On December 31, I published my list of 52 goals for 2009 (also listed on sidebar)  Since January is drawing to a close, it’s time for to review this month’s progress on my goals.

Scrapbook Wedding Album

I started out with lots of enthusiasm.  On New Year’s Day, I spent the day sorting and scanning my wedding photos to work on goal #1 (scrapbooking my wedding album).  When the baby was born, I decided to give up paper scrapbooking in favor of going digital.  With digital scrapbooking, I can work for 3 minutes or 3 hours–whatever amount of time the baby gives me.  I can also work the same way that I am writing now, with baby sleeping draped across my lap.  I don’t have to worry about sharp knives or small choking hazards left out for for Baby Wiggles (yep, that’s his official blog name) to find.  I have about 30 pages laid out, but I got sidetracked when it came time to pull out and scan some pictures that already got put into an album.

The program I am using to do digital scrapbooking is Creative Memories Storybook Creator Plus.  I decided to go with this program because there is an easy learning curve.  There is a free and a paid version of this program.  With the paid version, you can use non-Creative Memories embelishments and kits (including freebies) and you can save the pages as a high-quality JPG file to print at a non-Creative Memories page printing service if you find a better deal.

My goal for February is to finish scanning photos, finish the page layouts and start adding embellishments (look for an upcoming post on my favorite sites to find digital scrapbooking freebies)

House Keeping

The other goals I decided to work on was my housekeeping group of goals:  shine sink, make bed, keep house company ready.  I’m probably hitting about 90% on making my bed every day and following a morning routine.  My morning routine includes make bed, empty dishwasher, wash a load of laundry, and spot clean the bathroom.  After I get that done, I sit down to make my daily to-do list of 7 things.

The best trick I’ve found to keeping the house company ready is to invite company over regularly.  We had people over for dinner 3 time out of 4 weeks in January.  The house was probably company ready 80% of the time (okay, probably 75% of the time).  Hey, whatever it takes.

Blogging

I think I wrote on my blog 15 days in January.  I never intended to use my weekends to blog (that’s family time), so there were 22 days in January that I intended to write.  As the saying goes, “Two out of three ain’t bad.”

Other Stuff

Of course there is always other stuff that I have done a bit.  We started planning our square foot garden and are probably going to be buying seeds this weekend.  We checked out the Signing Times videos from the library to start working on baby sign language. I celebrated “my day” by buying a new dining room light fixture.  I’m all set up for using cloth diapers (will start in February).

Even though I can’t mark anything off the list as completed yet, I made a lot of progress in January.  Unlike the vast majority of people who gave up on their goals in the third week, I used this past week as a reminder to keep moving forward on my goals.

Each day is a new day…a clean slate.  Even if you forgot to do something yesterday, you get another chance today.  Stop saying to yourself, “I really should do X.”  Get out there and do it TODAY!  Worry about tomorrow when tomorrow gets here.  “Each day has enough worries of it’s own” (Matthew 6:34)