If you’ve been following along, 2019 was the year of reading, budgeting, breastfeeding, and fitness-ing. That is, those are the categories associated with each of my selected goals for the year. As I type up this post, it’s 9pm on December 31st, 2019–the perfect time to reflect.
Reading: I’m a little disappointed to reveal that I did not achieve my goal of reading 30 books, although I did get reasonably close. The final tally (as of December 29th) was 28 books in 2019. The majority of those books were read during nursing and pumping time, so when I quit breastfeeding in November, my time allotted for reading declined considerably. Nonetheless, an average of 2.33 books per month is respectable. I’m sure I’ll continue to make reading as often as possible a goal for 2020.
Budgeting: Overall, I’d give myself a B+ on this goal. As I mentioned previously, I started slacking a bit on this one when I started a full-time job in April, but I still tracked almost all grocery expenditures throughout the year. Grocery expenditures are an important budget item for our family because we spend quite a lot on food. I take no issue with prioritizing high-quality food (in the name of good health!), but as with most things it’s wise to set boundaries. I think I’ve found a few strategies that work for us (e.g., using online ordering platforms like Prime Now to estimate the weekly total; making the most of natural and organic offerings at Aldi). I’ll likely continue to do this in the new year, as we will have quite a few big purchases in 2020…details to come 🙂
Breastfeeding: I’m pretty proud of myself for how I handled breastfeeding this time around. I didn’t let it affect my mental state or sense of self-worth, which are obviously positives. There were still times that worries over supply issues and whether Nathan was growing fast enough put stress on me, but generally I just focused on doing my best. Nathan received breast milk until about 10.5 months when my supply just organically dried up. For once, I didn’t fight my body’s natural tendencies and just rolled with it.
Fitness-ing: I was all jazzed about my fitness progress in May when I was running nearly every day. Then my pesky piriformis started acting up again, which hindered my pursuit of peak fitness. Then once I got out of the routine of running…it’s been hard to get back into it. I think my injury is mostly healed (thanks in large part to several sessions of PT), so I’ll ease back into running in 2020 as time allows, but I’d also like to focus on re-building some strength. I’ve lost about 15 pounds over the past 6 months, and I know (physiologically speaking) that at least some portion of that was muscle. All that being said, I exercised consistently (~6x/week) for in short duration (usually 20-30 minutes), which is an accomplishment to celebrate!
If you’re interested in how I tracked my progress throughout the year:
And for 2018:
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