Those of you who are longtime readers know that sometimes my goals for the year sync up nicely with my writing themes for the year. Other times they are fairly different and sometimes they are a good mix. So now that you know my H themes of Holiday, Heights, How, and Home, it is time to talk about what else I discovered in my Powersheets Prepwork and what goals I’ve set for the year.
Verso L’alto (ascend in faith and on mountains): This is a goal that coincides directly with my themes for this blog this year. If you read last month’s posts, you know that this is also my word of the year. Aside from the hiking goal baked into this big picture goal, it focuses on reaching new heights both physically and spiritually. You can read more about the idea behind it HERE.

Uplift my Family: We all know last year was HARD and while I was so thankful to have more time than ever with my little (or not so little in the opinions of some) immediate family unit, I will also admit that not getting any alone time and feeling all the stress of virtual learning meant that I was not always the mom or wife I want to be. I want to refocus on positive parenting and taking time to uplift and enjoy my family instead of looking at them only as something to care for or manage. I want to lift them up in prayer, in my words, and in my deeds. I want to keep the goodness and outdoor adventures we fell in love with last year, the fun we discovered the year before, and add to it a gentleness in hard times and enthusiasm in better times.

Elevate our Home into a Haven: I learned a lot about what I want for our home by being forced to spend so much time there in 2020. However, the stresses of everyone being home all the time and the unpredictable financial state of last year made it hard to implement many of those changes. I took some time during my Powersheets Prep to really plot out what I can do immediately, what I can do when we hit certain goals (more on this to come!), and what I can do in the in between.

Increase Sleep, Energy, and Strength: These are the three things I really want back in my life as I approach our youngest’s first birthday. It may or may not surprise you that the one that intimidates me most about this goal is also the most needed and that is the SLEEP. It’s a lot easier to force myself to do MORE of something than it is to STOP and pause and relax my body enough to truly rest and recharge. Also, while I jumped back into cardio last year because running and hiking are so helpful to my mental health, I have been delaying strength training while I continue to avoid gyms so that may take some time to get back in the swing of things.

Refine How I invest in and Enjoy my Talents & Community: A lot of this is about time management, but it is also about my career and how and when to participate in things when theatre hopefully emerges from the pandemic times. I don’t have a lot of clear immediate action on this goal yet aside from continuing to write where I can, but I’m excited for what is to come.

Go Tell It on the Mountain: This is about the struggle over making myself and my voice small vs. shouting out what is important to me and being less apologetic in what and how I share. So often I have wondered if I should quit blogging, if what I have to say matters at all. I often couch my shares of a new blog post with phrases like “if you want to read” or “if you are at all interested” and just a lot of caveats. I want to give myself this year of trying to share things unapologetically or without self-effacing… I have never been afraid to talk or share (clearly… this blog alone is enough proof of that), but often I share with so much doubt unless I am connecting to someone or something else is more important than my own thoughts and experiences. I still think it is important to connect in that way, but I am working on remembering that what I say and do is allowed to be important too.

So now that you know my goals, just know that a lot of January was about setting up the year for success and helping my littles start the second half of the school year. The big focus was also on a 31 day hiking challenge to jump start my verso l’alto theme/goals. I learned a lot from that and I’ll have a whole post on it coming soon. I won’t recap the rest since I didn’t share a January tending list, so let’s just jump into February’s tending list items (For those of you knew readers or unfamiliar with Powersheets, a tending list is basically breaking down year long goals into monthly, weekly, and daily action steps!)

FEBRUARY MONTHLY GOALS:
*Plan and Celebrate Baby’s 1st Birthday: It’s obviously not going to be the same kind of 1st birthday her siblings had, so we are planning other ways to celebrate the youngest member of our family making it through an extremely weird first year.
*Finish Baby Book/order prints: I got WAY behind on this project so this is going to take a huge amount of focus on time this month. I’m hoping by the end of the month I am ready to order prints and get the book totally done… especially since I’m still only about 1/3 of the way through her sister’s baby book and it just gets so much harder to go back than to do it while they are still little and the memories are still fresh!
*Plan Spring Break: I’m not sure if we will take day trips or a local in state trip or just stay home so hubby doesn’t take the time off work now in hopes that life might be a bit more normal later in the year and we can take a real vacation then, but we need to plan it out now so it doesn’t sneak up on us!
*Declutter house and get donations out of the garage: We have had donations piling up waiting for life to return to normal and at this point I just need to get them SOMEWHERE OUT OF OUR HOUSE instead of finding them the optimal place. I also feel like we are still drowning in stuff post-christmas (though the actual problem is that our house is pretty small for five people)
*Try 2-3 New Recipes: I don’t want to overwhelm us with the expectation fo a new recipe every week, but I do want to switch up our normal menus a bit.
*Transfer favorite recipes from online to physical cards: This is another big time consuming project for the month- but more and more websites are going defunct or their links on Pinterest are going bad so I want to save what recipes we love in a better form while we still can.

FEBRUARY WEEKLY GOALS:

The view from the top of a solo hike I did in January…

*Solo Hike: I am definitely pulling back on hiking compared with the every day goal of last month, and I certainly still plan to have some family hikes, and would love to have more time on the trails when possible, but at least once a week I would like to have completely solo hiking time to trail run or just to explore a trail all on my own. And everything else is bonus and something I’m grateful to have!
*Write the Word Wednesdays: This was another daily activity to kick off the year that I am ready to pull back to a once a week minimum… may end up continuing to do this much more than once a week though!
*Self Care Sundays: I have so many lovely lotions and masks that are going to go bad if I don’t start using them soon, so I’m setting aside the time to CHILL since so much of my other self-care is super active.
*Photo Routine/PL Pages: We got our family yearbook from 2020 all done last month, so I am pretty motivated to keep this going. Also FINALLY planning on getting a better backup system going and still have plenty of catching up to do as far as purging photos from my phone and organizing them on our computer/portable hard drive.
*WRITE!: Blog posts mostly, but I have a few other writing projects I’d like to work on as well.

FEBRUARY DAILY GOALS:
*Yoga/Meditation: This was another January daily item, and it is staying on my daily list. It makes SUCH a difference to my mental health. 
*1 on 1 time (even 10 minutes!): February is a month focused on LOVE and I want to love my family well so I have a goal of 1 on 1 time with each family member each and every day. A conversation, coloring a picture, having a dance party, etc. meaningful connection with just them.
*Sleep Hygiene: My sleep is really terrible. still. and with the baby turning 1 this month I want to go back to focusing on how to get an appropriate amount of rest.
*Evening Routine: Getting better at this but still tweaking/doesn’t feel like habit yet.
*Move My Body: While I might not be hiking every day anymore, I don’t want to break the habit of exercising almost every day in some way shape or form.