Welp, last month was a doozy. Not necessarily because anything new happened, but just because of that—BASICALLY NOTHING NEW HAPPENED! Other than the fact that it’s starting to look more and more likely that we’ll be moving at some point this year (see my post on my other, more personal blog for details).
Basically, since you all are in the same boat (more or less) that we are, at least with the whole sheltering-in-place thing, I don’t really need to hash out how it’s been hard…hard to focus, hard to make plans, hard to have much motivation to do anything but just ride it out.
But I tried to make the most of things.
I tried to ride the waves of motivation when they did hit, even if it was seldom. (And you’d better believe I rode the wave of motivation that always comes right before a deadline, which is why I finished four books in the last four days of the month.)
Someday, things will return to normal. Until then, I’ll keep on keepin’ on with my goals, and being patient with myself when I’m just not feelin’ it.
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April Goals
- Get a haircut
- So hair salons in our county have been open this whole time (with precautions), but I’ll admit that *I* didn’t have the guts to venture out yet (and I also wanted to do my part to follow government guidelines to shelter in place as much as possible). However, both Matt and I are in desperate need of haircuts and Utah’s governor did a “soft opening” of the economy this last week, so I’m putting this on the list again for May.
- Go to the chiropractor
- Ditto as above, but I’m going to put it on the list for May because I have a big exercise goal I’m starting (see below) and need to be in the best condition possible so I don’t reinjure myself again.
Go on another family hike- We made this happen two weekends ago on a trail that’s all of a 3-minute drive from our house, and it was glorious. The kids just ate it up, especially Mathias, as it was his first time getting to throw rocks in the stream.
Find a way to make Raven’s birthday special- We had two sets of Raven’s grandparents over for a special dinner, and then I had set up a scavenger hunt for her with all of her presents (which were mostly books, let’s be honest). This is one of the only social interactions we had in the month, and it buoyed us all up for days (even if hugs were scarce and masks were worn). Raven absolutely loved it, which was what we were all going for.
Have our own Easter egg hunt- Oh man, holidays with kids! So much fun! We did this on the Saturday before, and both Raven and Mathias were wild with excitement over everything. The Easter Bunny made a last-minute switch on toys in the baskets (pulling out a bag of hand-me-down mini cars from my sister for Thias and giving the original toy intended for Mathias to the baby), and it ended up being basically The Best Decision Ever, as Mathias has been playing with the cars nonstop ever since, and they’re the first toy he looks for every day.
- Build raised garden beds
- As our chances of moving are high, it didn’t make sense to sink money into this project. If/When we do end up moving, rest assured that raised garden beds will be a high priority!
Plant second set of seeds- We’re not going ahead with quite as aggressive of a planting schedule, but we are going forward with some of our plans for my cut flower garden and for our vegetable garden. If nothing else, they very well might help sell the house! Since our first set of transplants all died (#majorfail), we tried to learn from our mistakes and tried again with the peas, sweet peas, and lettuce, and then we also planted some flowers from seed (snapdragons, California poppies, verbascum) as well as some lemon balm. So far, so good! We planted the seedlings out last week and direct sowed some of the things that failed initially.
- Plant gladiolus bulbs
- As of now, I’m holding off on planting these. If we know we’re moving soon, I’ll bring them with us. If it’s still unsure in a month, I’ll plant them.
- Complete spring cleaning list
- There are about 30 items on my list, so I knew it was ambitious to want to get them all done in April. I only ended up completing about a third of them thanks to a major motivational slump in the middle of the month. Rollover goal.
- Replace fridge filter
- Nope. Rollover goal.
Make spring capsule wardrobe- I did this at the very beginning of the month when we had a warm spell, and I ended up discovering that I hardly have any clothes that fit. I’ve always considered this an “in between size” and have just muddled through it in the past by wearing loungewear pretty much around the clock (until I lost all the baby weight). However, lately I’ve set myself the goal of getting dressed in real clothes every day (seriously, I should get some sort of medal for this), which has made me realize that maybe having only one pair of jeans that fits is not such a good idea. That is why this month, you’d see that my clothing budget was $150, which is more than I’ve spent on clothes for myself in probably 3 years.
- Go through all the bags/bins of kids’ clothes
- I went through one. Now just 11 more to go…
Finish studying October’s General Conference talks- Matt and I took to studying the GC talks and our scriptures together on many nights this last month, which gave us a nice chance to frequently talk together about what we’d read.
