March is not my favourite month. Maybe this is the introspection of round number midlife birthdays, but I've realized that I almost never have a great March. This also might be affected by recency bias (we put higher cognitive importance on recent things than historical things).
Kyria gave an awesome rundown of her various March adventures on her blog and it got me wondering if I had any trends with March. Read Kyria's blog for exciting adventure, read below for... the opposite:
March 2024 I had 6 month old twins. 6 month old twins is not fun.
March 2023 I was feeling terrible and wondering why I was gaining weight so quickly and so early in pregnancy (spoiler - I was pregnant with twins, which I found out in April. reading my line a day it seems very obvious now).
March 2022 Things at work were getting weird, I felt like my career was going nowhere and weird stuff was happening. The kids were 18 months and 2.5 and both ill a lot.
March 2021 I was still under lockdown and at home every day with a 6 month old baby, people were still banned from visiting or socializing (Also will take a moment here to remember that Wales had one of the longest and most restrictive lockdowns... which has almost zero effect on covid mortality as compared with the slightly more open England)
March 2020 Lockdown started and I was 3 months pregnant and had an 18 month old and was working from home full time.
So.. March is not my favourite. Here's a short summary of this March, which was far better than most of the above!
Weather (first, because I'm sort of British now so everything is the weather):
It was very sunny this March, if cold. That was a nice change from rain
Sport:
Days I did some exercise: 28 (this includes walking, walking is exercise)
Cardio Sessions: 14
Strength Sessions: 9
Yoga/Stretching: 12
Days where I walked outside: 23
Other good things:
+ I have done 31 strength workouts this year of my 100 goal - 31% complete with 25% of the year over.
+ I did my 100th Peloton ride
+ I joined a local ladies running club
Budget:
I know this is a random one but I must confess that we are, for the first time ever, doing pretty bad against budget. I realized that historically Jan-Mar are high spend months for us (not sure why? My birthday? New year energy? Time at home to fix house projects?).
This is a sort of useless graph of our cash float (basically a snapshot of bank account, so kind of useless because when we do things like pay down mortgages or pay off student loans it shows as a massive dip) but I can see that generally we lose cash in Q1, though not as fast as we have lost cash this January Q1.
Andy Adventure:
One of my goals this year was to have an Andy-Rachel adventure every month. This month's adventure was going to be a trip to the bike park! Unfortunately it was not to be as Ezra was ill that day. Instead we added a store-bought takeaway to our grocery order on Saturday and had a curry night at home after the kids went to bed. It was still very nice.
Other Goals
In March I took the kids to see a children's ballet. I had a goal to take the kids (or Andy) to the theatre and I did. It would be fun to see a theatre show with Andy still, but I need to keep an eye on shows and then buy tickets so it's a big project
I hung artwork in my office. You know what looks better than art hung stacked on a bookshelf? Art hung on a wall. Also, 100% love command hooks. Also, that's where another £20 of house budget went.
In Summary
Was March the best? no. Was March the worst? no. It was a month with lots of changes, but it feels like a pretty good foundation month for what's looking to be an exciting (and possibly chaotic) April and May.
How was your March? Do you have high-spend times of year? Have you ticked off any yearly goals for 2025 (if you do that kind of thing)?