You can find my 2016 and 2017 resolution posts here.

Phew, it looks like we didn’t publish our resolutions for 2018… guess that means there’s no need to go back and review our successes and failures! 😉

2018 resolutions

Kidding, kidding, 2018’s list was small, but perfect for this stage of my life.

• read all the books I own. Ok I didn’t read all of them, but I read 10, and I’m calling that a success (I was secretly hoping for 1 per month). And this resolution makes me so happy because I was able to make reading a habit again! I didn’t do a good job of documenting the books I read and loved on the blog, but look for a few of those posts coming this winter.
• school the kids. We started homeschooling this year, and it’s been such a fun success!
• heal my back. After 5 years of picking up kids, my back was feeling the pain, but I made a concerted effort last year to make my back stronger and eliminate the day-to-day pain that I had been feeling. I’m happy to say that this was a success! I still have pain once in a while, but overall, my back is feeling good.
• do something charitable. Having kids has definitely occupied a lot of my attention, but now that we’re out of the baby years, I wanted to do something charitable on a regular basis. Sadly, this resolution was a complete failure. The year came and went, and I didn’t do as much as I was hoping. Going to try to incorporate more charitable activities into the coming year.

2019 resolutions

I’m happy to say that my resolutions always take on the same broad themes. I’m often setting a handful of goals to improve my mental and physical fitness and to challenge my creative skills. Unsurprisingly, this year is no different.

fitness goals

• Run 100 miles over the course of the year. Ask any dedicated runner, and I’m sure this sounds like a puny goal, but I’ve really gotten into trail running this year, and so I wanted to create some measure to track how much I run this year. The (just maybe), I’ll up this to a more challenging goal for 2020.
• Do 100 7-minute workouts over the course of the year. I started doing these more regularly halfway through the year, and I think they had a huge impact on last year’s “fix my back” resolution, so I’m curious to see what happens if I set a goal of doing this at least twice a week for the coming year.

creative goals

• play the piano at least 15 minutes/week throughout the year. The past few years I’ve practiced sporadically, but there are a few songs that I’d like to play well, and the only way to make that happen is with regular practice.
• sew clothing (for me and the boys). I want to improve my sewing skills, and I’m excited to be able to customize my clothes and make costumes for the boys.

charity

• do more charitable work. This is 2018’s resolution fail, but it’s something that’s important to me, so I’m really hoping to devote some energy to a regular charitable activity this year.

Since a few of this year’s resolutions can be easily tracked (100 of this, 50 of that), I created a couple of pages that I hung on the wall to document my progress. Here’s a link to those handy sheets if you’d like to track 100 or 50 of something. If you have weekly goals, these also work for doing something once (50) or twice (100) per week throughout the year.  Why 50 and not 52? Vacation! Just hang them on the wall and cross off a number each time you hit it.

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I often have a hard time deciding what goes on the resolution list. I used to think of resolutions as decisions that should be habit-changing, but in recent years I’ve started to add a few one-off goals to my list. This year’s example would be the DIY clothing. Making my own clothes may not become a new habit, but I want to have the skills to be able to take on clothing or costume projects in the future, so in that way I see this resolution as a big item that will (hopefully) give me a few new life skills. On the other hand, I have a huge pile of “knitting goals” for the year, but those aren’t necessarily resolutions because other than giving me a whole pile of finished items, they aren’t challenging my creative muscles. Does that make sense?

What goes on your resolution list? We’d love to get inspired by your lists.