July Goal Update

I’ll post about my August goals tomorrow. In the meantime, here’s how I did with my July goals.

I kicked some butt this month if I do say so myself.

Finish installing kitchen cabinet handles (and childproof latches). Done! I installed child safety latches on two sets of cabinets in the kitchen — the ones under the sink where all the cleaning supplies are, and one set on the island where we keep things like extension cords, small tools like screwdrivers and exacto knives, and spare light bulbs. For now, I’ve left everything else open and it hasn’t been an issue so far. (Emma’s favorite is the tupperware cabinet!) We may need to install latches on the bathroom cabinets at some point, but she doesn’t spend time in the bathroom unsupervised right now. Maybe when she starts walking? We’ll see.

I also installed the pulls on the last 6 drawers in our kitchen. This was super easy once I realized, um, I don’t actually need a jig to do it even thought that’s what I used the first time. I just measured the drawer, did the math to figure out where to drill, marked those spots on a piece of paper, and transferred those marks to the drawers by poking them with a screwdriver to make a small indention in the wood. At that point, it was easy to just drill where the marks were and screw on the pull. Why didn’t this occur to me a looooong time ago? I don’t know.

I did have one big “oops” moment with these pulls. On the drawer right next to the fridge, I marked and drilled the holes off by 1/2 inch. Ay yi yi. I was so annoyed at myself, but fortunately some wood filler and a stain marker, and the fact that the pull obscures it, made my mistake mostly unnoticeable. (Unless you’re specifically looking for it like I was in the third photo above.)

Sew myself a top. Done! You can read about it here if you missed it. I’m going to attempt a Washi top next — I bought the pattern a while ago but have been too intimidated to try it until now.

Plan Emma’s 1st birthday! Done! (Although now that means I actually have to execute the plan, which is a whole ‘nother story.) A lot of people will be out of town and can’t make the party, so it’ll be on the small side, but that’s perfectly fine with me.

Try a menu planning service for a week. In progress! Last week I signed up for The Fresh 20 at Karen’s recommendation. It’s only $5/month so even if it doesn’t work out, there’s very little money wasted. They provide 5 dinner recipes each week along with a shopping list. For our first week, we got a late start on our grocery shopping so we’re only using 4 of the meals — and we actually decided to use a set of recipes from a few weeks ago as well. (Which is another thing I like — it seems fairly easy to pick-and-choose each week, and substitute something different when we want to.)

I went to the grocery store yesterday with my Fresh 20-provided shopping list, and last night we had salmon, honey-lime corn and a mango salad with vinaigrette. Pretty tasty! I’ll have to post an update in a few weeks about whether we continue to have success.

Complete 1 M.A. book layout. In progress! I’ll share it here when I’m finished.

Keep the kitchen island (mostly) clean. I was fairly successful at this — at night as I’m beginning to head towards bed, I try to remember to take just a couple minutes to scour the island and return items to the proper home, whether that be the office, Emma’s room or just the trash can. The challenge now is to make that quick cleanup a regular habit. At worst, we do have a housecleaning service coming every other week now, which forces me to declutter at least twice a month!

Bonus items! I also finished two lingering goals from May and June — I wrote and posted Emma’s birth story (in three parts), and I have a new blog design. The blog design will get some more tweaks in the coming weeks, but it’s ok for now.