Just One Week -- My Personal Goal

Here is my weekly update on my participation in My Ice Cream Diary's For Just One Week goal program. If you would like to join us and set a personal goal to work on for just one week, go here.

My goal last week was to get out of bed before 6:00 am Monday through Thursday and before 7:00 am on Friday. I have always found that my day is better when I rise early, and yet over the holidays I really got lazy about that and found myself crawling out of bed when my kids did--or later. I knew that coming with the following week would be my exercise and scripture study goals, so I thought that easing in a little by getting up at a more reasonable hour would help. It did.

I made it out of bed before 6:00 Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday. Wednesday I decided to smother my goals with my pillow-- Ian had been up roughly 37 times in the night and I hadn't gotten more than three or four hours of sleep by 6:00 am. I stayed in bed until Bronwen got up at 8:00, letting my boys trash the house while I slumbered. (Ian had no problem getting up at his usual time, around 6:45. Kids!)

On the days that I did rise early, I was able to use this time to shower, dress, and spend at least 30 minutes with my gospel study in peace and quiet. It was heavenly and I really noticed a difference. In fact, the days that I did this, I found in the evening that I hadn't yelled at my children all day. Thursday I actually got up at 5:00 and made it to the early morning spin class that I'd missed for about 5 weeks in a row. I wanted a nap by 9:30, but it felt great!

Fridays are a little closer to the weekend around here, since my husband's office is closed, so I set my goal for 7:00 am and pulled it off. It gave me plenty of time to do my scripture study, feed the kids breakfast, and get ready for my hair appointment, and to let my husband sleep in a bit longer. Then he returned the favor on Saturday, the sweetie.

Anyway, in spite of not meeting my goal on Wednesday, I feel good about what I accomplished. This week, I am focusing on the same thing, plus adding in the daily exercise as part of our HH challenge. Additionally, I am going to do something that Lizzy at MICD is working on this week--cleaning my room every day. Somehow, it's always the last one to get done, which means it often doesn't. My kids aren't allowed to go to bed with a messy room, so I'm going to hold myself to that for just one week and see how it goes. Now I need to get to work on it before my early bedtime! Goodnight!