A 2017 Plan

            I realize this is coming a little late, but it is because I had other things I wanted to talk about before discussing my resolution plans. To be honest, these aren’t really New Year’s resolution plans. My husband and I sat down and discussed what we had discussed last year. We decided what worked and what didn’t work.

            We discussed how over the year some of our ideas, like a date night, turned into something new, like marriage counseling. This was a welcomed change. We are not having marriage trouble, but marriage is hard and we want ours to last. We discussed what didn’t work. He wanted to work on making YouTube videos but other things came up that were more important to him. Family days failed because I needed more time to study. Of course, at the beginning of last year we had not planned on me going to school. We had not considered that I would receive a publishing contract. These change time priorities. However, we still didn’t want to lose family time. We needed to find a way to make that a priority for 2017.

            We sat down and considered what our desires were and which ones we could make a priority for the New Year. The list is as follows:

• ·         Spiritual Devotion (family, personal, couple)
• ·         Homework with J1
• ·         Minimalize our house
• ·         Personal time for my husband
• ·         Personal for me
• ·         A summer trip to visit his parents
• ·         Reunion trip to visit my family
• ·         Watch Cars 3 in the theater
• ·         Weekend Getaway

            Some of these are already behind due to J3 having to visit the hospital again. Fortunately, when we discussed these plans we were not forceful that it had to be done every day. We knew things would come up that we could not control.

            We created a schedule, but again, it was not written in stone and if it was it included a side note that things would come up and that would be fine. Our weekly schedule, at least through the fall semester, is as follows:

·         Sunday: Family days

-        Games, movies, outdoors

-        Family devotionals that included the kids

·         Monday:

-        In house homework for me

-        I help J1 with homework

·         Tuesday:

-        Out of the house writing

-        Hubby helps J1 with homework

·         Wednesday:

-        In house homework for me

-        I help J1 with homework

·         Thursday:

-        Out of the house writing

-        Hubby helps J1 with homework

·         Friday:

-        First Friday of the month is Marriage Counseling

-        Forth Friday is a Skype Critique (Writing/Editing)

·         Saturday:

-        Second Saturday is Skype Critique (Writing/Editing)

-        Homework days for me

            Looking at the goals from 2016 and making an honest assessment of them allowed us to judge what we were proud of or disappointed by. We discussed the obstacles that had appeared over the year that forced a change to our original plans. We chose the things that we wanted to accomplish this year, even simple things like seeing a movie at the theater. Now, we have a new plan for this year. Can’t wait to see how we feel about it in 2018.