Hey everyone! Welcome to the first installment of ‘Favorites and Goals’! A few of the reasons I started this blog were to keep myself motivated and document life’s moments. In this new series, I’m going to post some of my favorite pictures from the previous month and lay out a few goals for the new month. In future posts for this series I will also add in how I did on the previous month’s goals. 🙂

Onward to my favorite pics from June!

A few cute moments with the pups to start things off. Crystal (the Rottweiler mix) loves her blankets and just looks so cute all wrapped up. The second picture just makes me so happy though. When we adopted Crystal, she and Achilles took a quite a while to warm up to each other, and even longer to actually play. I love seeing them running around the backyard!

I made two wreaths last month. The summer one turned out pretty nice. As for the winter one, I’m just glad I finally finished it! I started it a long time ago and had the base mostly done, but lost momentum on it after making a similar one for my mom. I love how it turned out!

The bottom three are just me playing with my camera. These are two of my favorite glass fusion pendants and a bolt on our deck. I have a long way to go in my photography, but I’m pretty happy with how these turned out 🙂

Family! I don’t know what I can really say about these pictures other than that I have an awesome family. I love getting to spend time with them and am so glad that we were able to get together in June!

This one actually is from the end of May, but I didn’t do this post last month and I really wanted to share it. These two women, my mom and my grandma, are amazing. They are my inspiration and my motivation. This was at our lunch for my mom’s birthday. I am beyond grateful to have these two in my life.

And that is it for looking back to June! On to looking forward!

July Goals

• Work out at least 4 days a week. This is something I have been working on for months. Some weeks I do great, others….not so much. I’m really hoping this will help my motivation on those more difficult days!
• Guided meditation – 5 minutes a day. Mediation is a new one for me, so I’m starting small. I have a yoga program on my IPod that has guided mediation and I am going to give it a try this month.
• Language studies – at least 4 days a week, 30 minutes a day. This is going to probably be the most difficult one for me. I have been working on learning Japanese for the past few months and, while I enjoy it a lot, I have had difficulty making time to study the past few weeks. I really hope the accountability of putting this one here will help!
• Photograph something daily. As I said earlier, my photography skills have a long way to go. Spending some time each day with my camera working on them, even if it’s just a few photos, will be good pratice.
• Yoga twice a week. While I use a short yoga session to cool down after workouts, I would really like to include two longer sessions a week as well.

That’s it for this month! I have to say, I’m really looking forward to seeing how the rest of July will go!

Do you set monthly goals? How do you keep track of them or hold yourself accountable? I would love to hear how others are working toward their own goals!