2020 - In Review

Although I understand why many people are referring to 2020 as a dumpster fire, for my immediate family and me, it wasn't that terrible and actually offered many opportunities we might not have had otherwise. With that said, I recognize that we are incredibly blessed to have good health, good jobs, and good schools for our children. I fully understand that my year's success are just that: mine. Yours may be different, and that is okay. For many, this year was merely one of survival.

Highlights:

• One marathon, one half marathon. I joined a Facebook group for running mamas, and now I'm signed up for a trail Ragnar in May 2021!
• Felix learned to ride a bike.
• Trixie learned to ride a bike.
• Felicia is potty trained!
• Canoeing 88 miles on the Yellowstone River with lots of Eric's extended family.
• Connecting with my big sister, an old friend, and my niece on MarcoPolo.
• Joe Biden won.
• I won tickets for our family to go to Lagoon. We had so much fun!
• I made my own sourdough starter and can now make an adequate loaf of sourdough bread. I like this recipe.
• We got a Costco nearby. There are a handful of things there that I really love, especially the giant bag of spinach for my green smoothies.

Places in 2020:

• Cruise along the western coast of Mexico right before Covid-19 hit the rails. We even got a bonus day aboard the ship.
• Lots of camping, including a couple of nights in Fremont Indian State Park in a tipi, camping near Moab, and camping on Orcas Island in the San Juan Islands.
• A trip to Seattle (and environs) to visit Eric's sister and her family. I am a bit in love with the San Juan Islands.
• Jackson Hole for Thanksgiving. (We defied the CDC.)

Birthdays/Traditions

Same traditions as usual, but this year we added Stockington Day the Monday before the first day of school. It was such a blast, and I can't wait to do it again next year!

Review of 2020 Goals:

• Run a sub-30 5K. DONE!
• Log 400 miles of running (outdoors and treadmill). DONE times 2.5. Yes, I ran over 1000 miles in 2020.
• Catch up on all the books I have downloaded to my Kindle. Ha! Not even close. The problem is that Amazon gives me a free book every month, and I joined a second book group this year!
• Read the Book of Mormon as a family. We gave up on this pretty early. Our little girls just cannot do it. I did read the whole thing, and I think Ike might finish before the new year.
• Start a social media hashtag called #forrealfriday where people take pictures and post about real-life stuff, not just the beautiful stuff. This hasn't caught on quite like I wanted, but we'll keep working on it.
• Crochet 20 beanies for a service project run by a family in our ward. I didn't do this one, but our ward did a service project for them, so I made five and put them with entire bundles for the project.
• Crochet 15 new snowflakes for my Christmas tree. I didn't count how many I did. It may have been 15? It may have been 10? I genuinely do not know.

2021 Goals:

• Run another marathon (or two, or three).
• Keep teaching my kids to cook. (Before the reinstatement of tighter lockdown (which, to be fair is hardly tight at all compared to other places), each of my kids helped me cook one night a week, and they got to have a friend over that night. It was working really well, and they were learning real skills besides just, getting food out for me.)
• Read daily with my kids. This should be a thing we do already, but we just don't. Sometimes we will check books out from the library, and I never even crack them open.
• Reinstate dates with our kids.

2020 focused a lot on myself, especially in regards to training. I am looking forward to being more mindful about the time I spend with my kids going into 2021.