- Do an online photography class
- I ended up buying a year-long pass to Bluprint, which has hundreds of craft/photography/cooking classes taught by experts on it. I’m currently about halfway through their food photography course, and I’ve been very impressed so far! It’s been a good reminder to me as a photographer that I need to be investing just as much into education as I do into my equipment, if not even more. Buying new lenses and drooling over the prospect of someday owning a full-frame camera are much more immediately “fun,” but I’ve seen far more results in the growth of my work from taking classes than in just upgrading equipment.
- Upload first vlog
- I know nothing about editing videos, and I didn’t have the mental space to devote to learning that brand-new skill in April. However, Matt finally went over to the dark side and got a smartphone in April (we’ve both had fliphones this whole time, and I still have mine), and he’s been catching on pretty quickly to editing videos on it, so maybe I’ll have him help me out. I’m not going to put this as an official goal for May, though–it will probably have to wait until we know more about the direction we’ll be going in the next few months with Matt’s work.
Make 4 recipes out of A Year With Six Sisters’ Stuff- Still going strong on my 2020 resolution to “cook from my shelves”! This became slightly more challenging with my husband’s recent celiac diagnosis (which I need to do a post about), but I still completed it fairly early on. I made their pot roast recipe, a surprisingly good “faux” monkey bread garlic parmesan roll recipe (using store-bought biscuits, which I basically never use), and a couple easy vegetable side recipes.
- Optimize two old posts for Pinterest
- I updated the pictures and some of the text on this recipe posted back in 2012 for pepperoni pan pizza, which was our favorite pizza recipe until the post I did on how I perfected our pizza-making technique (and found our new favorite recipes). Now I just need to figure out the best gluten-free pizza recipe so all of this talk of pizza doesn’t bum me out…
- Write + publish pages/tabs on new blog + finish customizing theme
- In case you missed it, I’ve started a second blog–I Dream of Acres–just for fun to document our suburban homestead journey, as well as our plans moving forward on that. There is still a LOT to do on it, and while I posted six times to it in April, I still haven’t updated the tabs. Rollover goal!
Blog 10 times- If you count my posts on both blogs (which I am), I posted 12 times–six on each.
Work out refund/credit with Delta- Normally, Delta is just offering e-credit if you want to cancel your flight due to COVID-19, but we got lucky–since our original flight was actually straight-up canceled by Delta, we were approved for a full refund. We haven’t received it yet (which makes me a bit nervous), but hopefully that should come through in the next week.
- List Mazda
- Okay, for real for real this is getting done in May! I was for sure going to do it in April, but then we discovered the car wasn’t starting. (Totally our bad–we’d left it out in the driveway for too long in the winter without starting it, so the battery completely died and couldn’t hold a charge anymore.) Matt ended up buying and replacing the battery himself this last weekend, so this should finally be happening over the next few days!
Read 9 books- Like I mentioned above, I ended up reading four books in the last four days of the month to finish this, BUT I FINISHED IT. And now I’m on track to read eight books a month this year, which is just fun 🙂
- Finish The Age of Innocence
- Nope–my brain still had a hard time wanting to read anything that required too much concentration. Still hoping to knock out this final title that will allow me to cross off my 101 in 1001 goal to read five books off my 100 Classics list, though, so I’m going to roll it over again.
- Print photos for Quiet Book and 3rd + 4th family albums
- This was definitely overambitious. I ended up getting a decent amount done in putting together the pictures for the 3rd family album, but I didn’t do anything on the other two. I’m going to go easy on myself in May and just set the goal to finish the 3rd one.
- Run a mile in under 10 minutes
- I didn’t run a single time in April. At first, it was because I tweaked my back, but that went *enough* back to normal(ish) that I could have done some short ones. However, I completely and utterly had no desire to do exercise of basically any kind. Hence, you will notice that May has multiple health goals to get me taking better care of myself, which I know will help my motivation and focus as well.
May Goals
- Have a family movie night
- Let’s start with the more fun things, shall we? We ended up giving in to the pull of Disney+ and have been pleasantly surprised by how much we ALL love it. (I was also pleasantly surprised to find out that Rakuten–formerly Ebates–offers cash back of up to $15 on a subscription. And, if you sign up through my link, we’ll BOTH get a check for $30 cash back! That basically makes an annual subscription almost free!) Our plan is to watch the newly released Onward for our movie night this month (and maybe make it into a monthly tradition?).
