Half Yearly Review – Family Goals For 2009

Back in January I detailed what our Family’s Goals for 2009 would be. This is the first year that I have done something like this. I have found it too be incredibly helpful to have these goals to look back and assist me in working out what I need to be doing.

June Review – Family’s Goals for 2009

  1. Smooth transition adding our newest family member.
  2. This actually went better than I could have imagined. Not only does the baby bring me the most amazing joy and satisfaction, but he brings immense happiness to his siblings. There are however moments when there are extreme acts of neediness from the 3 year old, for example wanting me to pick him up and carry him, when he can quite clearly see that I am carrying the baby, but they are infrequent and he is happy just to be sitting right next (read almost on top of) me when I am breastfeeding him.

  3. Ensure Possum’s first school year is a positive experience.
  4. Possum loves school and in the last few weeks of term 2, you could really see a learning explosion for her. In the last few weeks of term 2 you could also see extreme tiredness in the little one as well. The second last Friday of term, she fell asleep on her bed at 5pm and slept through until 7am the next morning.

    I will need to continue to work on keeping her well rested on week ends, so that she has the energy to learn and enjoy herself at school. I also need to continue supporting her early literacy and numeracy achievements at school with informal, fun reinforcement at home.

  5. Complete my project.
  6. At this stage, I think I will struggle to have it completed by the end of the year. Mr I and I are currently looking at him taking small bursts of leave and being the primary carer during the day, so I can spend more extended hours on the project.

  7. Encourage further (age appropriate) independence in my children.
  8. This has been going along quite well. I have been posting the key achievements in increasing the kids independence through out the year. The 3 year old however is going through a stage where having mastered the task of dressing himself, he no longer cares to do it. Experience with my other kids has shown that this phase does pass, but we will keep working with him on it.

    Some of the things that I would like to work on over the second half of the year are:

    • Possum to learn to tie bows.
    • Thinker to learn a new meal.
    • Little Rascal to learn to stack and unstack the dishwasher.
    • Babaganouski to learn to set the table.

  9. Maintain my health and fitness.
  10. I have started gradually building up the intensity of the exercise that I am doing. My key issue is to cut out a lot of the junk that I am eating. My main down fall is chocolate and also that when I am tired, I often confuse this with being hungry and eat instead of sleep (because sleep isn’t always possible!).

  11. Support Mr I’s chosen sporting events, so he can maintain his health and fitness.
  12. Mr I is still carrying an injury from last year’s football season, so he has been limited in what sporting endeavours he can do. Cycling is the main thing at the moment – unfortunately for me this is actually quite time consuming! An 80km bike ride does take up quite a few hours on a Sunday morning, but it is an enjoyable outlet for him.

  13. See at least one live music event a quarter.
  14. I have seen no live music this year yet. Really need to work on this one as I love going to a gig.

  15. Adhere to the family budget.
  16. First quarter of 2009 was balanced, but the second quarter was in deficit. I will need to be more strategic with my expenditure in the next quarter.

  17. Achieve a balance of fun and learning activities for the children.
  18. Overall I would say this is going along okay. I do wish that I was spending more time individually with each child though. I need to remind self though that this does happen when you have a new baby. I am running on less sleep and breast feeding on demand which does alter your ability to do as much as you would like with each child in a one on one format.

  19. To grow this blog to become a greater resource for families.
  20. I haven’t executed any of the ideas I had around this task. I would love to renovate the blog and reformat it to be more user friendly, but the task above takes priority and I really just don’t have the time.

To summarise, I have probably achieved about 75% of what I aimed to at this point in the year. I think the reason for non achievement of goals lies in the fact that I was too ambitious with what I set for myself. In a year which I have a new born baby, I probably underestimated the time factor this would take up. As I want to enjoy my beautiful little boy and all the children) I am going to make the following changes to the family goals for 2009:

  • Complete my project, will now become 75% completion of the project.
  • To grow this blog to become a greater resource for families, will now become top priority for 2010.

Did you set yourself goals for 2009? How are you tracking on them? Like me have you needed to make changes to your goals?