No. 82. December 2023 recap + my 2024 goals

The things I want to grow this year

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Happy New Year!

December flew by with work travel and holiday activities. This year was the first year we didn’t travel back to Missouri to spend Christmas with family, so we made the most of it with just us three staying local.

Here’s what December included for us:

• I flew to Florida for a work conference for four days & got to meet the rest of my colleagues in person

• We spent a lot of time in the kitchen baking and cooking

• We took Levi to see a lights display, a German Christmas market that our town puts on every year for the holidays, and to a giant kids indoor sandbox with construction toys

• A Christmas brunch with the ladies at my church reminded me how blessed we are by our church community

• In typical midwest fashion, our weather in December was a spectrum of spending an afternoon in sweatshirts by the fire pit and our first snow of the season

• I purged a car-full of stuff from around our home and put away Christmas decorations - nesting is setting in for sure (and yes, some of the skirts - but not all - got donated)

• We are officially in our third trimester with baby #2 and I feel like a giant whale most days & keep telling myself that this is only a season and I won’t feel / be this huge forever

• My husband and I spent a few mornings at coffee shops the week between Christmas and New Years - talking about and planning for 2024, reading and writing (our favorite way to rest & recharge!).

I love this time of year and setting goals for the new year. As I’ve grown older and more sure of what matters to me, my overall goals have generally remained the same from year to year - they just build on each other.

But even as the bigger goals remain generally the same, I instead focus more on the micro goals under the bigger goals to help me move forward on the bigger goals each year. You can see my 2023 goals here. 

So, without further ado, here are some of my 2024 goals (this is not an exclusive list - there are things that we are not yet ready to share publicly): 

Goal #1: Plant & cultivate seeds of legacy in our home

I’m going to go deeper into what this means for us in a later blog post, but in this season of raising little kids, one of my top areas of focus is our family and home. As a mom who has a full-time paid job, I want to be intentional with the time I have with my family and how our household operates, as well as finding joy and myself in motherhood - that’s still a work in progress for me!

Mini goals:

• Define what legacy looks like for us and put up in a place where we can see it regularly. Full blog post on this coming later this month! 

• Welcome baby #2 joyfully, and adjust to being a family of four. I am approaching goal setting from a quarterly approach since the first half of the year is going to be the final months of pregnancy and newborn/postpartum season, which calls for slowness and a shift in priorities as I heal and we all adjust to adding another child into our home. 

• Spend intentional time with our children and as a family. For us, that looks like putting our phones away and spending quality time as a family, usually outdoors!  

• Learn from others - read books & listen to podcasts on parenting, household management, building a legacy, etc. 

• Create systems for our home (e.g., cleaning schedule, meal prep routines, etc). I want to spend the bare minimum time on chores to maximize the time I spend with my family and other areas that are more important in the bigger picture.  

• Preserve memories of our daily life as a family. For us, that looks like a photo shoot in our home to document our current home/season, printing photos and putting them in albums, annual photo books to document the highlights of the year, journaling weekly, etc.  

• Document our journey of growing a legacy. This includes writing this newsletter regularly and trying to capture more things on video and in photographs. 

Starting steps: Break down these mini goals even further and space out starting steps throughout the year. I’m planning to use PowerSheets to track what I want to focus on each month to accomplish these goals. 

Starting steps for this goal include: writing out a family values statement and getting it printed/displayed in our home; making a list of books to read on keeping a home / raising a family / building a legacy; preparing for baby #2 (nesting is already kicking in!), and using my new home planner to track cleaning tasks.

Goal #2: Steward & invest our finances well

Part of the legacy my husband and I want to build includes managing our finances well to grow and multiply what God has given us. We expect 2024 to have some big financial pivots for our family, so it’s especially important that we are intentional with where our money goes. Lately we fell off the wagon with keeping track of our finances, so in the new year, we want to get back on track with this. 

Mini goals: 

• Contentment challenge - you can learn more about it here, but basically, I really need to stop buying stuff and maximize the use of what we have. For example, I keep thinking buying that new sweater or dress will make me feel prettier, and it never does. So, I’m taking advantage of nesting mode to declutter and then aiming to limit spending on wants in 2024.

• Set up a budget and use a budget tracking system. Last year, I created my own budget system and it worked out okay, but I recently found this template on Etsy and am going to try it out in 2024 just because it is so much more robust than my own version.  

• Weekly finance dates. For the most part, I’m the one who tracks the flow of money in our home, as far as tracking transactions and checking our accounts / net worth dashboard daily, but we check in as a couple regularly on major expenses, bills that need to be paid, and progress on our savings goals. This year though, we want to be more intentional to do this weekly versus random, informal check-ins.  

• Make $5,000 from writing in 2024. This feels like a stretch goal since I generally make like a small fraction of this right now, but I do want to be more intentional with my writing in 2024 and the side projects that I focus on. 

• Start infinite banking. If you don’t know what this is, you should definitely research it, but I’m going to convince my husband to share more about this sometime this year with y’all - it is a fascinating concept we’ve been learning about and want to add to our financial portfolio eventually! 

Starting steps: Buy the budget template and set it up to work for us, find my copy of the Contentment Challenge PDF e-book, put email calendar holds on our calendars for finance dates. 

Goal #3: Develop healthy and life giving habits & systems

As cliché as it is, you truly can’t serve from an empty well. I know that I show up best as a wife, mom, friend and sister when I am spiritually, mentally and physically healthy, so I want to continue to build up habits and systems that enable me to be strong, energetic and at peace. 

Mini goals:

• Spiritual 

  • Grow my love for prayer 

  • Read & study the Bible daily 

  • Write down our needs to track answered prayers 

• Physical 

  • Daily steps goal

  • Weights 3-4x week and increase steps goal (this will be a focus in the later part of the year once I’m past the newborn/postpartum season - I did this the first half of 2023 and it was so good for me physically and mentally!)

  • Limit sugar, caffeine & processed foods

  • Prioritize protein with each meal 

• Mental —> cultivate peace in my mind and home

  • Develop social media boundaries 

  • Limit screen time 

  • Get rid of clutter / simplify our stuff

Starting steps: Find a Bible reading plan (I do best if I have a reading plan to work through, reading at random just doesn’t work long-term for me!), brainstorm social media and screen limits and how to track this for accountability, keep purging and donating all the extra things!

Goal #4: Invest in others

My husband and I are passionate about using our talents, finances and spiritual gifts to teach, give back and serve others. For us, this looks like producing resources like the Dating Guide, serving in our local church, hosting Dating Seminars, and opening up our home and family life to build one on one relationships (discipleship / mentorship).

This goal is my “maybe” goal - meaning if it happens this year, great, but if not, it can wait until next year too.

Mini goals: For 2024, our top priority is to finish (or at least make significant progress on!) a premarital counseling course/curriculum that we’ve been slowly working on since we finished the Dating Guide. And for me personally, I want to work on a resource for single women over the age of 24. 

Starting steps: Outline the singles resource and figure out the format. 

What are some of your goals for 2024?

Until next time,

YPS