GOALS: OCTOBER AND NOVEMBER

October was a month of ups and downs.  It felt, more than usual, like my days were either easy or hard.  I think it's just this season of life with three kids under five and the general chaos that goes along with that.  And, honestly, the level of ease has a lot to do with the amount of sleep I get and the general attitude I bring to each day.

Through it all, I continue to find myself motivated by the goals and challenges that I set for myself.  And I am thankful for that.

My October goals ended up as such:

1.  Get as many x's in my daily checklist as possible.  Fail.  The month started off well and then I just stopped filling in my daily checklist.  Although I don't have an exact record of how things went, I can pretty easily tell that I missed a lot more of my daily tasks this month than I did in September.  I did somewhere between okay and well on all the household upkeep stuff and getting my daily 10,000 steps.  I completely last traction on doing my daily devotions and daily flossing in the last half of the month.

2. Walk a minimum of 300,000 steps.  Done!  I stayed right on track (averaging right at 10,000 steps per day) through the middle of the month.  I had one really bad stretch where I was below 7,000 for three out of five days.  Then, I rallied and came back to end the month with just over 314,000.  Woot!

3.  Figure out an Advent devotional plan for myself.  Done.  For the past two Lent seasons, I have used the Lent devotional by Amen Paper Company (formerly Naptime Diaries) and really liked the format of that devotional.  I was not, however, a big fan of their Advent devotional last year.  So, I decided to make my own devotional for this Advent that is similar to the Lent devotional format that I liked in the past.

It is a super simple and very open ended setup.  Each page has a verse at the top of the page and a lot of room to write.  That's it.  I chose 25 verses related to faith and will write whatever I have to write about each verse as the days of December pass - usually my writing tends to be a combination of thoughts on the verse/topic and writing out my related prayers.

If you would like the pdf file, email me at petermann dot brooke at gmail and I will send it your way.

4.  Start planning Advent study and activities for the kids.  In progress.  So far, I know that I want to include a lot of Christmas books and time learning about the destination of our Operation Christmas Child box.  Topper, our Elf on the Shelf, will be visiting again.  And this will be the first year that we will help the kids shop for each other (and I am greatly looking forward to that).  Before December starts, I would like to nail things down a bit more firmly.  But, overall, I am happy with this start to a plan.

5.  Reach the "caught up" point in our family Project Life album.  Done.  I was caught up by the second week of October and now each week seems so easy to complete.  I love that.  I think it will be a while before I let myself fall behind again.  Caught up is a good place to be.

And now for November's goals:

1.  Decide on financial goals for 2017.  We set three big financial goals for 2016 and I found it really motivating.  And, happily, as of this week, all three are complete.  Brian and I need to spend some time talking about what's next.

2. Walk a minimum of 300,000 steps.  Same goal, new month.  Not exciting, but having the goal keeps me motivated to walk, walk, walk.

3. Get the majority of my Christmas shopping done. I've been making progress on this through October and would love to have it all done by the first week of December.

4. Fill an Operation Christmas Box or two.  I am excited to introduce the boys to the idea of buying things for others.  I'm guessing that buying toys and candy only to give them away will be a challenging concept for them - and also an important lesson to start to learn.  Once we send off the boxes, we will track them to their destinations and then spend some time learning more about those countries or regions.

I think that will do.  I'm excited to start a new month with some fresh goals.

Also, I really liked having my October goals listed here on the blog.  It's something I haven't done for a while and I think it really helped push me to get things done.  Advent planning, in particular, would likely not have been accomplished if I didn't have the accountability of sharing my progress.