Keeping Up With...2021 Goals (Weekly Recap 3/22 - 3/28)

This was a big and exciting week around here! I was thinking about doing separate blog posts for at least one of these events, but I fell behind on weekly blogging and a few other things around the house so I decided to just do one blog. My apologies in advance if it gets long and picture overloaded. The first big excitement was that the boys are back in school full time starting this week!! They will go to school four days each week with the fifth day being a virtual day so the school can better manage transportation and deep cleaning schedules. Unfortunately for us, each boy has a different virtual day so we have a bit of a rough schedule for the next 9 weeks. But we don't care, we will make it work! Everyone was so excited to be back in school and they all had a fantastic first week back!! There are some things that are different than they are used to, but overall they doing great adjusting to school as it is right now. This also means that I can go back to subbing, and I subbed 2.5 days already this week, yay! I love being back in the classroom!

Since this was their first week back and I didn't have a lot of subbing assignments, I was able to take each boy out for a one on one lunch with me. Daniel was confused at first but then picked Red Robin and we had a great lunch together on Monday. AJ didn't really want to go but picked IHOP for Thursday's lunch and was super happy once we got there and started talking. Zak was really excited to have my undivided attention and also picked Red Robin to close out our week on Friday. I didn't want to leave Adrian out, so he and I had a date on Friday night for dinner, wine tasting and some kitchen table shopping. It was a great week with one on one time with all of my favorite guys and some delicious food!!

The other big thing this week was that we celebrated my 45th birthday! We didn't do anything super big this year but it was a much better COVID style birthday than last year. I started my day with coffee and breakfast with my girlfriends and then came home to spend the day with the guys. We played board games, opened my presents, relaxed and enjoyed a delicious ice cream cake from Coldstone! The celebration continued on Sunday when it was more of the same including homemade (by Adrian) pizza for dinner and the newest episode of Falcon and the Winter Soldier. I got tons of texts, phone calls and messages from friends and family all weekend and I truly had an amazing time. I also was able to get my first COVID vaccine on Friday and didn't have any big side effects that dampened the celebration. All in all this was a really great week and we all had a fantastic time!!

Here's how I did on my goals this week, some of them were awesome and others were largely ignored in favor of celebrating, haha!

Working on Myself:

• Lose 50 pounds by exercising 5 days each week and walking at least 400 miles this year -  I walked about 17.5 miles this week for a total of 125 miles so far this year. I did not weigh in this week since my eating has not been great. It's OK, birthday calories don't count!
• Read 15 books for fun - I finished "How to Fight a Dragon's Fury" the final book in the How to Train Your Dragon series. It was really good, I enjoyed the whole series! And this was a great ending to the whole story. This was my 7th book of the year so I am just about halfway to my goal. I'll wait and see how the next few months go, but I may increase this to 20 books for the year.
• Write Scripture(s) every day this year - I have done this all 87 days so far this year. I'm really enjoying this practice so far this year. For March I picked a plan focused on perseverance which feels appropriate for the season of life I'm in. 
• Attend 12 6 Zumba jam sessions to improve my teaching skills - I attended 1 jam in January and was registered for one in March however we had something else come up that day so I postponed it until April. I am leaving my Zumba classes paused until August so I adjusted this goal down to only 6 jams this year. I will do the one in April and then wait until I am back to teaching classes to attend any more.

Working on Family:

• Play all 152 of our board games together (either just Adrian and I or as a family) - We played 4 games this weekend for a total of 50 games so far this year. We played Even Stevens Odd with the boys and then played First Martians, Fort and Five Tribes as a couple. We also played all of my favorite games, including my newest one, for my birthday celebration. We played Viticulture, Isle of Cats, Castles of Burgundy, Takenoko and Quacks of Quinlinburg. It was a great weekend of gaming, all great games (except First Martians) and lots of fun and relaxing. You can follow along on my thoughts on each game on this webpage.
• Do 10 home improvement/reorganization projects - We didn't really have time to work on any of these projects this weekend. The only thing we did was plan for our big project for next week, refreshing our kitchen. We made sure to have everything ready to get that done next weekend.
• Pay off all of our outstanding credit card debit and don't incur any additional debt - We shifted our big payment to our only remaining credit card balance this month. If everything goes according to plan, we will pay this off this year and be done with all of our credit card debt!
• Watch 50 movies together and continue watching TV series together - We didn't watch any movies this week since there was so much else going on. We'll have to go down to only one movie each week for the next 2 months since the boys are in school again. We will continue to focus on our TV series together though. This week we made progress on Falcon and the Winter Soldier, Who Wants to be a Millionaire and watched a few more episodes of The Hollow.
• Celebrate a holiday every day this year - This week we celebrated National Goof Off Day, Puppy Day, National Chips & Dip Day, National Cheesesteak Day, National Waffle Day, National Spinach Day, National Paella Day and Palm Sunday. Below are a few picture highlights of our holidays. I'm also chronicling them on Facebook so if we aren't friends there, feel free to add me or follow along at #CelebrateEveryDay