On my drive to daycare last Monday morning

After two weeks of holidays I started January craving routine and have happily fallen right back to it – getting dressed and ready for work, eating salad for lunch, the dinner and bedtime rhythm, making the boys lunches, driving to daycare listening to audiobooks for the boys and then to work listening to podcasts, marking book club on my calendar, filling my library hold queue and my Kindle. The weather has been cool and unusually and gloriously rainy and I’ve been cozy in skirts with tights on work days and in jeans and my trusty Patagonia fleece (going 10 years strong at least) on other days.

Recent developments in my routine include sleeping through! the! night! and not! pumping! Cedric has been consistently sleeping from 7 PM to 6 AM since the new year. Dash still wakes at 5 AM but Chris is so sweet to take the early shift. For a year I went to bed knowing I would be up once and likely more. It’s wild when I write it but you just do what you have to do and it becomes your normal and you adapt. But wow is feels amazing to curl up in bed beneath my quilts and to know I don’t have to emerge for several hours. The best part about going through something hard like this is reaching the other side and appreciating something you used to take for granted. 2016 I like you already.

Last year I updated my approach to monthly goals by including “big things happening this month” and recurring monthly goals. Including these categories helped me to see everything already planned in a given month and to be realistic about what else I could accomplish. So I’m sticking with this same format in 2016. And here we go!

Big things happening in January:

+ Chris attends an overnight workshop. Hooray, this happened last week so it’s already done!

January goals:

+ Complete Cedric’s first year photo book. I’ve been uploading and organizing photos for this all year and I’m really proud that I stuck with this. I need to set aside a few hours on a weekend or post bedtime to get this done. I still love the way Dashiell’s photo books turned out and will plan to use Blurb again. Instead of making two for Cedric’s first year as I did for Dashiell I’ll just make him one thick book.  I wrote more about my approach to family memory keeping if you’re interested. 

+ Complete a 2015 Team Wharton photo book. This will be our first annual family photo book. As I’ve downloaded photos from my phone each month I’ve been saving photos to a folder to use for this photo book so hopefully it won’t bee too much work. But similar to completing Cedric’s album the biggest challenge is setting aside a few uninterrupted hours to get this done. (P.S. I’m still really happy with the system of backing up my photos using Google Photos. Read about the system here.)

+ Go social media lite. Lately social media has felt more overwhelming than inspiring so I implemented some practices to cut back on my scrolling (and it feels great). I’ve got a post coming up outlining what I’m doing.

+ Do a toy audit and re-establish a toy library. Christmas and Cedric’s birthday brought new toys and things to our lives but we are eager to maintain a clutter-free home environment. Most of the toys we have out have been out for a while and so it’s time to organize everything we have, give away what we no longer need, select some toys and books to be out in the house and put the rest away to be rotated in later.

Recurring monthly goals:

+ Exercise at least twice per week. With my new found sleep I’m trying a 5 AM Orange Theory class this week. I used to love 5 AM spin classes so I’m hopeful this will work as well.

+ Publish to RISING*SHINING on Mondays and Wednesdays. Writing consistently on my blog is therapeutic and fuels my creativity; the more I write the more ideas I have to write about and the more I want to write. To accomplish this goal I have to plan ahead in my blog editorial calendar and find time to write post-bedtime and/or on the weekends. For me creativity is grown from a very healthy measure of time management and planning ahead.  

+ Record and produce new episodes of The Girl Next Door Podcast and Matrimoney on schedule. Each podcast airs every other week on alternating weeks so I have a new podcast episode publishing each week. This requires setting aside time each week to develop an episode outline, sitting down to record with my co-host and then editing and publishing the episode plus finalizing show notes.

+ Download photos from my phone and collect photos for the 2016 Team Wharton photo book.

Happy January!