Hello lovely readers!

I can’t believe February is over already, and yet here we are! I’m definitely ready for Spring and warmer weather. And since it’s March, that means this is the last month for my first quarter goals so I thought now would be a good time to pause and reflect on how my progress is going and whether I need to make any changes.

Jan-Mar goals

First, a quick recap on what my first quarter goals are.. I’m focusing this year towards building new habits to support my overall well-being in the areas we humans need most: breathing, sleep, hydration, and food. Though, I got off to a bit of a late start (kicking off in February) these first three months are dedicated to breathing/clean air goals, which I decided would be to…

1. Clean my floors 8 times (yeah… I’m embarrassed to admit that my floor cleaning habits are so irregular and infrequent that this is my goal. At least I’m working on it?)
2. Brush my cat’s and dog’s fur 8 times each (ideally would also help with floor cleaning by taking care of loose fur BEFORE it gets dropped all over the floor)
3. 900 minutes of exercise/stretching breathing (about 10 minutes every day. It may not sound like much, but I’m building a habit to just GET STARTED and then I can work on increasing the time.)

How it’s going…

All in all, I’m pretty proud of myself. Has the journey been perfect? NO. Even with limiting myself to only 3 task priorities per day, I’ve still had days where I checked off only one of them. But, I remind myself that part of the point of this blog and my journey is to make progress without worrying about perfection. I’m learning and I’m practicing letting that go. At the moment, that looks a lot like my brain scolding me for not getting the other things done and then me taking a deep breath, giving myself a pat on the back for what I did accomplish that day, and adding the missed items to tomorrow’s priority three. I still feel disappointed in myself, but it’s getting better.

Cleaning floors

As far as my goal progress goes, I have cleaned my floors five out of eight times, which means I can reach my goal by cleaning the floors once per week (and have one week to spare where I can choose to clean my floors again… but that’ll be overachieving).

Brushing my pets

I’ve brushed my pets’ furs three times each, which means I’m going to have to brush each of their fur coats at least once per week and either double up one of the weeks or squeeze the last brushings in during the last half-week of March. One thing I plan to do a little differently this month is to move my dog’s brush to the end table by my spot on the couch. My dog often lies on the couch with me and I prefer to brush my pets while they are lying down and relaxed, so if I have a brush at arms reach during these opportune moments, I think I’ll be better setting myself up for success here.

Exercise/stretching/breathing

For almost two years, I’ve been doing an exercise program (off and on) called MommaStrong, an online exercise program designed especially for humans who have given birth and don’t have a lot of time to exercise. There’s so much I love about this program, but that’s perhaps a post for another day. Building a habit of showing up consistently has been an ongoing learning process for me. I don’t have a dedicated exercise space and I feel too self conscious to do it while my husband’s around to see so I either try to get it done in the morning (my husband is a late morning sleeper) or complete the exercises in our bedroom before bed, trying to be quiet enough not to wake my sleeping toddler in the next room. Well, motivation to open up the website, navigate to today’s video, and do physical exertion is much more difficult to muster up when I’m about to get ready for bed so that last one doesn’t work for me at least 50% of the time. So I’m trying to get better about not caring whether or not my husband can see me (which I did this morning. Truly, it wasn’t as embarrassing as I feared) and also not allowing thoughts of “I don’t feel like it. I’ll do it later.” to convince me to put it off. If it doesn’t happen in the morning, chances are too great that it won’t happen at all.

So far, I’ve exercised for 705 of my 900-minute goal. I have NOT exercised every day (I missed three days in February) but by exercising for 15 minutes almost every day that I did show up for, I’m on an even pace to get to 900 minutes by the end of March. 240 minutes remaining means just over six minutes per day or 15 minutes every other day is what I need to do.

The blog

I think it’s worth mentioning my progress on one more of my 2021 goals because it’ll help keep me accountable and it’s completely relevant to the blog. I’m aiming to publish 45 blog posts by the end of this year, 10 of which I’m working to complete by the end of March. Including this post right here, I’ve published 6 posts to this blog, which means one post per week will get me to my 10! Let’s go!