2011 Check-in

Today is the last day of 2011. Wow, that went fast. I thought I'd check in and see how I did with my goals from last year.

1. Continue to visit the temple once a month. CHECK! We went every month this year, and even a couple times some months. We continue to feel the blessings of the temple in our lives and will continue to attend as often as possible.

2. Improve at tithing payment. Check? Kind of? We did a lot better this year in most regards. We set up our bank to automatically skim our paychecks and move tithing into our savings account so we never touched it. That worked well. We made regular payments each month and were up-to-date on tithing on our salary all year. The hiccup was that we forgot to count rental income from Paul, Blair, Parker and Edgar so we did have a big chunk of catching up to do at the end of the year. And we need to work on improving our fast offerings.

3. Improve finances. Yes and no. It was very much a one step forward, one step back kind of thing. We were able to pay off some cards, but then we opened cards for other things (i.e., dining room table). We are down to having just the table and one other card and think we can pay them off in the next three months. We're almost there!

4. Home Improvements. We made a lot of progress, but of course not nearly as much as we would have liked. We did succeed in getting more living room seating and a living room rug, not to mention a new dining table and dining room rug. We also added a few small tables and art on the walls. We successfully painted the front door, the entire entry way, most of the downstairs trim, the guest bath, and painted and added wainscotting to the dining room. We did not get to the office, countertops, appliances in the kitchen, and we still have a little bit of painting left to do upstairs. Slowly but surely, right? 


5. Develop more hobbies. CHECK! I baked a lot this year, and definitely improved. I'm still not as great at cake decorating as I'd like, but I make a mean cupcake and my cookies ain't bad either. Hans needs to use those manly tools he got last year and build some stuff for our house. 

6. This year, we will read the Book of Mormon together as a family. As of this evening, CHECK! We have just 12 pages to go, which we'll finish off in our evening study together. This has been a really wonderful thing to do together, to study the Book of Mormon and discuss it together. I'm glad we were able to do it.

7. Participate in at least one organized run this year. CHECK! We ran the Turkey Trot on Thanksgiving, a five-mile race I never thought I'd be able to do. And now we're hooked and want to keep doing races.

8. Food storage. Work on it. Period. FAIL. Can I roll this one over to next year?

Looking back, I'm frankly a little surprised how many goals we actually met. I've thought many times this year about setting those goals and I think it's helped keep me accountable. I'm really glad we took the time to commit them to paper (er, blog...) and give ourselves something to work toward. And most of these don't stop here - hopefully, this year has helped us make some practices into habits so that they're easy to continue doing. Stay tuned for 2012 goals... since that seems to work for us :)

I hope you all had a wonderful 2011. Here's to a great new year!