2012 Goals: April Update

How are you doing on your goals for 2012? I’m excited about the progress I made in April…

Personal
Read through the Bible in a year. {I’ve been keeping up with this faithfully.}
Read through the 24 books on my 2012 booklist. {I’m almost finished with April’s books and have read quite a few other books!}
Listen to 12 audiobooks. {I just finished April’s audiobook and am starting on May’s!}
Run in at least one 5K race. {Finished the Couch to 5K program and am now working on getting my time down. Hoping to sign up for a race soon.}
Complete the Couch to 10K program.
Tackle 12 Do-It-Yourself Projects. {I made homemade poptarts last week!}
Focus on one habit per month. {I made some good headway on my morning and evening routines in April?!}
Learn to use my new DSLR camera (huge surprise Christmas present from Jesse!!) & improve my photography skills.
Take at least one photo a day and put together a page every week for my Project Life album. {I’m behind on putting my album together, but I’ve been doing good about taking lots of pictures!}
Memorize Colossians using the plan and free download here. {I’m almost caught up with this.}

Marriage
Go on the Love Like You Mean It Cruise. {Done–read my recap here.}
Go on two Marriage Retreats (Went to Cincinnati together in April).
Have monthly date nights. {We had one date in April.}
Read four books together. {Jesse read Rekindling the Romance in April and we talked about it since I had just read it in March. We also read parts of One of Us Must Be Crazy… And I’m Pretty Sure It’s You together!}
Read at least 3 books on marriage. {I’ve read two so far this year.}

Children/Homeschooling
Continue regular dates/outings with each of the children individually. {I went on at least one outing with each child individually in April.}
Continue Grace and Truth memory book. {The children finished memorizing the Lord’s Prayer plus two other verses and one verse of a hymn this month.}
Ice-skating lessons for all three children. {The children finished up their second round of classes and we enrolled them in a third round since they are enjoying it so much!}
Swimming lessons for all three children.
Finish second grade, begin third grade with Kathrynne. {We should finish this in May!}
Finish kindergarten, begin first grade with Kaitlynn. {We should finish this in May!}
Start preschool with Silas. {Started this in April.}
Go on at least one field trip every month. {We went on one field trip in April.}
Go on at least one family vacation.
Finish at least 15 read-aloud books. {We’ve finished nine read-alouds so far this year.}

Ministry/Friendships/Extended Family
Write at least two handwritten notes every month to encourage someone. {I wrote & mailed two handwritten notes this month.}
Continue being involved in our local church, homeschool group, young couple’s group, and blogging accountability group. {Ongoing}
Continue with weekly get-togethers with both sides of our extended family. {Ongoing}

Business/Blogging
Continue to take Sundays off from blogging/business work. {Ongoing}
Continue keeping strict Office Hours for the business/blogging time each day. {Still plugging away on this!}
Switch to a paperless planning system. {This is going well for me, though I’ve decided I’m probably never going to be 100% paperless for all things.}
Follow my weekly blogging plan. {I didn’t do this perfectly in April, but I did pretty well most days.}
Plan blog posts out at least a month in advance. {I made some great progress in this area in April!}
Write and schedule blog posts at least a week in advance. {Making some headway with this, though I’m far from where I want to be!}

Financial
Continue to tithe 10% of our income. {Ongoing}
Give generously to needs in our community and around the world, as God prompts us. {Ongoing}
Pay cash for a new-to-us vehicle to replace our family’s van. {We’re still looking and haven’t found anything we love in our price range yet!}
Finish saving for and purchase a rental property with cash. {Thanks to finding out we set aside too much for taxes this year in our tax savings account (we got burned last year when we had to pay more than we expected, so we set aside quite a bit more than we thought we’d have to pay this year), we ended up with a lot of extra money in our tax savings account after paying our taxes. So we’ve almost fully funded our rental property savings goal amount and are beginning our search for rental property — woot! We’re still investigating our options right now and we’ve not completely settled on what we want to invest in, so we may decide we need to save quite a bit more depending upon what we find now that we’re starting to look. I’ll keep you posted!}

How Are You Doing on Your Goals for 2012?

If you’ve posted goals for 2012, I’d love for you to post an update on how things are going and share your link in the comments. If you don’t have a blog, feel free to just leave your update as a comment. Let’s encourage one another to live lives of intention and purpose!

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