gillian

Twelve Things – April Edition

• Television: Rewatching Vampire Diaries and Modern Family

Honestly, I didn’t think I could rewatch Vampire Diaries. I had tried several times before but just thought the first episode was so cringey! Then I powered through and remembered how great it was. I only made it to season 7, but I’ll probably rewatch it again all the way through at some point.

Modern Family, now that is just a classic, feel-good sitcom. I never really watched it when it aired live, but being able to binge it is so great. I love it!

• Reading: Inside Delta Force, Being Mortal, Thinking Fast and Slow
• Exercising regularly to increase my patience and attitude towards my kids meltdowns

I need to exercise in order to maintain mental clarity. It is much harder said than done. I will not exercise for a couple of weeks, get in a bad mood and realize it’s because I haven’t sweat it out. I really want to get better about this. Carving out time in my day to make exercising happen. I’m full of excuses at the moment but I need to get back to it!

• Planning my hubby’s surprise 30th birthday party!

Needless to say, men are not great at keeping secrets. The party went great, (Chipotle catering was a huge hit) and everyone had a great time but I think the secret had been blown a few days before and there were some unexpected hiccups, but we did it!

• Spring cleaning 🙂

Refreshing the house and all of those little things you don’t do weekly or monthly just feels so great. I will put together a Spring Cleaning Plan and link it here soon. This is not broken up specifically per day because I know you working mamas and stay-at-home parents can’t get it all done in one day or even one week, so I’ve just broken it up by room.

• Pantry and fridge/freezer cleanout – making all the meals with what we currently have before doing a big grocery shop

I made a point of it, particularly while my husband was out of town for several weeks, to go through the fridge and pantry and try to make everything we had already before doing a large grocery shop. It’s so nice to reset the kitchen like this without being wasteful.

• Spring has sprung and seed starting and garden / yard prep have begun

I try to plant most of the seeds that I can in seed trays about 6-8 weeks before the anticipated last frost. I’m new to gardening and am learning more and more every year. This year I’m focusing more on quality of specific plants ovr quantity of varieties. Although I still seem to have a lot of different plants, vegetables and flowers, I am planting more of each vegetable to hopefully produce a greater yield.

• Preparing for my performance review at work – researching salary expectations, my performance, and outlining accomplishments.

This has been so eye opening. It can be very frustrating to not know what you should be making compared to others in your field. I met with several other women in my industry to discuss salaries and benefits to see where I fell and now I think I have a much clearer vision as to what I should be making. Now I have more confidence to go into my performance review and make requests.

Further, I have been motivated to go back through my accomplishments over the past three years I have been with this company. Business Development / Marketing can be difficult to accurately track performance if your company does not have a system already in place. Mine does not have a system so I have had to use the resources accessible to try and determine my performance. This hasn’t been easy and I don’t know the accuracy of the numbers I am pulling but this will be a great talking point during my performance review to discuss measurable goals and overall performance. There are several instagram accounts I follow that discuss women in the workplace, finances, and empowering people to get their worth. Here are two I particularly like: @shewolfeofwallstreet and @financesreimagined.

• Outlining my personal and professional goals: writing everything out on paper and then creating a tracker using Google Docs/Sheets to put it down so I don’t lose it.

This is an evolutionary process and I am still working on figuring all of this out. I have considered a bullet journal to put my constant stream of ideas down into but just haven’t gotten there yet. There is an ease and simplicity to Google Docs to be able to access it from anywhere. Anyway, this is something I have been trying to focus on more and more recently. Discovering what my end-of-life goals are and trying to build a life that will get me there, keeping in mind my motivations, desires, etc. I will share an example of mine once I have this outlined a little more clearly in case you want to do the same!

• Working on self-improvement goals. Both my husband and I are trying to map out some side-hustles, professional goals / desires, dream future, and what to look forward to over the next few months/years. 

Setting goals for yourself, and doing that with your partner, keeps you both on the same page as you grow (I think). Oftentimes I hear people saying “we just grew apart, I was so young when we got together I didn’t know what I really wanted”. I think keeping these lines of communication open and striving to grow individually and together is so huge when trying to find fulfillment. I know that I don’t want to be the same person I was at 18 when we met. But I also know that I want to be with this man forever, and I know there will be hard times, but maintaining that communication and those expectations helps us both to strive for greater and find fulfillment in ourselves. I also think that doing this together makes sure the other person doesn’t feel left behind when things start to change. You end up being in everything together. A team. And I love that.

• Starting this blog! Pulling together post ideas, pictures, getting comfortable in front of the camera and behind it. 

Thank you for being here and reading this! I am learning so much through just these past couple of weeks! From building the site and learning WordPress, to writing posts and creating a list of topics, narrowing my focus a bit (can you tell I want to just talk about everything in here?!). This is truly a creative outlet for me. I had this dream of creating a portfolio of pictures of myself and my family that we can all look back on as we get older and this blog, instagram, pinterest, etc is such a great way to capture that. If you have requests for content, please share below or message me on insta!

• Listening to my body. We feel that there are a lot of unknowns right now and sometimes I think I feel anxious about it. How can I remedy this discomfort? Exercise? Talking it out? A glass of wine? Take a bath?

Everybody handles stress differently. To my military spouses out there, we have so many unknowns sometimes. When is the next deployment? How long is it? How long is it really going to be? Can my spouse come to this summer wedding with me? Are we going to be moving within the next 6 months, 1 year? So so many unknowns and sometimes the stress of that really gets me down and finding the best way to relieve that discomfort can vary. Sometimes it’s getting together with other military spouses and venting about the frustrations (we all have them!), or it’s putting the kids to bed and enjoying a glass of wine in the tub or with my favorite TV show. Other times, if my husband is home, it’s tackling a house project! Totally varies!!

I want to thank you so much for being here. This is my monthly brain dump that encompasses all of the feels. Please share some of your favorite things from the month (whether it’s April like this post or December!).