Eagle Nest Mom: How January Goals Turned Out

Monday, February 4, 2013

How January Goals Turned Out

January was quite disappointing, not only was everyone slightly sick and fighting tiredness, but the frequent storms cut into several nights of sleep, and a frantic change of plans, sent me off kilter for several weeks.

We decided to purchase both Story and Song a 4 year planner for High School Homeschoolers. It took several weeks, but I think I've managed to get everything that Story needs to do to graduate finally written down into one location. This also allowed me to write up quite a bit of Song's next 4 years, since they both will be doing the same thing for several subjects.

I also managed to read far too many mid length novels, none of which will be reviewed, as they had plenty of comments that covered everything I wanted to say. But I'm sure my total books read was between 15 and 20, reading 3 - 5 hours each day. I really wasn't happy with that, but there you go ... I'm addicted to reading, and I read very fast.

I also felt my Kindle was too boggy, and was finding it difficult to pick out a new book to read, so I decided to look up each book and put it into a catagory. I only have 800 more to classify ... having started with nearly 2000! I've also managed to delete nearly 200 books. Once I looked them up, and glanced at comments, many were outside of the paramaters that I enjoy, some were horror or extreme thrillers or immoral, or so poorly written that all reviews were low ... so I just deleted those from both my Kindle and my archive. Story has been a huge asset to my efforts, as she has been looking up the books on her own Kindle.

We could easily use a Kindle for each child in our family. In fact, Sunshine has taken to carrying around her own candle in the evenings, since we won't give her own candles (kindles). She's pretty sure we are tricking her, but she really likes the scents of the candles too.

Blogging -

1. Kiddos With Kindles - Blog posts finished before Noon daily, and not let it steal my whole day.
2. Eagle Nest - Write at least 25 Other Posts on Homeschooling, Crafts, and such. --- Anyone have a topic that they would like covered? Plan to finish up many that I had set up to do in the Drafts folder.
3. O 'Scarlett - Write at least 4 book reviews
4. Wings - my personal scrapbooking blog - Write at least 8 posts - catch up with pictures again
5. Try to skim Google Reader daily. Weed out a dozen or more blogs that I rarely actually read.

I didn't do as well as I wanted to do with blogging ... I kept up with the Kindle blog, almost too much... to the neglect of the others.

Project Household Settled

1. Work some more on Sunshine's room - Declutter
2. Work more on Scholar's room - Declutter

3. Work on Craft supplies

4. Work on Kitchen / Living room / Videos

5. Work on Master Bathroom organization

6. FIGHT roaches!

7. Paint the master bathroom.

Quite a bit of decluttering happened, but since I haven't been able to get rid of the filled boxes yet, you really can't tell anything much has happened.

Food
1. Keep using up the food in the freezers.

2. Go through freezers again later this month and refill the ones next door - trying to empty the big chest freezer for my Dad.

3. Make meal plans to use up as much odds and ends of stored food as possible - to keep the budget down.

We haven't been in the freezers as much as we should. Nobody has starved yet, but some of us are really getting tired of rice!

Personal
1. Be in bed before Midnight - WITH the lights off.
2. Have all of the kids in bed by 10pm - and asleep.
3. More consistent devotional times.
4. Loose 10 lbs.
5. No eating after 8pm.
6. Walk two miles every day that the weather co-operates.

7. Get a schedule in place for chores and routines for the household (minus the Ref). And get it posted somewhere. (I saw an idea that we plan to work on! Hope to blog about it!)

Not much to report here either. At least I can say I didn't gain any weight!

Christmas:

1. Finish mailing Christmas cards - collect and write down all of the addresses.

2. Make a plan for next year .... and attempt to make a few things each month to put into a presents box for Christmas and birthdays.

3. Copy lots and lots of cassettes from our OLD tape collection to give to nieces and nephews on MP3's

I think we finally were able to send off all of the Christmas cards. I'll have to ask Song if there are any left. We still have quite a few gifts to deliver.

School

1. New assignment pages printed and filled out for the kids.

2. Find somebody to cut the chalk board in half - get half up in Story's room for her, and the other half up in the school room.

3. Find someplace to put up the posters and charts in the room - or find the charts a new home.

4. Get MIL label machine returned, since she bought me one for Christmas!!!!

5. Declutter the School room - bring some of the craft supplies over to use for school.

We DID return the label maker, and I was delighted to get lesson plans completed for Story through graduation, Song through to the end of 9th grade (I'll have to add more this summer for 10th - 12th grades), and Scholar through the end of this year. He has been asking for his own Android tablet and his own Kindle. I have so many books for him to read, and getting on the computer hasn't been working too well. I need to find a program that I can download to his "non-internet" computer that can read books.

So, that has been our January. I better plan February fast ... because it's already slipping away FAST!!!