Once again, I discover a blog post I thought I had published is half written! Sorry for the lateness of this! I’m just going to adapt the post titled “September Goals”, so I can share what I worked on last month, and what I will be focusing on this coming month.

I’d like to share with y’all my goals and my overall focus for this month. Maybe you’ve been needing a little inspiration or motivation to start this new season, and I hope I can help!

I have so much in my life that I want to improve, and historically I think I have tried to do it all- or, at the very least, too much- all at once. That has not panned out, and I have ended up discouraged and feeling like a failure. So, hopefully, going forward, I am going to figure out what I need most, and work on that, and, little by little, cultivate the life that I want to be living.

For September, Consistency felt like it was, across the board, the next piece of my puzzle that needed to click in place. It’s a big thing to tackle, so I chose to focus on a few small (but impactful) areas.

Consistency in…

Habits. I needed (and still do need) improvement when it comes to simple things like brushing my teeth, washing my face, and doing the things I need to do at night to prepare for the next day.

Appointments —one difference between just casually planning to do something and an appointment is, we feel obligated to follow through on an appointment. We take it seriously, and there is accountability. Another thing about appointments is that when life intervenes, as it often does, we reschedule. We don’t just say “oh well…” we know it’s an important thing to have happen so we make it happen, even if the original time didn’t work out. I need to treat the things that really matter each day like appointments.

Now, I tend to be all or nothing-sometimes all until I have nothing left. So, I chose not to tackle all the areas in my life these things apply to, right away. For September, I decided to work on treating my exercise, bedtime, and evening prep, primarily, like appointments, while also trying (less intensely) to improve my consistency with morning and evening beauty/hygiene practices.

I did pretty well, overall, with exercise and evening prep, especially, and made good improvements on bedtime and even beauty/hygiene. September was a really good month as far as pursuing what matters. I really want to build on that for October, and keep refining how I use my time so that our days can be full of memories and productivity and lots and lots of fun. To that end, I once again found myself examining where my time is really going and what could be streamlined, simplified, and straight up eliminated, to make more room for what matters most. I had to have a couple come to Jesus moments with myself.

First, I needed to get real with myself about what has been keeping me up late, and decide to change it. About half the time when I was up late, it was just that Scott and I were hanging out and watching something on TV, and I was not disciplined enough to prioritize rest, sleep, and the ability to get up early and start the day strong over “just a little more fun.” The other half of the time, though, I would get in bed at a decent time but stay up way too late playing Merge Dragons on my phone while listening to whatever audiobook I was into at the time. It sounds so silly, but I would tell myself i would just play a few minutes, just to wind my brain down… and suddenly it would be between midnight and two in the morning. Super smart, Mae.

From this self examination I made two decisions: First, to use the Sleep Coach feature in my Whoop app to guide my bedtime, and really stick to it, and second, to delete Merge Dragons, and commit to going to sleep without any games or scrolling- to put on my audiobook or Calm Sleep Story and then set the phone on its stand, and not pick it up until morning. I’m almost a week in, and getting up is getting easier, though my body is still not adjusted to trying to go to sleep early. I’m going to stick with it, though, and I know it’ll pay off.

I also spent some time over the weekend streamlining my fitness plan, which you’ll hear lots more about in other posts, so that the time I am spending on that really counts. Hopefully, as my sleep adjusts, and the quality of it improves, I will be able to get up at 6AM, and get all my exercise done before 9:30AM, opening our day up to lots of possibilities, and making more room for the biggest addition to my daily consistency commitments.

Writing.

I have known, and told myself for at least a year, that my writing was not ever going to become a job unless I started to treat it like one. I’ve let a lot of things and excuses, some legitimate, some created by fear of failure, keep me from that, but (God willing), no longer. Starting this month, I am committing to myself to write something every day. I don’t know exactly what that will look like, especially to start, but I think the discipline of getting words out daily is where I need to begin. This week, a lot of it is going to be here on the blog, catching up and sharing thoughts and goals going into this new month, new season, and some updates on my fitness and wellness. Going forward, I can see it looking something like this:

• Weekly wellness/fitness update post (probably on Wednesday so I can call it Wellness Wednesday).
• A general update post every week or so to share what’s going on in my life and our family.
• Most other days, I’ll work on essays that will be interstitials in my books, some of which I will publish here,
• As well as working on longer passages that will make up the books themselves. It’s very early days, but it would be really great to start working on getting one or both of these published in some way in the next year.

I’ve never successfully stuck with writing daily for more than a week or two, so this month of building consistency in this area is really important for me. I don’t know exactly how or when in my days to make it happen, I’m still playing with that, and it may take awhile before I can block out “appointment time” to write at consistently the same times on the same days of the week, because I’m still figuring out a new streamlined way of going through our days, but this first month, my goal is just to make it happen.

I’m also adding to my daily priorities/appointments consistency in what I call my “Soul Care” time. This includes reading/studying my Bible, reading books that enrich me, praying, journaling, and meditation. I have been less consistent than I’d like with this over the summer, and I’m craving it. It’ll look different each day, but it needs to happen for my cup to be full and ready to pour into those I love.

You can see here on my October Tending List that I am working toward expanding my world as far as going out with the family, as well as hopefully starting to spend time out and about with friends. This will be huge, and. I’m nervous, but I’m more excited. I’m also hoping to get my Learner’s Permit, as a step toward my Driver’s License. AAAAAH!

The other big priority now, and to finish this calendar year, is making memories and continuing traditions as a family. Fall/ Holiday season is my favorite! Here is a list Lexi and I came up with to help us make the most of our favorite season:

I am really excited for October, and Lots of sharing with all of you what it looks like in our house.