Comin’ at you again with another mid-month goals post. Seriously, it’s like I blinked, and another month has gone by. I knew taking our flower farm full-time for both me and for Matt would stretch us both, but I really had no true concept of the sheer time commitment required of BOTH of us every single week. We actually started tracking our time over the past month or so in order to know how long certain tasks were taking (for down the road, when we hopefully someday get an employee or two), and both of us have been putting in a solid 40-50 hours each week apiece. Considering that we also need to juggle all childcare and household duties between both of us during all that, it’s no mean feat.
Not complaining at all, but just letting you know why the blog has been seriously put on the back burner for so long (and boy, do I ever miss it!).
April was a good month for our family, though — we celebrated Raven’s 9th birthday and Naomi’s 1st birthday (simple parties with grandparents coming over both times), and we had a whirlwind start to our flower farming season, complete with both major crop losses but also major crop successes, which at least helped even things out a bit. We also hit our sales target for April, which felt AMAZING — so much of us going full-time with this has been built on the faith that somehow, things will work out even though we feel like we’re crazy sometimes for doing this, and so far, we’ve been both surprised and not surprised to see that it really is, in fact, working out.
Naomi turning one brought on a lot of Big Feelings — big feelings because she’s my last baby, big feelings because I can’t believe it’s been a whole year since everything we went through last year for the first couple of months after she was born, big feelings because she brings us so much joy and is growing up so fast and I love her at exactly the age she is now and cry knowing that she’s changing so much every day… One of my huge goals for myself for June is to finally finish typing up our NICU experience here so that we have an official record of it. It was so intense but so incredible on so many levels, and I desperately need to make time to write it all down before even more details are lost to me.
In the meantime, I must try to be patient, since we have thousands of seedlings that are very sulky in their trays and needing to get planted out, and a lot of other infrastructure to set up on the farm.
Let’s talk about how I did on April’s goals, though.
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April Goals
- Give everyone else a haircut
- Matt at least gave the boys haircuts, which they desperately, desperately needed. Matt still really needs one, as does Raven (and Naomi, for that matter). Rollover goal.
Size all the kids up + swap in summer clothing- This always feels like such a feat, but I got it done!
- Prep all beds (weed, compost, fabric, drip irrigation)
- Nope. We got several done (and many of the absolutely most critical ones done), but definitely not all. Still working on that, actually.
- Plant all hardy annuals
- Also no, but we did a lot — probably about 80%.
- Finish 3 books
- So close! I finished two — Happily Never After (terrible — such a disappointment), and The Candy Shop War (our family read aloud, which was pretty enjoyable).
I’ve heard it said that May is the other December, and that feels pretty succinctly accurate to me — graduations! end of school programs! sports season starting! all the things needing to be planted NOW! We’ve already wrapped up an intensely busy week leading up to Mother’s Day (you know, the biggest floral holiday of the year — no big deal), gone to Hyrum’s preschool graduation, attended Raven’s first two softball games…you know it’s bad when my Mother’s Day request was for everyone to help me catch up on laundry and to clean the house in a blissful hour of silence.
So much good stuff. But still….SO. MUCH.
My introvert self is already counting down the days until June, when all school stuff is wrapped up and all plants are (hopefully) in the ground.
We shall see.
Another notable thing is that at the beginning of May, I finally stopped pumping milk for Naomi (since she celebrated her first birthday at the end of April). I was so proud of myself for sticking with pumping every 3-4 hours for an entire year! It not only saved us a crazy amount of money, but it also gave me some major peace of mind that she was getting antibodies from me every time we had sickness going around over the winter.
Now that we’re fully in spring (almost summer) though, I felt confident weaning, and it has been pretty amazing to regain those 2.5 hours back each day.
As far as how I approach setting goals in super busy seasons, it basically comes down to this: 1) what is totally necessary?, 2) what will make my life easier, if I take the time to do it this month?, and 3) how can I fit in something I can look forward to during this particularly intense season?
Approaching goals in this way helps me to keep it both realistic as well as grounds me in what’s most important and/or most helpful.
Here’s what my goals are for this month:
May Goals
- Give Matt and the girls haircuts
- Rollover goal.
- Go through kids clothes and declutter drawers/closets
- I sized everyone up and brought out the summer stuff, but there’s a LOT of clothing in everyone’s drawers at the moment — some of the too-small stuff that snuck back in after I did laundry, some of the new-to-us items that the kids are not likely to wear, way too many shirts or pants in certain sizes…etc., etc. I try to keep it at about 10-12 shirts and 10 bottoms for everyone and call it good (except for the baby, who gets double that), and we have WAY more than that now, which complicates our laundry system a lot. Paring it down this month will go a long way in helping us simplify things right now.
- Go on an anniversary date
- We celebrated 13 years together on the 7th, so now we just have to go out and celebrate!
- Plant All. The. Things.
- Self-explanatory.
- Publish Summer 2024 Reading List post
- I’m always excited about this! I can’t believe this is my 7th year in a row doing this roundup.
- Publish one Homestead Weekly post
- If we can manage to get all the planting done (or at least make some decent headway on it), I feel like I’ll be able to work more blogging back into my schedule again. I’ve missed doing the Homestead Weekly posts!
- Finish 3 books
- Because a girl can dream…
How’s your “May-cember” going? 🙂
