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Yup, it’s almost July, and I’m just getting out May’s recap. And yup, that just about sums up how things have been going around here…busy busy busy, behind, behind, behind. Plus plenty of random jolts of stress, adrenaline, triumphs, failures…just to keep things interesting 🙂
But let’s back up to last month.
May was…a lot. A lot of work, a lot of events, a lot of stress, some scary medical stuff with Naomi…
To hit the main points, we were kept busy with the usual end-of-school shebang with the three older kids, plus Raven started her third season of softball. We were really able to “do” Mother’s Day for the first time ever with the flower farm, which was so much more insane than I bargained on. It ended up being highly successful (no complaints about that!), but I had to take a solid 2 or 3 days to recover so that I didn’t hate flowers from then on (yup, it was THAT intense). At the same time that the selling really started ramping up during the month, we also had basically ALL THE FARM STUFF that had to get done ASAP, like doing the last of the bed prep, planting everything out, getting irrigation in…it’s been so, so intense.
Then, near the very end of the month, Naomi got sick with a super high fever and really bad congestion and a bit of a cough, and she just wasn’t getting better. She’s not a fussy baby at all in general, and she was literally just crying for hours and hours on end. We’d already taken her into our general family doctor by this point AND to the ER right after to get her suctioned out (we don’t have any kind of Instacare where we are) for a few days, but nothing was improving.
Finally, after one particularly bad crying spell where she started to really not look very good, I told Matt we should plug her into the pulse oximeter we use at night to monitor her oxygen saturation levels and heart rate. When we put it on, her oxygen levels were not good, nor was her heart rate. I almost called 911 right then, but Matt suggested we see if we could quickly take her into the local clinic to make sure it wasn’t just our monitor.
So we did that, and their monitor only confirmed what ours said, and our doctor immediately made the call to bring in the ambulance. Once they were able to suction her out completely in the ambulance, her levels and breathing quickly became better, but we still ended up having to spend two nights and two days in the hospital. Her initial diagnosis was croup, but she wasn’t showing improvement after getting steroids and other things to help her lungs, and finally, on our second day, they ended up testing her for strep, which came back positive. Once she got put on the antibiotics, she rapidly improved from there, and we were able to finally bring her home.
Not a fun way to end the month.
We’re relieved she’s doing okay though (and is now back to normal), and we’re also glad that my dad happened to be out from Kansas City at the time and was able to help us out on the home front with things.
Here’s how the goals went for the month, though:
May Goals
- Give Matt and the girls haircuts
- Nope. And Matt finally just gave in and bought hair gel to keep his curls in check, and you know what? I think he actually pulls off longer hair really well! We might wait awhile yet to cut it.
Go through kids clothes and declutter drawers/closets- Basically had to do this to pull out summer stuff, but we went through all their clothes while we were at it. We decluttered a ton, which is always SO satisfying for me.
Go on an anniversary date- Yep, we went out for a quick lunch date while my mom was here.
- Plant All. The. Things.
- We started in May, but we definitely didn’t finish in May.
Publish Summer 2024 Reading List post- I *technically* published on the 1st of June, but I’m counting it since the post was almost finished entirely in May. (You can check that out HERE if you haven’t seen it yet! It’s one of my favorite posts of the year to put together.)
- Publish one Homestead Weekly post
- Sadly, no. I’m still hoping to get back to more regular blogging soon, but we just have a lot of super high level priority stuff we have to get done first.
- Finish 3 books
- Ha! I read a whopping one – this Grow and Gather book that I’d been savoring a few pages at a time right before bed for months.
Clearly I’m getting this post out suuuuuper late, so you can see how busy June has been thus far and can probably guess as to how ahead of the flower farming curve we are 🙂
The main goals for June are 1) to get absolutely everything planted out, 2) to get everything set up to automatic irrigation, and 3) to finally put up the support netting for certain crops that we should have done weeks ago.
Beyond that, everything is gravy.
Here goes:
June Goals
- Plant all the things. For reals.
- Not only because it’s getting ridiculous, but because if we don’t, things won’t have enough time to bloom before frost.
- Finish setting up all the irrigation stuff. For reals.
- Because we would like to have all those hours of our life back, please.
- Put up support netting on the crops that need it
- We originally were going to net something like 9 beds, but now we’re only netting the absolute most necessary, so it’s more like 6.
- Start going through the rest of the Master Decluttering List again
- I basically have had to take a break on this for the last 5 months or so, but lemme tell you, I am RARING to go again after very limited housekeeping time has taught me again and again that we still have waaaay too much stuff.
- Simplify master bedroom
- It’s literally been years since I’ve had a serene, simplified bedroom. We’ve basically gotten into the terrible habit of our bedroom being the “dumping ground” for everything that we don’t have a home for yet that needs to quickly be stored out of the main living areas. We also still have all of Naomi’s oxygen supplies in there, even though she usually only has to go on oxygen at night when she’s sick, so I want to move all that into the master closet. I’m excited to tackle this goal!
- Write up next NICU post
- Oh man, I super duper want to get this done because I’m forgetting more and more details by the day, but getting back into blogging might be more of a July thing. We shall see.
- Finish 3 books
- This wouldn’t be impossible. Maybe I’ll be able to pull this one off finally 🙂
How’s your June been going? Anything exciting?
