My Goals for 2019
Happy New Year!!! Who's excited about 2019? I know I am!
I don't know about you, but if I were to post my Facebook relationship status with New Year's, it would definitely be "complicated." When I was a kid, I loved New Year's Eve because it meant staying up late, but then I kind of hated New Year's Day because I was expecting to suddenly feel different but never did. When I got into my teens, I grew to hate the whole idea of celebrating New Year's because it was an annual reminder that I had resolved to lose weight and failed miserably once again. In my 20s, I was sort of indifferent, especially when it came to resolutions. I would often try to sound cool by saying things like "Why wait until the start of a new year to change for the better?" (I still feel basically the same way, but I'd like to think I'm less pretentious about it than I used to be.)
Now I think I'm back to loving New Year's, but for different reasons. It brings a certain air of hope that's not so easy to find the rest of the year. A new year means new possibilities, new opportunities to get things right or to improve on something that's already right. So, in light of my newly rediscovered excitement about New Year's, here are some of my goals for 2019:
1) Spend time in God's Word every day. Why is it that the things we need most get pushed to the back burner sometimes? I've been pretty inconsistent with my Quiet Times lately, and my soul has suffered for it. I know that I need uninterrupted time with the Lord every single day, and I need to start making room for it again. Nothing else is more important than this.
2) Take a trip with Tom, sans kids. Not only is this one of the items on my 99-in-999 list, but we're also celebrating our 10th anniversary in 2019, so it's the perfect opportunity to take a trip together, just the two of us.
3) Be more present with my children. Yes, I'm a stay-at-home mom. So, yes, I spend all day, every day with my two girls. In 2018, however, I felt convicted about a) how distracted I am by my to-do list or, more often, my phone, and b) how little time I get to spend with them one-on-one. So in 2019, I'm going to try to save social media time for naptime and after the girls go to bed at night. I'm also planning to take each of them on a little mommy-daughter date once a month so we can have some quality time.
4) See a counselor. For a long time now, something hasn't felt quite right with me. I first noticed it after my second child was born, and I thought it might be postpartum depression. However, when I looked back over the last several years of my life (before kids, even before marriage), I realized that there was nothing postpartum about it, and I would guess that there's probably some anxiety in the mix as well. So I started seeing a counselor in Louisville, and that was helping a little, but then we had to move. I thought I could get by without counseling here in Charlotte, but I was wrong; I need help dealing with this, and counseling seems like as good a starting place as any.
5) Commit to the Curly Girl method. It's taken me years to accept my naturally curly hair for what it is, and now I'm trying to focus on taking better care of it. Enter the Curly Girl method, which is basically just cutting out certain styling methods and hair products with ingredients that can be damaging to curly hair (such as sulfates, certain silicones, alcohols, etc.). I first heard about CG in 2012, but I didn't decide to try it until just a few months ago. I'm still working on gathering my arsenal of CG-friendly products; from what I've heard, there's a lot of trial and error involved. But if it means helping my hair reach its full potential instead of looking like a hot mess, I think it's worth the effort.
6) Buy a house. We really love the apartment complex where we currently live, but this was never our long-term plan for our time here in Charlotte. We reached out to a realtor here back in October, but in 2019 we're really going to get serious about finding a house before our lease runs out.
7) Purge/organize our stuff. Before moving to Charlotte, we got rid of a LOT of our stuff. We sold some things on Facebook buy/sell groups, hosted a yard sale, and made several donation trips to Goodwill. We were completely blown away by how many items we had accumulated that were serving absolutely no purpose in our lives. We thought we were setting ourselves up for an easy move to Charlotte because we'd have so little to pack...and then moving day came, and we couldn't fit everything into the truck. I actually had to make an extra trip to and from Louisville the following weekend, just to get the last of it. Our current home is also quite a bit smaller than our old one, so right now it feels like we're drowning in boxes. And here's the kicker: we've been here almost three months, and there are some boxes that we haven't even opened yet, which most likely means we don't really need the things that are inside. I refuse to drag unnecessary items through one more move, so before we buy a house, I'm going to be getting rid of a lot more stuff. Not only will that give us some breathing room, but it will also make everything easier to organize after we move.
8) Get at least halfway to my goal weight. I'll be talking more about this in my next Get Fit Friday post, but I think this is more realistic (for me, anyway) than trying to get all the way to goal weight in one year.
9) Read 30 books. Honestly, this might be the most ambitious item on my list. I feel fairly confident about the other ones, but this one is a little intimidating because I know my tendency when it comes to books. I challenged myself to read 30 books in 2018. Know how many I finished? Nine. My problem isn't a lack of interest, or even lack of trying. Kind of the opposite, really. My problem is that I start a book, get a few pages in, then start a new one; and the cycle goes on and on. What that means is that I'm pretty much always "in the middle of" 7-10 books, and that doesn't even include the 3-4 that I'm reading with Tom. I'm a self-proclaimed bibliophile: I love books, and I've recently come to the realization that a lifetime is not enough for all the books I want to read. But I don't really love the idea of starting lots of books and taking a long time to finish them, so I've come up with a plan: pick the seven books I'm closest to finishing, and read a different one each day of the week. A good plan in theory, but we'll see how well it works in practice.
What are some of your goals/resolutions for 2019? I'd love to hear about them. I hope you have a wonderful New Year!
