Step by Step Parenting

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I didn’t really set super specific goals this year. I guess this is obvious given that it’s February, and I’m just now deciding what my intentions for 2026 are going to be.

I started this year pregnant with twins. Given the high-risk nature of my pregnancy, the best estimate of a due date my care team could give me was “hopefully February.” There’s a lot more to the story, of course, but that’s what it boils down to.
if being pregnant with twins wasn’t enough, I also started another semester of law school at the beginning of of January. I’m currently halfway through my second year, and balancing those responsibilities with pregnancy has broken me and stretched me in ways I anticipated, but could never have possibly prepared for.

Given all of this, setting a list of lofty goals for the new year felt… wrong. I wanted to keep my head afloat in school, be a present mother to my children, and at some point, welcome two new little humans to our crazy bunch. How was I supposed to decide how many books I wanted to read this year, or how many miles I wanted to run, in light of all this chaos? Truthfully, I couldn’t.

Mother Nature must have taken pity on me and my desire to hibernate a little longer, because she sent weeks of snow and ice our way. In some ways, this was an inconvenience — the kids have been out of school for two weeks, the roads are a disaster, we were trapped inside for days — but in many ways, it was needed.

As the snow fell, it was as if time slowed down and life came to a pause. The world became more quiet, and in doing so, invited me to do the same. With nowhere else to go but my own secret garden in my mind, I finally gained clarity on how I wanted to rest of my year to unfold.

I want to write more.

I have been a writer my whole life. Whether it was storybooks adorned with glittery stickers at the age of six, a pink striped journal at the age of nine, a travel blog at the age of nineteen, or an appellate brief at the age of twenty-five, I have always been writing. Once the fire was lit, it has burned continuously for decades.

Unfortunately, we live in a world that is hellbent on shoehorning everyone into a “niche.” We are expected to nearly paint ourselves into tiny little boxes, complete with a pretty label, so that we can be more marketable, get more views, gain more followers.

Well I’ve never been good at painting (hence why I write) so my niche box isn’t pretty, and I’m done trying to fight it — I want to write everything.

I want to write poems again, or stories from the perspective of inanimate objects. I want to draft essays on my deep inner thoughts on religion, and blog posts reflecting on motherhood. I want to write like nobody is reading, about whatever I want, whenever I want, in any way I want. It’s an all-encompassing yet simple goal for the year: just. write.

I want to scroll less.

I’ve used my pregnancy as an excuse, but truly, this has been an on-and-off addiction that I’ve struggled with since I was in college: screen time.

Countless essays, dissertations, and books have been written on the subject, so I need not go into great detail. At the end of the day, the world that exists in our phones simply is not real. It’s designed to keep us trapped, keep us scrolling, and worst of all, keep us numb.

As much as I want to chuck my phone into a lake and live by candlelight off the grid, I recognize that that is not possible for me. But a lot of changes can be made to keep my mind in the present and my phone on the charger, out of reach and turned off.

Both of these intentions for the new year lead me to my third and final one:

I want to check in once a week.

I have named these check-ins “Self-Care Sundays.”

Life is just going to get busier and busier this year. The twins are due any day now. I’m on track to graduate law school in December. The months in between will bring countless more milestones and memories and tears and triumphs.

Some weeks I’ll write a lot, some I’ll write less. Some weeks, my screen time will be higher than I’d like.

So once a week, I want to check in on here and reflect on how the past week has gone. Did I write something that made me feel? Was I slave to my phone? Did I get outside and touch grass? Did I bake anything new?

Stay tuned for next week’s Self-Care Sunday post to find out, and thanks for reading this week!