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My 30 by 30 list

Twenty eight feels like entering the very end of my twenties. At twenty seven I could be just a bit over twenty five but now I’m closer to the big 3-0 than the quarter of a century milestone. I’m trying to embrace it.

By thirty, Ben will be a year and a half into his job out of b-school. Lincoln will have started kindergarten. Adelaide won’t be the youngest child (I hope). And me, well, we’ll see.

What is a 30 by 30 list

I put together a bucket list of thirty things I want to do before my thirtieth birthday and here I’m committing MOST of them and crossing them off this list as I do them. As I was looking for ideas I came up with a lot of things I want to add to a life bucket list too (amazing travel destinations, cool skills to develop, etc), but I tried to be realistically optimistic about the next 2 years.

Some of these are things I’ve never done (go skinny dipping) and some of them are things I am committing to doing again over the next two years (go ice skating).

Here’s what I came up with:

30 before 30 bucket list

  1. Go Skydiving: this one MIGHT get replaced by something like snowmobiling … I haven’t researched skydiving enough to understand the risks and the last thing I want to do before I turn thirty is leave my children motherless (#dramatic).
  2. Become conversant in another language: I’ve studied Japanese and French and want to be able to carry on a more natural conversation in one of these languages by the time I’m thirty.
  3. Go camping: outdoors, with or without my kids (but probably with them)
  4. Eat at a Michelin star restaurant with Ben
  5. Go skinny dipping.
  6. Run a 10k: The most I’ve run is three miles and that has happened three or four times in my whole life.
  7. Climb a mountain (hike a mountain)
  8. Take an adult dance class: Teaching ballet to toddlers this semester has really made me wish I could be taking a class, too!
  9. Unplug for an entire week: No computer, no phone, no email, no tech. Maybe a television to watch a movie? Maybe not.
  10. Take Ben to Tokyo: I moved to New England from Tokyo when I was 11 and I’ve always wanted to take Ben back to where I was born (and haven’t visited since elementary school).
  11. Learn a new signature (or go-to) dinner recipe: Things are getting a bit stale around here.
  12. Cut out sugar for 1 month: January might be the month for this!
  13. Read the Book of Mormon: I’m working on a challenge to get through this whole book before the end of the year but this time around I’m listening to it. My goal for the 30 before 30 is to physically read the whole book, marking passages that answer a particular question/topic I have at the beginning.
  14. Memorize all of the seminary scriptures: In high school we spent each year studying a specific book of scripture and memorized 25 passages from each book. I think I’ve forgotten all but 3 of them.
  15. Memorize 3 new poems: Lincoln loves listening to and reading poetry with me and I want to find a few new treasures to add to our mental collection.
  16. Write something: a book? a poem? a short story? a children’s book? an online course?
  17. Practice the piano: There seems to be a trend to this list – revisit lost talents. Specifically for this goal I’d like to learn 3 songs I can accompany on the piano.
  18. Birth a baby or two: Fingers crossed.
  19. Read 100 books in 1 year: And by that I mean listen to 100 books in 2019.
  20. Teach a parenting workshop
  21. Book a family photo session: No tripod! No handing my camera to a friend. No worrying about posing and angles. Just hiring a professional and letting them do their thing.
  22. See a Broadway show
  23. Hit my pre-baby weight: cliche, and I’ll be okay if this one doesn’t happen depending on pregnancy + babies
  24. Reduce my closet to only pieces I love: Marie Kondo might not be totally feasible for me right now but I do want to whittle this closet down to pieces I only love and that really work for me.
  25. Order and eat a remake of our wedding cake topper: We never saved our cake topper for our one year anniversary but now that we’ve moved back to New England I’ve wanted to hire the bakery that made our wedding cake to make a small version of it for an anniversary (or just because). Four layers alternating between white almond pound and chocolate with chocolate fudge filling and white buttercream frosting.
  26. Ride a roller coaster
  27. Visit Cincinnati and Utah (the two places I’ve lived in the U.S. besides New England)
  28. Go skiing: It’s been a few years.
  29. Go ice skating
  30. Mail 30 letters: Letter writing is always something I want to be good at. Getting letters is so fun and writing them isn’t that hard but, for me, mailing them is the step that kills me (and 70% of the letters I’ve ever written…including a small stash of wedding thank-you’s we found, unsent, before we moved out of our house in Ohio…six years after our wedding..).

P.S. reading through this list again it seems very… selfish, indulgent. There are lots of things I want to become over the next two years – kinder and more patient. More selfless and humble. Less judgmental and cluttered. But here it is anyway.


outfit details: 

Sweater: 525 America –  My favorite sweater of the season! It’s simple and black and great but the cut on the neckline really adds something. The quality is fantastic and it’s held up well after repeated washes (because I wear it every week). Wear it with a skirt, a pair of jeans, or some nice slacks – it’s so versatile.

Denim: AGoldE Sophie high rise (most worn jeans of the season – I’m 5’4″ and the raw hem of these cropped jeans is the perfect length)

Belt: Target

Layering necklaces: Madewell (here and here)

 

Sharing my 30 before 30 bucket list! #30before30 #30before30bucketlist #bucketlistideas #30thbirthday

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