I don't know about you, but if I were to post my Facebook relationship status with New Year's, it would definitely be "complicated." When I was a kid, I loved New Year's Eve because it meant staying up late, but then I kind of hated New Year's Day because I was expecting to suddenly feel different but never did. When I got into my teens, I grew to hate the whole idea of celebrating New Year's because it was an annual reminder that I had resolved to lose weight and failed miserably once again. In my 20s, I was sort of indifferent, especially when it came to resolutions. I would often try to sound cool by saying things like "Why wait until the start of a new year to change for the better?" (I still feel basically the same way, but I'd like to think I'm less pretentious about it than I used to be.)
Now I think I'm back to loving New Year's, but for different reasons. It brings a certain air of hope that's not so easy to find the rest of the year. A new year means new possibilities, new opportunities to get things right or to improve on something that's already right. So, in light of my newly rediscovered excitement about New Year's, here are some of my goals for 2019:
1) Spend time in God's Word every day. Why is it that the things we need most get pushed to the back burner sometimes? I've been pretty inconsistent with my Quiet Times lately, and my soul has suffered for it. I know that I need uninterrupted time with the Lord every single day, and I need to start making room for it again. Nothing else is more important than this.
2) Take a trip with Tom, sans kids. Not only is this one of the items on my 99-in-999 list, but we're also celebrating our 10th anniversary in 2019, so it's the perfect opportunity to take a trip together, just the two of us.
3) Be more present with my children. Yes, I'm a stay-at-home mom. So, yes, I spend all day, every day with my two girls. In 2018, however, I felt convicted about a) how distracted I am by my to-do list or, more often, my phone, and b) how little time I get to spend with them one-on-one. So in 2019, I'm going to try to save social media time for naptime and after the girls go to bed at night. I'm also planning to take each of them on a little mommy-daughter date once a month so we can have some quality time.
4) See a counselor. For a long time now, something hasn't felt quite right with me. I first noticed it after my second child was born, and I thought it might be postpartum depression. However, when I looked back over the last several years of my life (before kids, even before marriage), I realized that there was nothing postpartum about it, and I would guess that there's probably some anxiety in the mix as well. So I started seeing a counselor in Louisville, and that was helping a little, but then we had to move. I thought I could get by without counseling here in Charlotte, but I was wrong; I need help dealing with this, and counseling seems like as good a starting place as any.
5) Commit to the Curly Girl method. It's taken me years to accept my naturally curly hair for what it is, and now I'm trying to focus on taking better care of it. Enter the Curly Girl method, which is basically just cutting out certain styling methods and hair products with ingredients that can be damaging to curly hair (such as sulfates, certain silicones, alcohols, etc.). I first heard about CG in 2012, but I didn't decide to try it until just a few months ago. I'm still working on gathering my arsenal of CG-friendly products; from what I've heard, there's a lot of trial and error involved. But if it means helping my hair reach its full potential instead of looking like a hot mess, I think it's worth the effort.
6) Buy a house. We really love the apartment complex where we currently live, but this was never our long-term plan for our time here in Charlotte. We reached out to a realtor here back in October, but in 2019 we're really going to get serious about finding a house before our lease runs out.
7) Purge/organize our stuff. Before moving to Charlotte, we got rid of a LOT of our stuff. We sold some things on Facebook buy/sell groups, hosted a yard sale, and made several donation trips to Goodwill. We were completely blown away by how many items we had accumulated that were serving absolutely no purpose in our lives. We thought we were setting ourselves up for an easy move to Charlotte because we'd have so little to pack...and then moving day came, and we couldn't fit everything into the truck. I actually had to make an extra trip to and from Louisville the following weekend, just to get the last of it. Our current home is also quite a bit smaller than our old one, so right now it feels like we're drowning in boxes. And here's the kicker: we've been here almost three months, and there are some boxes that we haven't even opened yet, which most likely means we don't really need the things that are inside. I refuse to drag unnecessary items through one more move, so before we buy a house, I'm going to be getting rid of a lot more stuff. Not only will that give us some breathing room, but it will also make everything easier to organize after we move.
8) Get at least halfway to my goal weight. I'll be talking more about this in my next Get Fit Friday post, but I think this is more realistic (for me, anyway) than trying to get all the way to goal weight in one year.
9) Read 30 books. Honestly, this might be the most ambitious item on my list. I feel fairly confident about the other ones, but this one is a little intimidating because I know my tendency when it comes to books. I challenged myself to read 30 books in 2018. Know how many I finished? Nine. My problem isn't a lack of interest, or even lack of trying. Kind of the opposite, really. My problem is that I start a book, get a few pages in, then start a new one; and the cycle goes on and on. What that means is that I'm pretty much always "in the middle of" 7-10 books, and that doesn't even include the 3-4 that I'm reading with Tom. I'm a self-proclaimed bibliophile: I love books, and I've recently come to the realization that a lifetime is not enough for all the books I want to read. But I don't really love the idea of starting lots of books and taking a long time to finish them, so I've come up with a plan: pick the seven books I'm closest to finishing, and read a different one each day of the week. A good plan in theory, but we'll see how well it works in practice.
What are some of your goals/resolutions for 2019? I'd love to hear about them. I hope you have a wonderful New Year!
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