Hi, friends! I completely missed the May goals post, so I’ll recap how my April goals went and then share my June goals!
My parents came to visit in May, which was tons of fun! They’re our first visitors since we moved to D.C. unless you count Charles’ parents who helped us move here. I’m not sure that counts since we had hardly any furniture and we put them to work helping us unpack and pick up furniture instead of showing them the sights. Getting to show my parents where we live and the things we see on a daily basis was lots of fun! It was also a great opportunity to do a lot of tourist things that we haven’t done ourselves yet. This first part of the year we’ve been really focused on getting settled and haven’t made a lot of time for sight-seeing.
One big change for us in the last couple of months is the two new additions to our household. One of my April goals was to start fostering cats and that was the goal I knocked off my list the most quickly. Having cats in the home has been such an unexpected joy and delight. They certainly require more work (looking at you litter box), but their sweet snuggles and excitement to see you return more than pay off all the extra cleaning they require.
May Goals Recap
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Hang the remaining pictures in the apartment
- Didn’t do this one. Whoops! I’m not sure what it is about picture hanging, but it always feels so intimidating to me to put holes in the walls!
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Write 50,000 words of blog content
- I didn’t quite make this one either, but I did get a lot of writing done, which felt nice. Now to polish it up and publish!
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Eat 5 servings of veggies a day
- I did GREAT eating more veggies the last couple months, for pretty much the first time in my life. My secret? A super simple, super boring lunch that I eat every single day. I’ve been eating 2 hardboiled eggs and a couple of cups of fresh veggies dipped in guacamole for lunch every day. Have I gotten sick of it? You betcha. But not as much as I expected. The boiled eggs are particularly rough, but I never really liked them in the first place so eating them every day doesn’t help. But the veggies are still delicious. I don’t look forward to eating this lunch, but once I do, I’m always satisfied. The health factor and the EASINESS to pack it for work mean that I’ll probably be doing this for a long time.
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Connect more online by actually commenting
- Totally forgot about this one! While I commented on things a few times, I definitely didn’t do a great job. It certainly pays to have reminders of your goals around so you don’t forget!
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Stick to our food budget. Moving to D.C. has definitely changed our budget a lot!
- We for sure did not stick to our food budget. Not even a little.
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Finish at least 2 of the nonfiction books I’ve started and haven’t finished yet
- I finished Grace for the Good Girl by Emily P Freeman and have made progress in One Thousand Gifts by Ann Voskamp (66% of the way through!)
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Start Friday Adventures. More on this soon!
- Didn’t really start this one, but we have more concrete plans for this month!
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Sign up to be pet foster parents
- Done!
Looking back at this list, I didn’t really finish enough to cross most of them off the list. That can feel really discouraging, but the thing I need to remember is that I’ve made a lot of progress. And isn’t that what life is all about? So much of the human experience isn’t about the final destination but about the growth and change along the way. It takes off a lot of the pressure I put on myself to be perfect.
We went to Georgetown Cupcakes with my parents one afternoon and these little bites of sugar were to die for.
Fun Things Happening in June
- Summer school for Charles is in full swing
- Whole30
- When I’m not cooking (see above), I’m hoping to really dig into my goals!
- Reading for fun. I’m thinking about giving myself another Netflix ban since my reading has suffered immensely since we started watching again.
June Theme: Spend out
I’ve been learning a lot about my unhelpful tendencies, thanks in large part to the enneagram. One of the areas I need to work on is being more generous instead of rationing and hoarding all my resources. This mentality is so pervasive for me, whether it’s time, energy, money, ideas, words…. If it’s a resource, chances are I try to hoard it. BUT I truly believe that God gives us our daily bread and because of that, I don’t need to ration the bread He’s given me today. I can spend out. The place that this feels most restrictive to me is in my energy. So this month I plan on reminding myself that I have enough energy for the things that matter.
Many of my June goals reflect this theme. I’m going to focus on saying yes to the things that I would normally say ‘no’ to or put off for another time for feeling a lack of whatever it is I need.
June Goals
I love Natalie Bacon’s post on goal setting. I like to use her eight life categories to give me focus and help me realize if I’m neglecting a particular area of my life. The eight life categories are environment, career, health, relationships, money, personal development, fun, and service.
Some of my goals hit more than one category, so I won’t always come up with eight different goals for each category. The great thing about using the categories as a guideline is that it gives me some structure to work with and helps me see if I have any blind spots.
- document more on my blog and clean up my Pinterest boards
- hang picture ledge
- Complete Whole30 – We started May 27th so we’ll be doing it for most of June. Eating Whole30 is a lot of extra work in the kitchen and definitely a serious goal to tackle
- Write out my top 3 tasks every morning
- Friday adventures! I work 9 hour days and get every other Friday off. Usually I use those Fridays to catch up on chores, errands, and rest. BUT I’d really like to start setting a few hours aside for those Fridays for some kind of adventure. Charles and I are thrilled we get to live somewhere with so many exciting and enriching experiences nearby and we definitely want to take advantage of that.
- Ask my people how they need prayer and then write down prayer requests in my prayer journal and then pray for them throughout the month
Here’s our sweet foster kitty hanging out at the top of the condo I couldn’t help buy for him (affiliate link – we got the dark grey multi-platform one and our kitties love it).
Bonus June Goals
One thing I’m doing differently is picking one or two main goals that are closest to my heart to work on and then thinking of the other ones as bonuses. This month I thought of a LOT of things I want to go after, but I’m not sure if I can realistically tackle all of them. Am I the only one whose eyes are bigger than her stomach when it comes to goals? So here are the bonus things I’d like to get done but aren’t as important so I won’t be at all upset about if I can’t tackle them.
- find a local primary care physician and call to schedule an appointment (possibly one of my least favorite tasks in all of adulthood)
- pull out my camera for some fun non-iPhone pictures. I haven’t done this in forever and I’m feeling an itch to document our current life a little better.
- Make an IKEA trip for wall storage for our kitchen, jars for making kombucha, and baskets to organize our cat supplies better.
- Go through 2+ years of phone photos. I have about 12,000 pictures on my phone and I’d like to go through them and delete all the random screenshots, duplicates, and non-memory related pictures. I got a smartphone in 2013 so I’ll be starting there and working my way to the present. My goal is to have it finished by the end of the year.
- Call or text a loved one every day
How about you?
What are your June goals? Or is there a theme you’ve named for your month or your summer? I’d love to hear about how June is looking for you!
Click here to follow along on Instagram to see how my goals are coming along.