- Watch two movies with Matt
- Often after the kids are in bed and we’ve read our scriptures and we’ve cleaned up and done the dinner dishes and watered the garden and taken care of the chickens, we’re so tired that we just go to bed without hardly really spending any time together with just the two of us. So, thanks to that fun Disney+ membership, we’ve started watching movies together at night occasionally, which has been such a great way to relax. We don’t usually watch a whole movie at once (just because we have a baby that still doesn’t usually sleep through the night and so we don’t want to stay up late!), but even still, it’s something I want to start doing more together, even if it’s only a few nights a month.
- Do something special for our anniversary
- We celebrate 9 years together this Thursday (the 7th), and as our state has started lifting some restrictions (and our county especially has seen almost no new cases over the past week and a half), we’re going to brave the world of socially distancing at restaurants while my mom watches the kids.
- Go on family hike
- Let’s see if we can make it 3 months in a row!
- Get a haircut (both me and Matt)
- Why do we always let it get so bad before making this happen? We really should just learn how to cut each other’s hair already. In the meantime, we’ll have to venture out into the Real World again to make this happen.
- Read 8 books
- I’m currently averaging 8 books a month for the year. If I keep up this pace, I might read 100 books in 2020, something I didn’t think was possible with young kids underfoot! (P. S. If you want to see what I’m reading, add me as a friend on Goodreads! I love “meeting” people over there!)
- Finish The Age of Innocence
- Rollover goal.
- Go to chiropractor
- Rollover goal.
- Get 5,000 steps a day
- I’m trying to more intentional about taking care of myself, and this has been an easy way to start. I set this goal for myself last week, and it definitely encouraged me to get outside more and just fit in extra steps where I could. I loved how it stretched me without stressing me, so I’m going to set it as a goal for the whole month.
- Start Kayla Itsines’s BBG (again)
- I got most of the way through this exercise program after having my second child, but then I severely injured my back during one of the workouts. I’m all sorts of nervous about starting this again, but I injured myself because I was pushing myself too much, too fast, and I also wasn’t watching my form very closely, so I’m going to do it MY way this time. (I plan to do a separate post on this later.)
- Plant vegetables (+ maybe some more flowers)
- Even if we end up moving this year, it probably won’t be for another 3 or 4 months at least, which means we should be able to harvest some things for sure. We might not plant as much as we were going to, but we’ll put in some zucchini, cucumbers, peppers, more tomatoes, and maybe some green beans.
- Finish spring cleaning list
- Rollover goal.
- Make 4 recipes out of America’s Test Kitchen Baby + Toddler Cookbook
- This is part of my 2020 resolution to “cook from my own shelves” more.
- Get lawn + weed treatment done
- This will help curb appeal if we end up listing the house, and if not, it will help my sanity by taking care of the weeds and dandelions. Win win.
- Replace fridge filter
- Rollover goal.
- Contact credit union about getting preapproved
- If we end up deciding to move, things could go quick, so we want to get some of this preliminary stuff out of the way just in case.
- List Mazda
- 8th month’s the charm?
- Sleep train Hyrum
- I still remember reading in Bringing up Bebe that the French say that if your baby isn’t sleep trained by 5 months, it becomes monumentally harder to do so after. I don’t know if there’s any truth in that, but our other two were sleeping through the night by now or at least had been trained to (Mathias’s ear problems made it hard for him to be consistent until he got the ear tubes put in later), so I guess let’s do this!
- Start Hyrum on solids
- Our older two were more than ready at 4 months exactly to start solids. I tried giving some to Hyrum last month after he hit the 4-month mark, but he wasn’t having it. Since my milk supply is doing its usual slump around this time, I’ll need to start him on solids or maybe look into supplementing with formula.
- Go through all bags/bins of kids’ clothes
- Rollover goal.
- Iron patches on Matt’s jeans
- Two of my most procrastinated tasks are mending and ironing, so this goal should be interesting.
- Print photos for 3rd family album
- Rollover goal.
- Update tabs for I Dream of Acres (aka, the new blog)
- Rollover goal
- Blog 12 times
- I’m going to count posts on either blog for now!
- Update one old recipe post
- I have a lot of good spring recipes in the archives, but the pics definitely need some work. (If you want to make sure you don’t miss the updated posts when they go live, follow the blog’s Facebook page or follow me on Pinterest, as those are usually the only two places those updated posts will be shown.)
- Finish online photography class
- Since I purchased the year-long subscription to Bluprint, my goal is to complete at least 4 courses over the next 12 months. Should be fun!
And there you have it! I’ll be interested to see how my motivation shakes out in May. How do you find that your motivation levels have been lately through all this?
