Hi, friends! Thank you SO much to everyone who has taken my 2017 survey! I have loved hearing from more than 140 of you so far. The polls are open until Friday (when I’ll draw the $50 gift card winner!), so go leave your feedback here if you haven’t already. Looking forward to sharing some of the results, too!

In the meantime, I thought it would be fun to share what we ate in January. It can be hard to get inspired to cook in the winter, when it’s cold and produce is a little lame, so I’m supplying you with 31 options :) A few notes:

— I’ve linked to recipes where I have them, which is most places – we are not the type of cooks who can just throw things together in the kitchen!!
— I’ve marked with an asterisk any recipe we were making for the first time.

Photo from Design Mom

Week 1:
Sunday, January 1: homemade ramen (John uses only the ramen noodles from the $.20 packets and adds frozen peas, soy sauce, an egg, cashews, etc.)
Monday, January 2: roasted butternut squash soup, salad, and baguette (Whole30 people, I’m pretty sure this is approved, and it is delicious and so easy!!)*
Tuesday, January 3: burrito bowls (we do quinoa rice, pinto and black beans, sauteed green bell peppers and onions, canned diced green chiles, salsa, and Greek yogurt)
Wednesday, January 4: kielbasa, crispy smashed potatoes with avocado aioli, and salad
Thursday, January 5: chana masala, rice, and naan
Friday, January 6: three pepper pizza and salad (we use Whole Foods dough (in the refrigerated/prepared foods section), jarred sauce, Monterey Jack cheese, and chopped up red bell pepper, poblano pepper, pepperoncinis, and red onion)
Saturday, January 7: lasagna, salad, and garlic bread (the absolute BEST lasagna, in my opinion!)

Week 2:
Sunday, January 8: easy chicken pot pie*
Monday, January 9: leftovers
Tuesday, January 10: leftovers
Wednesday, January 11: chili mac and cheese*
Thursday, January 12: BBQ takeout
Friday, January 13: three pepper pizza and salad
Saturday, January 14: kale sausage chick pea pasta (this is a recipe from our friends the Henrys that has become a staple in our house. I may share it in a separate post sometime because it is delicious!)

Week 3:
Sunday, January 15: sheet pan tenderloin and roasted veggies*
Monday, January 16: taco soup
Tuesday, January 17: Articles Club! Homemade ramen for John
Wednesday, January 18: leftovers
Thursday, January 19: butter chicken, rice, and naan
Friday, January 20: Chick-fil-a :)
Saturday, January 21: veggie burgers and frozen sweet potato fries

Week 4:
Sunday, January 22: zucchini meatballs, Marcella Hazan’s tomato sauce, spaghetti, and salad
Monday, January 23: Chipotle (we had meetings at church)
Tuesday, January 24: quesadillas on the grill (we do pinto beans and sauteed peppers and onions)
Wednesday, January 25: pork lettuce wraps
Thursday, January 26: farfalle with pancetta and peas
Friday, January 27: buffalo chicken pizza (we do Whole Foods dough, frozen buffalo chicken, chopped red onion, shredded cheese, and Whole Foods 365 blue cheese sauce) and Asian charred broccoli
Saturday, January 28: Chinese takeout for Lunar New Year!

Week 5:
Sunday, January 29: chicken noodle soup
Monday, January 30: chickpea shawarma pitas
Tuesday, January 31: chicken and broccoli stir fry

If this was helpful, I’d love to do posts for other seasons, since our go-to meals change a lot with the weather! Let me know what you think, and I’d also love to hear if you have a favorite recipe for the winter!

P.S. I wrote a post a few years ago about how we meal plan – considering writing a follow-up since our process has changed a bit!

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As I suspected, having June born in January was such a treat for my logical brain, as demonstrated so beautifully by this post. What a treat to watch her grow from a nugget in my belly to the cheerful, funny, sweet little girl she is today in just a few months!

There will never be another year like this one, the year in which we welcomed our first child, and though sometimes that makes me feel like the sobbing emoji… it’s okay. The best is yet to come! Here are a few highlights of this very special year on Em for Marvelous and in our lives.

Well, pretty much the first thing we did in the new year was have a baby!! (Oh yes, I did share my 2016 guideposts and vision board first.) June was born on January 7th, leading me to share “notes” from my hospital stay as well as the meaning of her name. John and I also celebrated our 11th dativersary, and I posted the first of many Marvelous Mama interviews!

I celebrated a very sweet birthday with friends and chocolate raspberry cake in February. June also met her cousin Tegan and the rest of my family – such a wonderful week!! As we rounded out our first six weeks, I shared two more posts with newborn tips and tricks.

The best part of March was celebrating Easter as a family of three! June also got to spend some time wearing matching headbands with her buddy Milly :) Even once John went back to work, I enjoyed every bit of maternity leave, especially our daily afternoon walks around a local lake!

