Goal Progress - February

At the beginning of the year, I did a Thursday Thirteen post listing 13 goals for the year. I decided I would also post at the beginning of each month how I am doing on each goal so far. It's the beginning of February and it occurred to me today that I better get this post done before it is no longer the beginning of the month.

1. Monthly Budget: I haven't been able set up a monthly budget because I do not yet know how much my husband's base net pay will be at his new job. I'll know this vital piece of information for next month though. On a good note, we'll be a month ahead; the paychecks he receives in February will pay the bills in March.

2. Saving money with the Grocery Game: I was only partially successful with keeping up with this. I spent $507 at the grocery store this month which includes any household items, bath & beauty products, diapers, and diaper wipes. I can't find the official figures but I did find an article stating that the average family of 4 (mine is a family of 5) spends $709 a month on food. Based on this, I think I'm doing ok.

3. Weight loss: I totally flubbed this one in January. Not only did I not lose any weight, but I gained about 5 pounds since my lowest weigh in at Weight Watchers.

4. Pregnancy: I'm not pregnant which is great. My goal is to not get pregnant before July.

5. .Homeschooling Routine: I do not yet have a working homeschool routine but we are getting our basics (language arts and math) done every day which is an improvement. Sammy is doing awesome. He often does more than he's required and, because of this, he'll be finishing up most of his language arts (spelling, phonics, reading comprehension) by the beginning of March. He'll finish up his grammar and math before June. Mika is doing pretty good too. She's on track to finish all subjects before summer starts: a huge improvement over last year, especially considering she had to finish last year before starting this year. I'm still working on a plan for catching up on our unit studies.

6.Clean house: While my house is not clutter-free and clean, I did make a dent in the work I have to do. During January, I swapped bedrooms which I've been wanting to do for a long time. The kids are now in the larger of the two bedrooms. With two beds and all their toys, they needed the larger room. In the process of switching rooms, we took about 7 bags of stuff to Goodwill and threw out another 2 bags. Their room is now wonderfully clean and organized. My new room is also very nice now with the exception of the closet which isn't finished.

7. Menu plan: I've been struggling with this one. It takes a lot of time and effort to make a menu based on this week's Grocery Game list while computing all of the Weight Watcher's points for each meal and get my shopping done before the list sales end on Tuesday.

8. Bible study: I've done exactly one Bible study with the kids as part of our homeschooling. Sad, I know.

9. Scrapbooking: I didn't spend a single day on my scrapbooks. I focused my energy on creating my daughter's birthday DVD though. That was the first step because now each of my kids have a collection of their photos showing their whole life on DVD. In the process, I had to organize ost of our photos which will make printing for scrapbooking easier.

10. Knitting and crochet: I didn't touch this at all.

11. Piano practice: I only manage 2 practices last month.

12. Taekwondo classes: I did begin taekwondow with my son. In fact, I have 3 out of 4 stripes for my yellow belt and will probably be testing for my yellow belt soon. Unfortunately, my bad knee does not like taekwondo and has been causing my a lot of pain.

13. Madden 2008: I won two games last month. Whoo Hoo!

So, I'm doing ok on some goals. I didn't expect to be able to accomplish them all in one month so I feel good about what I have done.