Happy New Year! I hope you are having a wonderful start to your 2024!
The new year is a great time to look back and look forward at what God had done. It is also a good time to set goals for yourself.
I used to really love goal setting, I found it so motivating. Every year I would have goals about reading, writing, running, character growth, and a bunch of other things.
While I still love to look back and look ahead, I find that my own ideas often don’t work out the way I thought they would. I still set goals sometimes (either for the new year or for smaller amounts of time) but since marrying my husband and then having a baby, I have a much more “go with the flow” attitude toward things.
That being said, here are some things that happened in 2023 and a few ideas about 2024:
Writing
During 2023, I posted 21 blog posts:
1. Life Update
2. A Time to Be Silent
3. Baby J Birth Story
4. My Stories
5. The Problem with Modern Worship Music
6. New House Design
7. A-Z Bookish Tag
8. Godly Masculinity
9. Alphabet Book Tag
10. Home is Where The Mess Happens
11. Writer Q&A
12. Building Update
13. My Favorite Traditional Hymns
14. Author Interview with E.G. Bella
15. Cabin Girl Book Review
16. Simplicity
17. Land and Building Update
18. What Christians Have to Celebrate on October 31
19. What I’m Thankful For This Year
20. Benefits of Reading Nonfiction
21. My Favorite Christmas Hymns
You can find all these posts on the Blog page of my website.
What was your favorite post? My favorite was probably My Favorite Traditional Hymns, because it combined two of my favorites: writing and music! I also really enjoyed sharing Baby J’s Birth Story at the beginning of the year.
I didn’t get to work on my fictional stories in 2023, but I am alright with that. It was a year full of many wonderful things, and story writing was not a top priority. I’m not sure what writing in 2024 will look like, but I plan to continue to at least keep posting on my blog. 🙂
Reading
In 2023, I read 28 books, 12 of them being in the last two months, and 4 being in the week between Christmas and New Year’s! Of the 28, 18 were nonfiction and 10 were fiction. In the past, I’ve read more books total, but almost all of them were fiction and many were much shorter.
I wanted to spend a little more time talking about books, so I’ll have another post about all the books I read last year.
I don’t have a specific number of books I’m planning to read in 2024 (I’m currently at 1 😉 ) but I want to continue reading many good books, and continue to grow my love for both fiction and nonfiction.
House Building
We spent so much time out at our land and working on our house! Though we still have a long way to go, we have made significant progress! I’ve had several updates on everything we’ve done (and there will be another in the near future), but here are the first and last pictures I have from the land in 2023:
These two pictures do not do justice to all the work that has been done, but if you’d like to see more you can check out my other posts. 🙂
We are hoping our house will be completely done this year, but I guess we will see!
Baby J
Baby J made the year fly by! It’s amazing how much he has learned and grown in the past year! One year ago, he was a tiny scrawny jaundiced baby who could do literally nothing. Now he is a chubby toddler who is walking, babbling a couple words, playing with toys, eating food, and getting into mischief. We love him so much! Here’s a picture of his little fat feet in some leather sandals my husband made him. 🙂
Other Life Updates
Last year, two things I wanted to do were get back into running and have a garden over the summer. I did both of them! We had a little garden that I somewhat kept up, and even though the rabbits ate some of it, and the weeds overtook most of it, we still enjoyed a small harvest of corn and cucumbers, and a large harvest of tomatoes!
We have a nice running stroller, so Baby J and I went on lots of walks and runs over the summer, and continued to do some after it has gotten colder. I didn’t keep track of mileage, but it was so good to run again!
A few random things I would like to do in 2024 are:
Minimize and move. We did a little bit of minimizing last year, but we would like to have a minimalist approach when we move into our house. This includes both having less stuff and just living more simply and staying off electronics more. Having less stuff will make moving easier too!
Get better at piano. Since I play piano for church every week and our church just got hymnals, I would like to improve my music skills enough to be able to play just about anything out of the hymnal.
Keep running and being outside a lot. This is vague, but being outside and exercising are so refreshing!
Maybe get goats. We have been talking about getting goats, and depending on how things are going with the house, we want to do that this year! Baby J has had one experience with goats and he loved it, so we are sure he will have fun with that!
Maybe try some fruit preserving/jam making. There are a lot of black raspberries, gooseberries, and mulberries on our land. Last year we enjoyed eating a lot of berries, but I would love to preserve some for later months.
What are some things you look forward to this year? I would love to hear your answers in the comments!