My goals for 2023 revolve quite a bit around self-care and doing things that make me happy such as cross-stitching, gardening, puzzles, hanging out with my family and reading. I am also trying to make them pretty open ended so I don’t feel to rigid about them.

2023 Goals

1. Practice Self-Care every day. – My main goal is to practice self-care every day. I have found that I am not good at resting and my focus this year will be in practicing this.
2. Puzzles, puzzles, puzzles! – As part of my self-care I set myself a goal of doing puzzles every week. I outlined it here in a recent blog post. I do want to try and sign up for a puzzle competition next fall but I am not sure if the timing will work out with my school and my kids’ school.
3. Cross-stitch to finish projects. – I really want to finish my Zoo Alphabet project and start the Autumn Love project I bought last fall. I also want to make headway on both of the HAEDs that I have started and work through some of my smaller projects. I will be talking more about this on my YouTube channel but for now I want to finish some WIPS.
4. Maintain my Commit30 planner. – My fourth goal is to keep up with my planner every month this year. I have found that writing things down really helps me remember what I need to do. I love my Commit30 planners and how every month you set a goal for yourself. You can find them here.
5. Read some books. – I don’t have a concrete number of books to read this year but I do have a few that I want to get through. Some are favorites like this series by Dorothy Dunnett and others are new to me. I may post something later this year for one of my monthly goals but for now I just want to read a few books and rediscover my love of reading.
6. Maintain the status quo with finances. – I am not working but I am taking classes all year for 2023 and this has made our budget very tight so my goal is for us to stick to it and maintain the status quo. I don’t want to take on any new debt and I also am hoping we can see an increase in our emergency fund this year. I don’t have any investment goals besides continuing to contribute to our account every month. The stock market has been down and I am just going to keep trucking along with our set amounts and not worry about it.
7. Continue to grow my YouTube channel. – I have really enjoyed filming for my YouTube channel Oscoey which can be found here. This year I am expanding beyond groceries into cross-stich and my puzzle content.
8. Keep working on my health. – I am still recovering from the major burnout I experienced last year and I am going to continue with recovering for 2023. I have been doing more gentle exercise, focusing on my eating and practicing self-care and it is slowly turning things around. I have signed up for one 5k so far (walking) and I am thinking of doing a 10k next fall.

Thank you for reading my 2023 goals! I am keeping this post short and sweet so the important parts stand out. I hope your 2023 goes well and you get enough time to relax and enjoy the things you love!

Links:

Oscoey YouTube Channel

Commit30 Planner

The World of Cross Stitching Magazine Subscription

Zoo Alphabet Cross-stitch

If Fish Could Walk

2023 Goals: Puzzles

One Year of Blogging Done!

Last weekend was the one year anniversary of Oscoey. I can’t believe how quickly the last year has gone! I have learned a lot about blogging over the past year and gotten to know many fabulous bloggers as well.

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When I first started out blogging with my very first blog post:

Welcome!

I had all sorts of ideas of what I wanted the blog to be and then the reality of life set in and I had to way scale back my ambitious plans.  There simply was not time for me to be posting quality posts 3 days a week, be on top of social media all day long and be an active member of all the blog groups I am part of and have some semblance of a home life. Luckily I realized pretty early on that it is ok if I can’t write an article for a few weeks or if I miss out on pivotal twitter discussions because I am not doing the blog as a full-time business making gig. I am doing it because I enjoy writing about our life and I love the community of people I have become a part of.

My blog first started out as a basic mom blog with many posts about the garden and recipes. I loved my weekly garden posts and will continue them on a less frequent basis this year. I love looking back at how the garden changed over the growing season.  I am probably going to scale back on the recipes though. Mr. Oscoey is more the cook in the family and now that I am working again I really don’t have time to cook much any more.  I use my banana bread and chocolate chip cookies recipes all the time though. They are a great dairy and gluten free choice for any sort of social gathering you need to bring an item to.  I am planning on making my dairy and gluten-free banana bread to bring with a jar of homemade jam to our work potluck at the end of this month.

I have spent a little time focusing on urban homesteading on Oscoey because I firmly believe that people should grow at least a little of their own food. It is easy to set out a pot and even just grow a little bit of lettuce. Connecting with nature and understanding the seasons is something a lot of people have lost. Growing your own food is the easiest way to regain that connection and as an added bonus you have cheap organic produce to munch on! I am very excited to start our garden this year and I look forward to spending time out there with the kids every day. They love to graze and eat whatever is in season and that is fine with us!

After I had done the mom blog thing for a while and focused on our little urban homestead I found the personal finance community and I haven’t really looked back. I love reading about personal finance, talking about savings strategies and getting inspiration from others. I will be honest and tell you I was a little nervous when I added the “Finances” category to the top of my page but then I did the Uber Frugal Month Challenge this January and I loved being a part of that community and jump starting our frugal mindset once again.

My crossstitching progress pictures seem to have fallen by the wayside…and that is mostly because I have not been stitching.  I would love to have the time to stitch every day and I am very inspired by my Instagram feed with everybody’s progress but I am honestly too tired at the end of the day to even think about picking up a needle.  This picture was taken almost a year ago and even though I have actually made progress on the piece I am no where near finished with it like I had hoped.  I also have several sewing projects I would love to write about that I have not worked on in months so I think one of my blogging goals for this year is to talk about some of my projects and spend some time tracking them on a weekly basis to motivate me to finish them.

Oscoey had a great first year! I want to thank everyone that is a regular reader of the blog! I love your comments and interacting with you. Here’s hoping to another great year of blogging!