You may remember the Stevensons from their sweet maternity session! As I mentioned then, Jennie and Rebekah are two of our dearest friends and we could not be more excited that their amazing family has grown by one! Their perfect new addition has the most fabulous shock of red hair and this wide-eyed expression of curiosity and wonder…I guess the daughter of two brilliant scientists would HAVE to be observant, wouldn’t she!?! I’m so tempted to go on and on here, but I’ll just have to stop here so that you can see her perfection for yourself!
Baby bits!!!
I just love her slightly cross-eyed expressions!!
LOVE!!!!!
Willie came over to say hi…she wasn’t concerned in the slightest!
Her two older siblings are still deciding what to make of her, but they think she’s okay for now!
Jennie & Rebekah…we could NOT be happier for you both! We love you guys and your warm, welcoming, amazing home!!!
As I promised yesterday, I’m sharing my revised 2013 goals with you…just in time for February! I realize that my personal goals for 2013 aren’t necessarily riveting reading, but in the spirit of accountability, I want to put them out there publicly! I am going to keep things somewhat general (there is a detailed task list associated with almost all of these goals), but that could get pretty dense (and quite boring!)!
So without further ado (or procrastination) (or excuses)…
Health
- Eat organically grown, healthy food: have 75% of food come from the farmer’s market, CSA share, my garden, or a local farm via the grocery store; no factory farmed animal products; all organic
- Yoga: attend a Freeport Yoga class (any class!) 1-3x per week; develop personal daily home practice
- Running: run 3x per week minimum; stay injury-free; possibly (?) begin training for a 2014 marathon (subject to staying injury free)
- Keep up with exercise even when things get busy- make it a priority and remember that I’m more focused, happy, and productive when I’ve exercised!
Friends & Family
- Get organized- remember birthdays, anniversaries, etc and send cards/gifts ON TIME! Gifts should be meaningful and personal and well thought out.
- Initiate spending time together- reach out and make dates to meet for coffee/etc without agenda, just to catch up and spend time
- Call & write handwritten letters…regularly! Show the people in my life that I love them!
- Take time away from my work to eat dinner with Justin every night
- Prioritize my marriage- when I don’t have shoots/weddings scheduled, take the weekends off to spend time doing FUN things with Justin and building memories and shared experiences together
- Focus on making “down time” = quality down time…TV is fine, but spending that time engaged in conversation or reading with Justin or doing something purposefully stimulating/relaxing rather than a veg-out default more often
- Organize & put together family photos & home videos- share a copy with each family member
Learning/ Growth
- Develop a creative outlet separate from (but complimentary to) photography- take an art class of some sort (Maine College of Art?)
- Continue to learn sewing skills- work on a more advanced project with an instructor
- Languages- complete Rosetta Stone for French in its entirety this year + read 1 novel in French (dictionary allowed)
- Writing- complete The Making of a Story textbook in its entirety
- Photography- take a photography workshop not related to wedding/portrait photography…work on new perspectives & fresh skills; read 1 photography related book per month
- Finish online herbal remedies class
Spiritual
- embrace ritual- get in the habit of taking a moment of reflection and gratitude as well as seek out ritual that furthers a sense of connection
- Meditation: find a method of mindfulness meditation that works; take at least 5 min per day to practice
- embrace the mental and spiritual aspects of health and healing…visualization, etc
Service/ Financial Giving
- Cuppa- continue CancerCare donations; establish Dempsey Center/ Dempsey Challenge program
- Explore and develop an action plan for using photography to tell the story of (a) a non-profit; (b) a person/group of people in need of assistance or public awareness; (c) fundraise for a worthy cause or causes
- Reach out to non-profits with which I’m interested in working and establish how to become more involved in a sustainable way
- Create product for the families in El Salvador that we worked with {framed images for the new homes, community book , etc?}
Writing
- Write. Something. Every. Day.
- Outline project ideas
- Join a writing group?
Travel
- create and expand my travel photography portfolio
- learn to manage travel time in a productive and satisfying way {ie- use flights to do more than catch up on magazines!}
- El Salvador- set some photographic goals for Feb trip
- Ireland- create some beautiful travel photographs; capture the story of Justin & my trip; take time to sketch & write & absorb new experiences; go for a run on Dingle; fly by the seat of our pants and have adventures
- Reach out to a non-profit/NGO/etc and offer services- go somewhere, anywhere with purpose of photography & expanding my aid photography work
- Make better use of the interesting places in our immediate area: visit at least 6 New England historic sites & camp/backpack in a new park
Home/Garden
- Review last year’s garden journal and apply lessons in planning our 2013 garden
- Maximize small space- talk with Corie at Shift and Martha at Wealden Farm about how to better utilize our vertical garden space so that it’s more productive
- Apply knowledge from online herbal remedies class- grow/ dry/ preserve/ use herbal teas/infusions/etc {begin with chamomile, mint, and maybe lemon balm + wild gather medicinal barks, etc}
- Put up more seasonal food…buy pressure canner?
