Back From Hawaii + My To-Do List is Insane {July 2022 Goals + June Recap}

Yep, we’re a third of the way through July and I’m just getting around to posting my July goals and June recap. We’ve been intensely busy over here!

At the end of June, our whole family flew to Hawaii to stay for a week thanks to my in-laws, who rented a house and took turns hosting each of Matt’s brothers and their families in turn for a week, and we were the last family to visit. We spent a ton of time on the beach, visited the Polynesian Cultural Center and a Buddhist temple there, tried snorkeling (well, Matt and I did), and tried a lot of yummy food. It was fun and exhausting and full, and we all came home with a lot of seashells, some stowaway sand, and a lot of memories. (Note: I’m only including the pictures of the trip that were actually from the end of June. The ones that were from the July part of the trip will be in July’s recap!)

Before we left for Hawaii, we had a lot of stuff going on, too. We had to plant out the entire flower farm ASAP, which took all the way up until about halfway through the month. The older two kids had daily swim lessons for two weeks leading up to the trip, which was a fun way to kick off our mornings and a solid way to provide some routine into our more laidback summer days. We also had my dad come visit us from Kansas City, celebrated Mathias’s 4th birthday and Father’s Day (on the same day, actually), and had to do a lot of prep work before the trip so that the people who had bought bouquet subscriptions from us would get their scheduled bouquets without (too much) interruption.

And now coming back, I have mounds of laundry and housework to catch up on, a flower farm that is literally exploding with blooms that I can already hardly keep on top of (not to mention the weeds), and a bunch of random household tasks that I’ve been putting off forever because we were so focused on planting the past 3 months.

It’s been a long, LONG time since we’ve had a summer this busy, and it’s flying by so fast!

Here’s how June’s goals ended up going:

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June Goals

• Enjoy Hawaii!
  • Check! (And one of the only reasons the plane rides weren’t absolute nightmares was because I bought the kids these and these beforehand.)
• Do something fun to celebrate Mathias’s birthday
  • About halfway through the month, Mathias turned 4, and we celebrated by taking all the kids bowling for the first time. It was the longest bowling game of all time (probably around 2 hours long!), but the kids sure had a good time, and it was a fun “first” to do together as a family.

• Sign up two older kids for swim lessons
  • Both kids completed their first set of swim lessons right before we left for Hawaii, which was perfect!
• Get everything planted out
  • Can’t even tell you what a relief it is to have everything planted out finally. Now the only things I still have to worry about are the sunflower successions and starting the seedlings I’m going to be overwintering for next year.

• Plant all gladiolus corms
  • Check!
• Plant all dahlias
  • Check! (This took seemingly FOREVER since we planted out about 125 tubers or something crazy like that.)

• Order gift certificates for flower farm
  • Nope, didn’t have time. Rollover goal.
• Change over kids’ clothes to summer
  • Kinda?? They at least have their summer clothes OUT, but unfortunately I still haven’t put any of the winter stuff AWAY. So now their drawers and laundry situation are basically just chaos.
• Order contacts
  • It ended up not being in the budget. I’ll probably table this for a few months.

• Finish editing photo session
  • Nope, no time. Rollover goal.
• Start setting up watering system
  • Once again, no time. Rollover.
• Figure out issue with car horn on Buick
  • We’ve been trying to get our Buick ready to sell forever, and we finally got around to changing the battery the other month. Problem was, while it fixed the problem of the car not starting, it also triggered something weird with the car horn, where it constantly blared the second the car was turned on. Matt ended up just disabling the fuse to stop the noise, but we don’t know what else the fuse is hooked to, so…we’ll just mention it in the listing when we get around to doing it and knock a few hundred bucks off the price.

• Fix doorbell
  • Matt tinkered around with it a bit, but still not fixed. Rollover goal.
• Try to sell the hot tub
  • We made our first attempt at selling it to someone we knew, but it was a no go. Now we just need to decide if we’re going to list it or not.

July Goals

We’re a third of the way through the month, and I feel like it just started since we just got back a few days ago from the vacation. I’m always behind on flower farming stuff (and housework too because of flower farming stuff), so now the level of chaos and tasks reaching “urgent” level is at an all-time high, it seems.

I’ve still tried to pencil in some more “fun” items as well as some basic self care (like a haircut I’ve been overdue for for about a year), but we’ll see how much I can actually get around to. At any rate, it’s good to be home again, even if my to-do list is a mile long!

Here are my goals for the month:

• Get a haircut
  • I had my husband literally just chop off 3 or 4 inches of my hair in December (no styling or layering or anything, other than a bit of layering I did myself around my face right after), so yeah, I’m a bit overdue.
• Take Onyx in for a haircut and groom
  • Our puppy looks ridiculous because he hasn’t gotten his hair cut in 5 months.

• Read 3 books off my Summer 2022 Reading List
  • I read just one book off the list last month (The Reading List, coincidentally), but I think I can improve upon that in July.
• Order gift certificates for the flower farm
  • Rollover goal.
• Start all the seedlings that will be overwintered
  • It’s crazy to imagine having to start yet more seeds when we literally just got the entire flower farm planted out, but ’tis the flower farming life. All of the hardy annuals that can be overwintered in my zone need to be planted out in August or September in order to establish enough of a root system before the frosts hit.

• Print pictures out for at least two family photo albums
  • One of my 101 in 1001 goals is to get caught up on making family photo albums until 2020. This has become even more important to me lately because the kids have lately become obsessed about looking through all the photo albums we DO have, all of which were made before they were born. The two older kids recently got their own cameras as well, so pictures are something they’re really into at the moment. I think they would be thrilled to have more recent photo albums to look through, especially since they’d actually be in them!
• Finish editing photo session
  • Rollover goal.

• Start setting up watering system
  • Rollover goal.
• Take off painting tape in master closet
  • The house has been neglected for an extremely long time (hint: we painted our master closet back in December), and so now that we’ve planted out the flower farm 100%, I can finally have a bit of breathing room to get around to these nagging tasks.
• Thoroughly declutter, tidy, and clean master bedroom
  • We moved here in November of 2020, and we still have never fully unpacked our master bedroom. Yeah, it’s bad.

• Fill up water storage barrel
  • Several of the items on my current 101 in 1001 list include being more prepared for emergencies, so we were thrilled when my mom and stepdad bought us a 55-gallon water storage barrel for Christmas. It was backordered and so didn’t actually arrive until about April or May, but we still haven’t filled it. Time to change that so we can actually, ya know, have the water stored in it like it’s intended!
• Put beans and rice in 5-gallon storage buckets
  • We’ve been putting a ton of money and effort into building up our food storage ever since we moved here, and the last major piece of that is to transfer over the bigger bags of dried foods like rice and beans into the 5-gallon storage buckets.

• Glue kitchen drawer front back on
  • One of our kitchen drawer fronts randomly broke off this past month, and I know if I don’t put it on here, it will stay like that for months.
• List Buick
  • Rollover goal going on a year and a half now…

• Fix doorbell
  • Rollover goal.
• List hot tub (?)
  • Not totally decided on how we’re going to approach this; hence the question mark. I’ll put it on here though so that Matt and I hopefully remember to talk about it and make a decision.

What has your summer been like so far? Any big plans for July?