Seeing as we’re almost a third of the way through the year, I figured I probably should do a check-in with my 2020 resolutions, even if the current pandemic conditions make some of these impossible to work on or predict at the moment.
The other thing that’s making life unpredictable at the moment (and therefore making the ability to do some of these resolutions unpredictable too)? The fact that the next few months might hold a move and/or a major job change for our family, which I wrote all about on my other, more personal blog.
So, with those two things, that effectively makes several of these pretty hard to work on right now, if not downright impossible and/or unwise.
But, excuses aside, here’s how things are going thus far:
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- List all Ebay items in office
- I’ve literally listed one. However, it *did* sell almost immediately, so…progress? Now I’ve just got 3 more full garbage bags to go…
- Get back to pre-pregnancy weight
- At the beginning of the year, I had 17 more pounds to go to reach this. Currently, I have about 13-14. My husband and I are both trying to lose weight at the moment, and we were both making really good progress leading up to our Hawaii trip (since we were using that as a motivator). But, since that was canceled…it’s been a bit harder to stay on track. I haven’t GAINED anything back, but I’ve just basically stalled over the past month. It doesn’t help that I absolutely am a stress eater, which has meant that I’ve turned to sugar a lot more than I really should over the past month, what with the COVID-19 quarantine, Matt’s recent celiac diagnosis, the fact that we don’t know what our job/housing situation will look like in a few months…I really need to get back on track with this.
- Bump up retirement contributions
- This one could go a few different ways this year. If we find a new job that has a retirement plan, then we’ll probably significantly be able to bump things up. If we move to stay with Matt’s current company, we might be able to bump it up if we end up buying or renting a house with a lower monthly cost down there. If we end up being unemployed for awhile or choosing “filler” jobs until we find a good fit, we’ll probably stop retirement contributions altogether, even though we’re just putting in $150/month currently. Lots to think about.
Get more chickens- We completed this in March, except now the fate of said chickens is unknown. We’re hoping that wherever we move, we’ll be able to take our flock with us, but there are no guarantees there. As it stands, we currently have the four hens we got last year and now six chicks (that are really not chicks anymore, but who are at that gawky teenage stage of chicken-dom) on top of that.
- Pick a cookbook a month and make 4 recipes from it
- So far, so good! I posted the monthly breakdown of all the chosen cookbooks here, and I’m 4 for 4 so far on keeping up. This has especially been a fun one to be doing during quarantine!
- Have 4 people/families over for dinner (that we haven’t before)
- Nope, for obvious reasons. Here’s hoping that life returns to normal in the next few months so that we can still do this!
- Go to Hawaii
- It’s just depressing now seeing this on here–this should have been a shoe-in, as we’d bought the tickets and all. (We would have gotten back from our trip last Wednesday…weird to think about that.) We were able to get a full refund on our plane tickets, so maybe when conditions calm down, we might still be able to make this happen.
- Publish 100 blog posts
- I should have been more specific on this one—do I shoot to publish 100 blog posts HERE, or am I allowed to count posts I do for my other blog too? (For the record, I still haven’t decided). As it stands, I’ve currently posted 26 times here, and 8 posts on the other blog. So if I count all those posts, I’m about right on track. If I’m just counting the posts here on To Love and To Learn, I have some catching up to do.
- Plant dahlias
- Another one that might be foiled by the uncertainty in our future. We would need to plant these in the next couple weeks if we were to stay here, but seeing as we still don’t know, this might not happen this year. Such a bummer! But maybe I’ll just plant anyway, and we’ll see what happens?
- Get my TBR list below 270 (starting at 292)
- This one is so far going a lot better than expected! I usually add books at a much faster rate than reading them, but I actually have trimmed this down to 277 so far. Of course, part of that is because I went through the whole list and ended up just taking off about 7 or 8 titles that no longer interested me, but still—progress is progress! (Note: You can see what all is on the list by adding me as a friend on Goodreads here. Please don’t feel shy to add me, even if we don’t know each IRL! I LOVE it when people add me to their Goodreads list—it’s one of my top sources for finding my next read.)
Do 3 read-alouds with Raven- I really wasn’t sure how this would go, but we’ve knocked it out of the park! I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised, but Raven has LOVED doing these read-alouds of longer books, and it’s provided some great opportunities to discuss some deeper life questions with her as well as do some critical thinking questions to help prep her for kindergarten. So far, we’ve read Charlotte’s Web, Mrs. Piggle Wiggle, and Socks together, and we just started The Magic Treehouse (book 1).
- Do a complete study of the Come Follow Me curriculum this year
- I’m mostly on track with our church’s weekly at-home study curriculum, although there are a few weeks I’ll need to go back and hit better. I haven’t missed a day of scripture study in over a year and a half, but I *did* erroneously think I could keep up with my own personal study/goals AND thoroughly do all the curriculum exercises, and…it just wasn’t going to be doable. So now I’m doing the curriculum first and then spending any extra time at the end of the week continuing with my personal study goals.
Are you even bothering with goals right now? Or have you created a whole slew of new ones? (I feel like I’ve been at both extremes at different points in this quarantine.)