2012 To Do List - And 2011 Report Card

I'm continuing my tradition of looking at the goals I set for myself over the past year and grading myself based on how well I stuck with them. I also came up with some new goals for this next year.

1. Lose weight. C 

I lost the 10 lbs that I'd been trying to lose for the last few years. My clothes felt looser, I felt fitter and had more energy. And then I gained 5 lbs back because I stopped being careful about my eating habits and slacked off with my running. Boo.

2. Decrease Internet time. B

My overall success with this was good. For the most part, I've been good about not mindlessly browsing the web when I should be doing other things (like losing weight). But there were a few weeks here and there that I wasted way too much time on the web.

3. Read the whole Bible again. B

I read the Bible just about every day, but didn't get through the whole thing again. I stopped doing my reading plan for a few months to try a few other methods of study. One method was to read the same portion of the Bible each day for a month. There are some great advantages to reading the Bible this way, but I really missed going through the whole story this year. 

4. Take part in a Photo-a-Day project. F

I dropped this back in January because it conflicted with goal #2.

5. Read more good books. A+

I was able to read lots and lots of good books over the past year. Some of my favorites are:

Raising Real Men, The Read-Aloud Handbook, Just Do Something, Adopted for Life, Think, How to Read a Book, Positive Discipline and Bossypants. Okay, so that last one wasn't really great literature, but it certainly was entertaining!

For 2012:

1. Run a 10K. I ran a 5K last July and am planning on running another one in March. If I do two more 5K races the few months after that, I think it's within the realm of possibilities to squeeze in a 10K by the end of this year. I've started doing training for 10K using an app on my phone, which will hopefully get me back in the groove of running and help me with my next 5K. I'm on Week 4 and it hasn't been too bad. It is longer than I'm used to because the run/walk cycles go for 50-70 minutes instead of 30-40 minutes that I was used to with the 5K training.

2. Spend at least 10 minutes one-on-one time with each of my kids every day. Something that I've been slacking off on the past half year is spending quality time with each of my kids. We have plenty of quality time all together, but not much with each of them personally. This is partly because we've been busy. But mostly it's because they love spending almost every minute of their day playing together, so there's hardly a time when I can get them alone. But since I've been thinking about this, I've noticed that there are actually small pockets of time when one boy is off doing something and the other one is still in the room with me. I want to be more purposeful about snatching up those moments and starting a conversation or do something fun with them. 

3. Commit to eating only real food. Using the 14-step plan from this website, I want to try to cut out all of the processed foods and extra junk from our diet. We generally eat healthy and we get most of our fruits and veggies from local organic farms. But there is still so much room for improvement. Some of the items on the 14-week plan will be easy (like giving up sugary juices - we only drink water and milk anyway), but some others will a lot harder, like Week 3: Eat Only Local Meat or Week 12 - No Extra Sweeteners: I wonder how my kids will eat their oatmeal when it's not drizzled with honey? Or how I'll eat my oatmeal without honey!

4. Read the whole Bible again. I plan to use my favorite reading plan, from Discipleship Journal and stick with it this time. :)