Working Homeschool Moms – 7 Goals For the New Year

Dear Working Homeschool Mom (and Dad),

You’ve made it to the new year! Can you believe it’s 2015? And guess what…It’s the year Marty McFly travels to the future! Apparently we have a lot of catching up to do if we are to fulfill what Marty saw. Please tell me I’m not the only Back to the Future fan.

Working Homeschool Moms

Working Homeschool Moms - 7 Goals for the New Year Do you work and homeschool?  Check out our working homeschool moms resource page that contains more articles about how to balance homeschooling and working.

With the new year comes those pesky new year’s resolutions. You can see how I really feel about those things here. I’m a bit of New Year’s rebel. While I personally do not set many (if any) New Year’s resolutions, there are still things to consider. Change is good. It can happen any time and definitely doesn’t need to wait. With that said, I do understand that setting goals for the new year is motivating. It sounds promising, and anything that lights a fire under our rear-ends is a good thing. Right? Recently, I’ve slowly come to terms with setting some yearly goals.

Because of this, I’d like to give you a list of things I think would be awesome for every working homeschool mom to do…or at least set as goal!

1. Delegate (give away) one major chore that you are currently responsible for. I’m thinking of something like the grocery shopping, the mountain of laundry, cleaning out the fridge, balancing the check book, etc. These are stresses that you can easily allow another member of your family to do. One thing I do is pay a friend to spend two hours a week deep cleaning my home. Even though the kids manage to destroy the freshly cleaned house in a matter of hours, knowing it was clean at one point is a huge relief! Also, my husband does a lot of the grocery shopping and helps with the laundry. We are truly a team!

2. Cut down on time wasters. Until someone invents technology to add more hours to the day, and at the same time makes something that allows us to function on less sleep that does not include pounding down a bunch of energy drinks, we need to find a way to get more out of our days. This is one thing that I will definitely be working on this year. We need to get rid of things that waste our time. What are time wasters? Of course the obvious things are TV and social media, but so are things like unnecessary driving, having projects or hobbies that provide little return, and for me, repeatedly rearranging my homeschool stuff!

3. Encourage a healthy immune system so you don’t lose the time you have! There is nothing worse that getting sick. Everything comes to a halt, including your homeschool plan. While I can name off a slew of things to do to promote a healthy life style, for this particular list, I want you to consider three things for your new year: Drink lemon infused water, take Vitamin D, and decrease sugar intake. I have provided you with some interesting articles to ponder. As for the sugar, I’m not just talking about that white stuff you put in cookies. All processed carbohydrates fall into this category and will slow your immune response if over done.

4. Reassess your curriculum choices. Having curiculum that isn’t working for your family will waste your time even more! Don’t let that happen! In this post I gave a general overview of some options available which could be suitable for us working homeschool moms. Personally, I’ve made a complete overhaul late this last fall because things just weren’t working out. We’ve moved to Sonlight. What a huge time saver! I’m grateful I didn’t wait until the end of the year to make that change!

5. Be active with your kids! While I’d love to say that you should “work out” 3-5 times a week for at least an hour (preferably including a lot of resistance training), that just doesn’t seem very realistic for most of us. It’s a great resolution…but most resolutions don’t make it past January. So as an alternative, I want to suggest that you choose to be active with your kids. If you must, make this your exercise time and set an example that being healthy and active is important. This will be a good start to getting yourself on a fitness track.

6. Have Fun! Seriously. Just do it. The general theme of much of the advice I’ve seen from other moms regarding their goals is that they all want to let go of certain things. As one mom from the HHM community page says, “Don’t sweat the small stuff!” Let us enjoy the time we have. Board games, pajama days, or what ever else fits into your fun criteria…let it happen. Time goes fast. Let us not miss out on it.

7. Set and re-evaluate goals regularly. While many may like making and reassessing goals daily, I find that I don’t have the time to do this. Honestly, just the sound of that exhausts my brain. Weekly and monthly focuses may be more effective for us working homeschool moms. Write a vision for your week, month, season, and year. It’s okay to be optimistic with these goals and set your sites high, but don’t get down if you don’t meet your goals. Goals are and always will be a work in progress. One mom, Nicole, said it this way, “Don’t set a goal of immediate change (I’m going to workout every day), but a deadline (by the end of the year I want to be in the habit of working out more consistently).” I agree with her wholeheartedly.

Whether you are like me and choose not to set resolutions at all or you are the one that goes full out with the new year, it is important to always have something to work towards. And obviously, our goals will look different from each other’s. My other goals will include things like praying more, yelling less (Ummm…yes, I do this. Can you believe it?), and being more aware of spending.

Do you work and homeschool?  Check out our working homeschool moms resource page that contains more articles about how to balance homeschooling and working.

I hope you have a blessed year!!! As a working homeschool mom, do you set goals or resolutions or do you just wing it? Please share!

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4 Comments

  1. I’m setting goals this year too. I always do for homeschooling but now I’ve set some for work and important tasks and it’s helping tremendously! Cutting down on time wasters is at the top of my list – whenever I want to add something new to my list I ask myself if it’s going to help me meet my goals in the long run.

  2. Now that I know my family needs, I split our school year into 2 semesters and 4 blocks where I switch up the curriculum a bit. The kids like trying new things and it helps them to focus more on some of the curriculum topics that they are passionate about. With our new year we hibernate in the winter a bit by cutting back on our outside activities and we have a fuller course schedule. Then in the Spring and the Fall the schedule is lighter. The summer schedule is completely online and interactive (more fun but learning). As for the family we squeeze in weekend day trips since I can’t take off work to do them during the week with our homeschool group – but my kids invites their cousins or friends along and it’s a good time. That’s what I start to schedule at the beginning of the year.

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