Green goals are my “emotion” goals, the “feelings”, the warm fuzzy side of me. Not my strongest area, but not quite as weak as my normal “yellow” / social ones. In 2016, I limited myself to only three.

MY GREEN GOALS: Stick to the knitting

• Under the general heading of Andrea, I had hoped to have some date nights out, a few game nights and to take a family trip. We had a few date nights, but nowhere near enough, and much of that is my fault. I often like to go out for dinner, etc., but I am not looking for fancy or anything, just eating out, and Jacob is old enough to come without too much distraction. So we usually do things as a trio than as a couple, and truth be told, I like exposing Jacob to new things. But most of the time, Andrea and I commute together which is good, hang out with the cub from supper to bedtime, often in the office together for a half-hour or hour or so after that, and then I tend to watch TV while she works, surfs or reads. We did some family trip stuff this year, wouldn’t say it was awesome sauce. It’s a toss-up between yellow and red, and we have a family trip to Mexico booked, but I’m looking back to 2016, not forward to 2017, so I’m coding it RED overall to remind myself of the priority for the new year.
• My second area in my list was engaging with Jacob, and some of it was a complete bust. I had hoped to try a bunch of different things with him, looking for something that could be “our thing” together, and most of the things we tried from boys nights out to going for hikes just hold no interest for him. I got a bit of a start with some DIY projects, and he liked parts of them, although it is a bit more “me” than “us” for the first couple. He enjoyed them though, and is open to more, but I also don’t want to ram them down his throat and have him get bored or resent them, so gentle dosages is the plan. We didn’t end up doing anything on the sports front, and that is entirely my fault (more to come on this in the red goals section). So, I made some progress, and I can’t let my disappointment cloud that too much. And we ended the year well — we have an XBox 360 that we picked up at Black Friday, and he got Disney Infinity for Xmas, which we have been playing TOGETHER. He loves to play together and he has completely been ignoring NHL ’14 which he loves but I suck at and have no hope of playing well with him, so it’s kind of boring for him (he’s better off playing against the computer). So I’m going to give myself a small pat on the head and call it YELLOW for the year.
• The third area was listed as “Website Support“, but that is the specific role I play in my limited “community engagement”. I provide web services for two sites, one for a school and one for a non-profit, and while I met the minor needs for one, I’m behind on the second. Call it YELLOW overall.

Overall, that lands me somewhere between yellow and red, and with the plans for 2017 and a small base to build from, I’m going to cut myself a bit of slack and go YELLOW overall.