistent… My bad… (Blogging fail!)
So, let’s just quickly correct that. (And yes, I realize that it is almost time to do another monthly review, but whatever…)
Here we are, over a month in to 2018 already! How are you doing with your new year’s resolutions or goals? I am going to try and post a monthly review for accountability on my personal goals. It may not be the most exciting read, but it’ll help me keep up with my goals, and also give me a better idea of what I need to work on each month… Of course, I am already quite late in getting this first review out since we are now pretty much half way through February… Oh well…
This post took a bit longer to get written and posted than I had anticipated… I kept getting distracted reading everyone else’s posts on their goals for 2018… I posted my financial goals for 2018 already, and now I want to go over my personal goals for 2018.
As I mentioned when I wrote about my financial goals, it is very hard to predict what this year will hold for me, or know how everything will play out with baby-to-be, and so it is very hard to think up personal goals that will be applicable for the whole year. I was considering only doing monthly goals, but I think I can find a few goals that I can work on all year. If you followed along with my personal goals from 2017, some of these might seem a little familiar… Continue reading →
To quote one of my all time favourite books, Anne of Green Gables, “isn’t it nice to think that tomorrow is a new day with no mistakes in it yet?” And so, with the beginning of a whole new year of tomorrows with no mistakes in them yet, it’s fun to give ourselves a reset, a fresh start, to work towards new goals.
Last week I reviewed our financial goals from 2017, and so I wanted to move from that to discussing our financial goals for 2018. It is difficult to think too far in advance for this year because so much is up in the air once March hits and baby is scheduled to arrive. We haven’t made any final decisions with respect to maternity or paternity leave yet, so that also makes it hard to plan too far in advance… But, even if everything changes and I have to re-evaluate my goals in 3 months, I’d rather have something to work toward than not… So, here goes with my financial goals for 2018: Continue reading →
All-Round Better Me 