In April, we headed to Charleston for a last hurrah of my leave. We had the best time staying downtown, walking the city, and eating delicious food, all with Junebug in tow! My Mom came to stay with us for three weeks as I transitioned back to work, and we all took a work trip to Atlanta. We also planted our vegetable garden and picked strawberries! I wrote about thanking our postpartum nurses and our baby favorites from the first six weeks.

May brought more work road trips with my Mom and June, including to the fabulous Greenbrier in West Virginia. We also had several visits from family, and we celebrated my first Mother’s Day! I shared my pregnancy book recommendations.

Good golly, look at those rolls!!! June’s first June was more of the same — visitors and road trips, for work and for play. We had the best time in the mountains with the Henrys and clocked a new family record of six trips to our local u-pick blueberry farm in just a few short weeks — one of the best things we made time for all year. You can see much more from this month in the first installment of June’s video series, June in June! :) On EFM, I shared our five month baby favorites and our summer fun list, of which I’m happy to say we accomplished much!

July! What a month! We spent the week of the Fourth on our beloved Island, and despite June’s first terrible cold, it was wonderful. We made another New England road trip just a few weeks later, this time for a friend’s wedding and a week with John’s family in Connecticut. In between, we celebrated that great Southern holiday: Cow Appreciation Day!!

What a treat to spend a week in our hometown in the summer, showing June all of our favorite activities and places from growing up! We had the best, best time. On the blog, I told you about Lisa’s baby shower and a fun date night idea.

The most exciting event in September was our first family camping trip!! We are already itching for the next one! We also enjoyed lots of al fresco meals, neighborhood walks, and playground swings. I shared our eight month baby favorites, all of the articles we’ve read in Articles Club, wisdom from four years of marriage, and we chatted about signature family dishes.

In October, we marveled at the flooding from Hurricane Matthew (June from inside foul weather gear), had lots of family singalongs, spent the weekend in Asheville with my sister and her boyfriend, and donned the foul weather gear again to dress as a lobster, lobsterman, and seaweed for Halloween! Some of my favorite posts were written this month, including three posts on how to slow down time, a favorite home improvement, and the best cooking playlist.

So many celebrations in November, including the magazine launch party, Thanksgiving with family and then again with friends, birthday parties, and more. You all helped me vote on a Christmas card, I shared how we plan our yearly budget, and we talked about Christmas traditions.

And finally, December. We drove overnight to spend ten days in Connecticut with our beloved family, and it was as sweet (and crazy – three cousins under three!) as we could have hoped for.

Friends, thank you for reading. I just love y’all – sharing with you, hearing from you, getting your opinions, and seeing what you’re up to. It is a joy to write here, and I can’t wait to see all the adventures 2017 will hold!

2015 year in review
2014 year in review
2013 year in review
2012 year in review

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So September was a strange month.

I think I’m a person with many skills, but being hospitable to strangers is not one of them. Close friends? No problem. But ask me to invite someone over I don’t really know, strike up a conversation with a neighbor I’ve never met, or small talk with the random person next to me at church? I pretty much break out in hives.

But for some reason, that got flipped on its head last month — instead of checking off the goals I’d set, September was like hospitality immersion therapy. In no particular order, we or I: went over to dinner at a neighbors’ house we’d never been to before, hosted guests two weekends, invited acquaintances over to dinner for the first time, put Articles Club out there on the blog and randomly met a girl who lives LITERALLY four doors down from me (hey Jackie!), brought food to friends who’d just had a baby, started back up for fall with our family group from church, went camping with friends, and had dinner with someone from our college’s alumni office.

I get that this list might sound wildly unimpressive to some of you, but for me, many of these things represent me (and John) radically extending ourselves. (I wish it weren’t so, but it’s true!) As a classic introvert married to a classic introvert, it’s easy to find excuses to stick close to my two favorites. My time is limited, and it can be hard to convince myself to use what precious little I have to do something that’s uncomfortable.

I’m not going to tell you that this sort of hospitality now comes naturally to me (it doesn’t). But I will say I feel marginally more comfortable with these sorts of situations — even a teensy bit empowered — and I definitely enjoyed our dinners once they were underway. In fact, a related idea for a 2017 goal popped into my head after one of our dinners that scares the bejeezus out of me… good thing I still have a few more months to contemplate whether or not I’ll make it official :)

Revisiting my goals for September:
Run once a week (I think we ran once…)
Plan well for and enjoy our camping trip (Yes!! Post coming soon!)
Add the final layer to June’s nursery so I can call it complete
Post my guide to the Triangle
Celebrate our four year wedding anniversary (Post here!)
Resurrect my nighttime routine now that June is sleeping in the nursery

October goals:
— Make plans for June’s baptism celebration
— Finalize our family Halloween costume (!)
— Host the fourth annual pumpkins and soup party
— Take our Christmas card photo (or at least set a date for our session with Nancy)
— Post my guide to the Triangle
— Finish our will (Is this really going to happen?? Only time will tell…)

As a reminder, here are my 2016 guideposts. If you’ve posted your goals somewhere, I’d love to see – or just drop them in the comments!

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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

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