life lately + our july goal progress.

hello august! i was starting to think july was never going to end, it just seemed that long. 
heres how the month went for us: we had a baby (on the 4th), and while dealing with my recovery/adjusting to life with a newborn in the house, james has been working a ton (including several nights out of town). its been crazy, its been exhausting, but looking back im having a much easier time of this than i did when i had alice. mainly because (in comparison to a c section) my recovery has been soooooo much easier, and this time i have help. lots of help. like, my mom takes alice for a sleepover/beach day every week help (thanks mom!). i dont remember exactly how long it took me to feel "normal" last time but i do remember that i wasnt going to stores and keeping the house clean three weeks after giving birth, and i definitely wouldnt have been able to do a craft fair at exactly a month postpartum (which we did). honestly at this point im getting really antsy for school to start because id really like to go outside by myself, which i was not expecting at all. 
thats not to say that transitioning into life with two small humans in the house hasnt had its challenges: alice loves benedict, but she loves him a little too much. i am always telling her to stop touching him and fussing over him and trying to pick him up and for crying out loud he is almost as big as you alice do not pick him up. alice is also going through a conveniently timed phase of both being incredibly sassy and ignoring everything i say unless i am literally yelling, which is alternately hilarious and very, very frustrating. some days she is a very good helper, some days involve a lot of yelling and crying (from both of us) and some days shes at grandmas house. benedict is great though and already has a kind of predictable eating/sleeping schedule and LOVES to be out and about so i really cant complain because he is an A+ second child (except from about 5-10 pm when he is the crankiest baby thats ever lived). 
obviously since we had a baby this month weve mainly been living in survival mode and working on our goals hasnt been a priority (which, i am totally ok with). so instead of giving the run down on our progress in each category (since most are at the same point that they were last month), im just going to share a few observations ive had on making big, year-long goals: 
my "word of the year" choice was very ironic. at the end of last year when i was making these goals, our life was crazy all over the place and no one thing was going anywhere productive so chose the word "focus" to guide our goals for the next year. i nailed down some specific things to work on with in various areas of our life and intended to spend the year focusing on just those things. at the time the list seemed very focused in comparison to the chaos we had gotten used to, however, as time went on, it became clear that that list had way too many things. which brings us to...
we cant do everything all at once. even though (in theory) each individual goal we set was reasonable and specific and attainable and all those things that goals should be, trying to work on all of them, all the time, was just, not productive. we cant actually make major home improvements and build our savings account simultaneously, and trying to establish regular family time/date nights while trying to put 100% into school, blogging, the shop, jamberry, AND schooling alice is just ridiculous when you put it in a sentence like that instead of a nice bulleted list. 
priorities change. the funny thing about making goals for the whole year is that you really have no idea in january whats going to happen and whats going to be important in august. in our case, the goals that seemed focused when we made them were really kind of all over the place so...
some things just have to go. like jamberry (the time i was spending on it wasnt benefitting us as a family and was taking away from the time i had to build my dream job), formally schooling alice (she is only three and seems to be benefitting most from reading together, right now were going through the chronicles of narnia), and working on our emergency fund (i now realize its much, much more important that we get a solid budget in place first). 
and some things have to change. certain areas, like our home goals, progressed faster than wed expected and now we have to re-evaluate what were going to do next (we purged and bought all the furniture we had planned for, so what's next? more purging? more furniture? a break?), and others, like the blog and shop, took a different direction as the year went on than what i had originally intended (hence, full-on rebrand and doing more, smaller craft fairs). one of the biggest lessons ive learned so far this year is that long term goals need to be flexible. 
we cant neglect short-term goals. i have a bad habit of putting too much focus on the to-do lists and short term goals, and i thought that making only big, long-term goals would help with that, but what ended up happening was that i made the big-picture goals and kind of just ignored the small day-to-day things. so, i really need to work on finding the right balance of long, AND short-term goal setting. 
all things considered, weve done surprisingly well. i mean, weve completely finished all the home goals we set, started making actual progress in moving my business to where we ultimately want it, and if anything, weve become a lot more focused in our goal setting than we were at the beginning of the year. 
speaking of which, im basically taking this entire month off blogging to focus on our new baby and the awesome new content coming in the fall, and id like some input: 
what kind of posts are your favorite? what do you want to see more of? and are there any questions youd like me to answer?