Most of mine and John’s conversations about our girl’s impending arrival revolve around the fact that we have NO IDEA how our lives are going to change once she’s born (only that they certainly will!). Everyone’s experience with a newborn seems so different that it’s hard to know just how much time we’ll have to eat, sleep, shower, or do anything else. Knowing this, I thought it might be wise to prepare a few posts in advance for EFM, just for my own peace of mind… and that’s where the idea for my Marvelous Mama series was born!

But the truth? I’m doing this as much for personal reasons as I am for blog ones! I wanted an excuse to pick the brains of my absolute favorite mamas, and this series gave me the perfect opportunity. It has been a joy, a comfort, and a delight to read their answers as they trickled in over the last few months, and I can’t wait to share them with you so soon.

Oh hey, Ayer family! That’s my mama on my right and my older sister (another great mama!) on my left.

So who are these ladies? Many of them are related to me! :) A few you will likely recognize right off the bat, and longtime readers will recognize a few more. They have children ranging in age from younger than six months old to older than sixty years old. Some have only children, and one has six children. Some are self-employed, some are full-time employees, and some stay at home full time. A few have blogs or Instagram accounts, but several do not. They have different faith backgrounds and political beliefs. What they all have in common is that I think they are doing a wonderful job raising their children, and I wanted to learn from their wisdom as John and I begin to navigate our own way. Whether their names are familiar to you or not, I hope you’ll find some nuggets of wisdom in their answers, too!

Marvelous Mama interviews will start appearing weekly on the blog once our girl arrives. In the meantime, I would love to hear: if you wanted to glean the wisdom of your favorite mama, what questions would you ask her?

P.S. I’m so excited for this!!

There’s something wonderful about our girl’s birthday lining up fairly neatly with a new year – it’s allowing me to think about not only what I want my 2016 to look like, but what I want her first year of life, and our first year as a family of three, to look like.

Longtime readers will know that I am not big on setting yearly goals. I love to set monthly goals, and have used a daily goal system in the past. In 2015 I focused on cultivating the fruits of the spirit. Other than that, I tend to work with a longer time horizon, as with my ongoing 60 Before 30 project.

But 2016 seemed to call for a year-long structure. And though I didn’t necessarily want to set goals, per se (my long-term goal focus will still be squarely on 60 Before 30!), I loved the idea of having something to measure myself against throughout the next twelve months – a touchstone to refer back to in this year that has the potential to be tumultuous.

Because you know, the one thing people love to tell you about kids is that they will change your life in ways you could never imagine. And while I welcome that, I also don’t want to start at zero on January 15. I want to protect and preserve the best parts of the life John and I have built together over the last ten years while welcoming the changes that will inevitably come. So, knowing that this Big Change has the potential to throw us off track and derail the progress we’ve made, I wanted to establish guideposts that I could look to to remind myself of what matters most to us as we integrate our girl into our life over the next year.

So what are these guideposts? I’ve listed them below, along with a few thoughts on how I might know whether I’ve been successful for each!

1. Stay healthy in mind and body. Continue weekly meal planning, pick back up with running and biking, play tennis with John, go on lots of hikes, recover from pregnancy and get back to a place where I feel great about my body, spend lots of time reading (I’m joining in Nancy’s book club!)
2. Stay adventurous. Go berry picking, plant our garden, introduce our girl to our favorite outdoor concerts and movies, explore the Triangle, take day trips, embrace the whirlwind of bigger vacations and road trips (Maine and Michigan) with grace
3. Stay faithful. Attend our church when we’re in town, continue visiting new churches when we’re traveling, listen to Adam’s sermons weekly, fill idle time by listening to other favorite sermons, lean on our family group, continue to make progress as stewardship chairs, adjust prayer and Bible rhythm as necessary, sing hymns and listen to worship music throughout the day
4. Stay financially free. Stay on track with our 2016 budget (it will probably be the hardest year we’ve ever faced!), stay on track with our plan for paying down our mortgage early, open a college fund, make wise decisions on baby purchases, continue to give generously
5. Stay in relationship. Be intentional about involving our far-away families in our girl’s life, make new friends in our neighborhood, continue Articles Club, go camping, host another adventure dinner party, keep up our monthly tennis dates, have a Southern meet-up with Kim
6. Stay strong in love. Hug every day, go on nightly neighborhood walks, prioritize conversation together, cultivate patience, kindness, and peace, laugh a lot, read The Meaning of Marriage

A peaceful home, family singalongs, simple time together, reading good books, camping and time outside, trips to Michigan, Maine, and Bald Head Island, laughter, a new backyard, and lots of love. See all my 2016 inspiration board sources here.

To wrap things up, here are my goals for January!
— Organize coat closet and install hook for Ergo
— Read “How to Win Friends and Influence People” for NR book club
— Research landscaping companies for our backyard project
— Pack our hospital bag
— Re-read first chapters of Babywise and The Nursing Mother’s Companion
— Order favorite Instagram prints from 2015
— Prep several EFM posts for after our girl’s arrival

If you’ve posted your monthly (or yearly!) goals somewhere, I’d love to take a look – leave a link in the comments! :)

Quote from designlovefest

I love seeing the 2016 goals some of my friends have already posted! I’m always inspired by the goals of others — not so much the content of their actual goals, but the ways in which they arrive at them and the structure they use to maximize their chances for progress. A few I’m loving so far: Val, Victoria, and Nancy. I’ll be working on finalizing mine this weekend, and can’t wait to share them on Monday!

In the meantime, I wanted to share my inspiration board for 2016! This is the first time I’ve made one of these; to be honest, I’ve always been a little leery of them. To me, the danger with creating a board like this is that you can look at it (at the end of the year, or the middle), and say, well, my life sure doesn’t look like that. It’s not that clean, or beautiful, or color-coordinated. I didn’t want to even be tempted to have this board make me feel that way, so I tried hard to pull images that felt “real” – and in many cases, I did that by pulling images that ARE real (from the places I love or things we’ve done in the past).

But, for this year in particular, I felt it was important to have a visual touchstone. So as I pulled photos for this board, I challenged myself again and again to choose ones that didn’t just look pretty and went well together, but that meant something to me, and were relevant to MY year ahead. It’s not bad to dream, to be aspirational, or to look toward the future, but I think even those things need to be planted in reality. I’m not moving to Hawaii this year, and I’m not building a farmhouse. But, we hope to renovate our backyard, and we will be traveling to Michigan and Maine with family, and those are things I can dream about.

Alright – I’ll get off my vision board soapbox! :) Here’s my final version:

I wanted this board to be about finding the beauty that’s in my life, and the beauty I hope to add to it this year, and I think that’s what I did. Consider it a sneak peek at my goals for 2016 – can’t wait to share more on Monday! :)

Clockwise from top left: nursery from Elements of Style (photo by Sarah Winchester Studios), guitar, newborn photo by Cassidy Brooke, books photo by Nancy Ray Photography, bikes from Style Me Pretty (photo by Liz Banfield), backyard pergola, personal photo from Maine, holding hands, personal photo from Michigan, camping photo from Lovely Morning, Laura Ingalls Wilder quote, happy gal