Happy New Year! My first post of 2021… I’m sure we all hoped that 2021 would be different, back to our old normal, back to pre Covid days, but here we are still fighting the virus. Praying and hoping for better days, and for people’s body to fight off this virus, and recover fully.

But let’s put that aside and talk about the new goals we set for the New Year. Something new I’m doing is writing down my goals. In previous years, I just talked about them but never wrote them down. I think that writing our goals down this year will help me remember and try to achieve them.

I’ll go over some goals that I set for myself, goals we set for our family, and for our kids.

New Goals for myself:

Be Better at Saving. I used to be very good at this, especially during our medical school years. I would not buy extra things, budget on certain purchases, save what I can. I’d love to start saving again and setting a budget which works with our new income and our new family size.

Embrace a slower lifestyle. Last year’s closures and new guidelines were very sudden, and it was difficult to adjust to that type of lifestyle. My extroverted and outgoing personality was struggling in the beginning of all the closures; but I have learned to adjust and enjoy going to places that are open. My ultimate goal is to enjoy the little things: like bike rides around our neighborhood, bubble baths, creating artwork with the kids, short fishing trips with my husband and son, playing dollhouse with my daughter.

Eat Healthier. Many of us set a goal to eat healthier every year including me. So, this year I want to write down some small specific ways I can strive toward this goal. I want to exclude extra sauces for dipping, less greasy meals and more healthy courses which contain more vegetables. I’ll go more in depth with this in our family goal.

Write more in my blogpost and in general. I love writing and documenting, but I don’t have as much time for it lately. So, each month I’m hoping to make small writing goals. I’ll try to write 2 posts per month at first and if I am successful then I will increase my posts to 3 per month.

Learn to speak Spanish. This is so crucial when you live in Miami. I know I won’t learn to speak fluent Spanish in one year, but I’d love to learn basic conversational phrases to help me communicate with Spanish speaking folks when I need to.

Screen- Free one day a week. I want to make a habit of being screen free at least one day a week, preferably Sunday so that I could focus solely on my family and God for the entire day.

Family Goals:

Eat Healthy: Most of the time, our family eats a balanced healthy diet. My goal is to start buying better quality foods. If there are better ingredients, I want to incorporate those instead. For example: better quality meat, packaged items which are less processed, buying fruits from local farms (we have so many nearby).

Help when we can. We want to pray and help those around us that need it. We especially want our kids to learn about kindness, thoughtfulness and selflessness and for them to find ways to help others as well. So, we have started to find small ways to introduce this to them and big ways too. Some ways we did this already was praying other people, sending gifts to children who are less fortunate or needed extra comfort last year, and financially blessing a family.

Create small habits and traditions. For the holidays, we would love to create traditions with our kids that we could do annually. Also, would love to create more weekly and monthly habits together with things we already enjoy doing. Our family loves to bike together, play board games, fish, bake, and so much more; for the new year I’d love to create a habit and do it least once a week or once a month together. My hubby suggested to find and visit a new restaurant in Miami every month.  

Kids Goals:

Learn scripture. As many of you know, we are currently a homeschool family. My goal is to include scripture memorizing in our daily curriculum. Little kids are like sponges and this is the age that they can remember things so easily.

Help clean up: In the past year, I’ve noticed that I don’t ask my children to cleanup after themselves. Instead, I would cleanup after them as they moved on to playing with something else and making another mess. This year, I need to start teaching them to clean up before moving onto something new. Of course, they are young, and I don’t expect much from them. However, I believe they are able to clean up the toys after themselves- we just need to make it a habit.

I don’t have much goals for my kids because they are kids. They are constantly learning, changing and growing so implementing too many goals wouldn’t work for them, in my opinion. However, my husband and I do make small goals when we notice things need to change. So as the year goes by, we implement small goals to make little changes and adjustments as needed.

May God Bless this new year upon us, for we do not know what is ahead, but he knows.