- Complete stairwell frame walls: remove popcorn ceiling & replace with beadboard; replace light fixture; paint; hang frames and art
- Build a new coffee table
- De-clutter: systematically begin with attic and go room by room down to basement and ruthlessly sell/donate/trash everything non-essential
- Evaluate office space and consider re-organizing or re-decorating to better maximize space
- Thoroughly map out major kitchen renovation project {to happen 2015?}
Business
- Revise and redesign all client materials {Pricing & product guides, etc}
- Streamline workflow and nail down any inefficiencies
- Improve user experience on website {have a custom site designed?}
- Do a styled shoot
- Establish quarterly newsletter
- Seek publication of every wedding + have at least one real wedding feature in a high quality print magazine
- Embrace social media in a more meaningful way and utilize some form of it daily to create a better connection to my clients’ lives
- Blog at least 3x per week
- Set monthly skill goals
- Get materials to bookkeeper on time every month
- Create job description for assistant to hire 2014
- Look into expanding into stock/editorial photography (?)
Phew. It’s a lot. And it’s random. And it’s likely that by the end of 2013 I will have modified almost everything to some extent to reflect new opportunities and experiences. But there it is in a nutshell…a revised look at what I intend to do with my 2013!
Love everything about this!! Yay for putting it out there! 
Here’s to an AMAZING 2013!!!
Hey what happened to the other one you told me about!!!:)
So remember how I set some generalized goals for 2013 back here? Well, something has been nagging at me since I wrote that post and it’s caused me to pause for a moment and ask myself some hard questions. And all of those hard questions really end up boiling down to just one big fat one: Is this a cop out?
Here’s the thing. A lot of what I said is absolutely true. You can’t fully measure the quality of your relationships via a checklist of tasks. “Happy” can be a hard word to fully define. Emotional connection to my clients and their lives isn’t quantifiable in my accounting ledger.
But.
The truth is that most of what I want to accomplish CAN be measured in some way. Maybe not by number of phone calls or accounting ledgers, but there is usually some way to gauge whether I’m reaching my goals or falling short. So why have I been so reluctant to create those parameters? Why do I shy away from setting up a structure that would allow me to measure where I am in my progress? Am I afraid of something? Am I rebelling in some way? IS there some sort of benefit to keeping things general?
In the end, I don’t know why. Maybe I’m afraid of something. Maybe I’m rebelling (I have a tendency to do that sometimes!). But the bottom line is the same…it doesn’t really matter why. Understanding why doesn’t set up the structure. Understanding why doesn’t actually help me move forward. “Why” might matter if I were seeking to get to the bottom of a major trauma or depression, but I have a sneaking suspicion that my personal “why” in this case might just be plain old laziness.
Because it takes a bit of work and a whole heaping spoonful of honesty to figure out (a) what it is I want, and (b) how the heck to get there.
So I went in search of some motivating structure. I began by reading this post by Liz & Ryan. Which led me to this post by Chris Guillebeau (whose blog, The Art of Nonconformity, I’m officially obsessed with). And there were a few things missing, which led me to Susannah Conway‘s take on setting your goals for the coming year…she had a bit more of the touchy-feely stuff that I was looking for.
And then it was simply time for me to sit down, pen and paper in hand and do. the. work.
As worthwhile work usually is, it was hard. Much harder than I’d anticipated. I’m a goal-setting kind of girl, so how difficult I found this actually quite shocked me. It took me days. Several of them. I had to walk away and come back. I got frustrated. And exasperated. And pretty hard on myself sometimes. I had to get pretty down-and-dirty honest about what I really want. Which was ridiculously hard to nail down. Ridiculously hard.
What was equally difficult was getting down-and-dirty honest about what I was willing to sacrifice to get there. Ouch. Because the sage wisdom that my mom has shared with me time and again turns out to be true over and over:
“You CAN have it all. You just can’t have it all, all at the same time.”
She’s a smart cookie, that mom of mine.
So I revised my goals. And I set the bar for myself a little higher in some areas. And I got more concrete. And I remembered that these are MY goals. For MY life. My ONLY life. And I could change them if they no longer felt right or relevant.
And I’ll share them with you guys, in case you’re interested. But I’ll share them with you tomorrow, because this post has gone on long enough for now! And I’d really love to hear if any of you have had this kind of revelation? Have you wondered if you’ve set your goals to low? Or too vaguely?
Oh! the suspense…
[...] I promised yesterday, I’m sharing my revised 2013 goals with you…just in time for February! I realize that [...]
Congratulations to Jennie & Rebekah! I love these pictures, and how well you captured the joy of this precious baby girl arriving, Cindy. And go Rebekah for representing – Tarheels!