2017 Goal Recap

Oh, 2017. WHAT A YEAR.

As I think back to our life in January of this year, I cannot believe where we are now. One extra child. One new (and rather stressful!) job. We don’t have either of the cars that we started the year with, but we have two completely different ones (with a motorcycle in between haha!).

At the beginning of 2017, I wrote out some goals for the year. Honestly, I was chin-deep in post-partum struggles and didn’t feel like making any lofty goals for the year. I briefly wrote a few things in my journal, and I wanted to recap them (mostly for myself).

One thing that I did do this past year was choose a word for the year. My word was FREEDOM and I really took that word to heart. My verse for the year was “God has not given us a spirit of fear, but a spirit of power, a spirit of love and a sound mind.” (2 Tim 1:7) I recited this verse to myself many times over and over throughout the year.

So, here are the goals I started 2017 with and how I did on them:

Read through the Bible in a Year (CHECK! I am so excited that I read through the entire Bible chronologically this year. It was a lot of reading every day. Technically I still have a week left, but I’m actually on track so I plan to finish this up by the 31st. If you are interested in doing the same this year, Dayton Women in the Word is hosting a read through the Bible chronologically together. I won’t be doing it since this year was so reading-heavy for me and I want to get deeper next year).

P.S. I do love my She Reads Truth Bible!

Read 26 books.  in this post.I read 44 books this year, so I’d say I hit that goal! You can see the full list, linked reviews and my top 7 books of the year

Accept two foster kids. Well, this did not go as expected. I’ve heard of these elusive foster placements that last only a few weeks, but that is not the case for us! We seem to get the really, really long-term ones. And that’s ok. I’m so glad we took in Heavenly, but it has been more than enough for me to handle.

Run a half marathon.  I didn’t have high hopes of this actually happening, but I’m so glad that I did it!!!! I went to watch the Air Force half/full marathon at the beginning of September and that inspired me to sign up for one at the end of November! It was bitter cold and I had just come off two weeks of sickness and a sinus infection, but I PR’ed (I’ve only run two halves LOL) at 2:09:43

Do not let our income stop me from living generously. I’m honestly not sure what I was getting at with this one. I don’t feel like I lived very generously financially, although I do give a lot of time and energy to help the foster community. Soooo…meh. on that one. Lesson learned: make attainable goals. Lol.

Technology off when kids are awake. This is for sure something that I’m still working on, but that I would like to keep as a family rule. There were times during the year that I did really well at this, and times that I did not. I will say that taking off from social media from Thanksgiving until last week was really, really helpful in breaking some of my bad phone habits. The times that I’m really strict about not being on my phone is from 3pm-8pm when all the kids are home and needing me for various things. It’s also the time of day I am most tempted to be on my phone.

Less “blogging”, more hobby. I often write up to five blog posts a week, and I realized that I just need to cut back. My goal was to make myself publish only three posts a week. As always, I’m working hard at mentally training myself to not worry about my numbers and just keep writing because I love it, not because I want to impress sponsors. I still haven’t impressed many, soooooooooooo I think I’ll just keep on with this as a hobby.

Weekly Game Nights. Uh. Nope.

Monthly Date Nights. I can’t remember exactly, but I’d say Theo and I went on around 6 dates this year. Not monthly by any stretch of the imagination, but I would actually call that a grand improvement from previous years. We finally seem to have found a babysitter and now that we have a little more income to spend on said babysitter, this is going to continue to be a goal going into 2018.

 

So, I guess my first goal for 2018 is to set more realistic goals with measurable ends. HAHA. How did you do on your goals for 2017? Any new goals for 2018?

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