My goals for April - update

I can't believe another month is over already! Time has been going so quickly now that the children are back in school and we are back to some sort of a routine. At the beginning of the month I posted my goals for April, and it's already time for an update.

So here goes:

Finish my pallet planter - Well it's not finished but I have made a start. I sawed my pallet into two pieces, a smaller one and a larger one. I've taken the smaller part, sanded it down and painted it with some white emulsion that we had lying around. Now I'm leaving it outside for a bit to see what happens to it when it rains, before I paint the larger part. My plan is to fill it with old tin cans that I've been saving, each one with a marigold or similar plant in. If they work out well then I'll share how I made them in more detail!

Spend lots of time in the garden - I've definitely done this. Even if most of that time has been spent sitting in our hot tub! When it's sunny I've been taking my morning hot chocolate outside and often my lunch as well. A couple of times I've taken my yoga mat out and done my stretches on the grass, I love lying on my back and looking up at the sky.

Plant out the rest of my seeds - I've done well at this too, I have a windowsill of vegetable and flower seedlings ready to plant out in the garden this summer.

Keep up with the exercise - Again this has been going well, with a good combination of outdoor runs, indoor cross trainer workouts and core exercises. 

Continue my leg stretches - I'm working towards a particular flexibility goal, which I'll share when (if!) I ever reach it, but I'm carrying on with my stretches and noticing improvements. I also bought some yoga blocks to help deepen my stretches, and I've inspired Mia to join me (she's doing way better at it!)

Spend time down at the beach. Oh yes. I've spent a lot of time at the beach. There's a particular seafront café where we often meet friends, and I think I've been there on average twice a week this month. I've also been for some seafront runs, and had a nice sit with Harry while we waited for Mia to do an afterschool club.

Refine my YouTube stream - I was doing well at this for the first couple of weeks but it's now got worse. I start to watch one video that doesn't interest me and then suddenly my feed is clogged with similar videos. I delete my history and set YouTube to forget my viewing history and then of course I see the same videos that I've already watched over and over again. I think the answer here might be to spend less time on YouTube and just watch new videos from channels that I'm subscribed to. 

Publish more blog posts. I'm very pleased with how I've done on this one. I've published three posts a week this month and I'm more than happy with that frequency. Now to keep the momentum going!

Pick up my cross stitch more often. Setting this as a goal really helped with my stitching motivation this month. My current long term cross stitch project is Olde World Map by Janlynn and I'm really pleased with the progress that I've made on the bottom left hand corner. This chap was quite challenging to stitch, as there are lots of different colours mixed together, plenty of half stitches, some detailed backstitching and a couple of French knots. You can see the corner where the border will go and that's the next part I'll be working on. It's a wide border but quite repetitive with only a few colours so I'm hoping it will be quite relaxing to stitch, and the sort of thing that I can work on while I'm watching television. 

Thank you for reading! I'll shortly be publishing my goals for May, I find listing out my goals a really useful way to help me feel more productive and get things done. It's definitely helped me to get lots done this month!