I hate the idea of setting New Year’s resolutions, but I love the idea of setting goals for the new year. Why? Let me explain. A goal is a desired result. It is measurable… you either accomplish it or you don’t. A resolution is a permanent change to your life. That’s pretty intense, and it makes it really easy to fail. Let’s say your resolution is to eat healthily or quit smoking, or get enough sleep. Those are pretty big life changes, and if you slip up once, it’s easy to get discouraged and feel as if you’ve failed, which technically you have. However, if you make goals instead of resolutions, you can easily achieve them. Instead of saying you’re going to randomly eat healthily, you can set specific goals for each month, and allow for cheat days. When you reach your goal, you can set new ones.
I personally like to set SMART goals, but that’s probably the teacher in me. A SMART goal is something that is Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Time-Bound. Although, I do like to make my goals a mixture of attainable and reach because I feel that if I meet all of my goals then I was too easy on myself.
Here are my goals and plans for 2018!
Word(s) of the Year
Intentional. Present. Consistent. Joyful. I chose 4. I want to be intentional and consistent in my parenting. I want to be present and not consumed by my to-do list! And lastly, I choose JOY.
Physical
I’ve struggled with my fitness since I became pregnant with the twins. I’m not good at exercising at home consistently; I hate running; it’s too much work to load the kids into the car and take them to childcare at an actual gym. SO MANY EXCUSES.
Well, there’s a gym at the end of my street at our new house. The gym is small-group fitness classes and it’s female only. They have classes ranging from barre, kickboxing, strengthen and tone, pound, TRX core, boot camp, spin, etc. I don’t think I’ll ever get bored, and since it’s literally a tenth of a mile from my house, I can force myself to go even when I don’t want to. So far I have been going to the 7:00 PM classes, which is also a nice break from putting the kids to bed. It’s SO FUN and I love the personalized attention combined with the energy from the other ladies in the class. If you have a gym like it near you, I strongly suggest you give it a try.
My SMART goal is to go 3x a week in January, 4x a week in February, and 5x a week starting in March.
Other physical goals are to bike and kayak in the summer, be able to do 5 unassisted pullups (Lord help me!) and run a 5K (which I’ve done before, but not since pushing out 2 babies within minutes of each other).
Spiritual
We have found a church in RI that we’ve been going to and I think it’s going to be our home church. It’s hard because we loved our church in Ohio so much that we find ourselves comparing churches here. I want to get involved in our church here as well as join a homegroup. Lastly, I want to write in my prayer journal at least 3x a week. So far, we’re 4 days into January and I’m at 0 days, yet here I sit blogging…
Educational
I want to read 30 books (this is harder than you think when you have 3 kids!) and start playing my flute again. My flute chops are fairly out of shape, and I’m ready for that to change.
Travel
We want to visit Ohio, obviously! We’re looking to do that in the Spring. Ben and I also want to get away just the two of us. We’re thinking someplace tropical in the early spring when it’s still cold here… and budget friendly since we just moved and bought a new house and all of that fun stuff. If you find any great deals, send them my way!
Traveling is very important to us, but it’s SO hard with twin toddlers. We don’t have any big family vacations coming up, but we might do some short weekend trips. We will definitely do LOTS of day trips in the Spring and Summer because there are so many amazing places to visit in RI. We have a goal to visit every lighthouse in RI in 2018. There are 21 according to google!
Projects
We have many things we want to do to our house. That’s what happens when you buy a house built in 1890! In 2018, we want (need) to tear out and rebuild our front porch. The paint is chipping terribly and underneath is lead paint, so it’s a safety hazard. We don’t currently use our front porch, but we have an outdoor rug down for the random people that come to the front door. We redid our back porch before we moved in, as that’s the entrance we use.
We also want to remodel our downstairs bathroom and our 3rd-floor office. Lastly, we want to start an herb garden and flower garden. I think a vegetable garden is too ambitious for this year so maybe that will be a project for 2019.
Woo! It’s going to be a busy year! What is your biggest goal for 2018?