Judging by the fact that this post is now covering the monthly goals for August, September, and October PLUS the recap for all of the above AND November…I’m sure you can imagine how life has been over here.
I’ve been on the fence about if I want to keep on doing these monthly goals posts for a long time now, and I’ve finally decided on a totally different blog series going forward, but I figured I’d at least wrap up how the last four months have gone (as well as my goals for each), and then do the new post for December and on. Let’s go alllll the way back to August and recap though, shall we?
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Flower farming has done something funny to how I feel about August. I used to be pretty excited about the month in general because it meant the end of summer fun combined with the excitement of back to school, but now I mostly associate it with a frantic pace on the flower farm that has led almost yearly to panic attacks or near panic attacks (almost the only time I ever get them anymore). Obviously it’s a pretty clear sign that we need to figure out a more sustainable way to “do” August, but we’re definitely not there yet.
August this year was more insane than any other farm-wise because we’d booked so many DIY weddings, and weirdly enough, once school starts back up again, the demand for flowers soars. Maybe it’s because people are just around more since they’re back from vacations, or maybe it’s just being back in a routine, but we always sell WAY more the last half of August than the first half. One of the most special weddings we got to provide the flowers for was Matt’s brother, who got married on the 10th. We loved being able to not only go and show our love and support for his brother and our new sister-in-law and their new union, but it was also really rewarding to see what they did with all the flowers we’ve been growing for them all season.
In non-farm news, August brought the beginning of full-time school for Mathias, who entered first grade this year, and the start of Raven’s 4th grade year. The transition was trickiest for Hyrum, who didn’t start preschool until September, and you could tell he definitely missed his siblings.
Mathias took to full-time school FANTASTICALLY (he still literally cries anytime he has to miss school for any reason, even if no one has school), and Raven’s school year has been going a lot more smoothly than last year, too, mostly just because we seem to be past most of the friend drama (at least for now…I already shudder thinking about her tween and teenage years around the corner).
Here’s how the actual goals went:
August Goals
- Register truck
- This should have been easy enough, but then the truck stopped working. I know we don’t need the vehicle actually working to register it, but considering that it was just sitting there and not being driven, the urgency to get it registered dissipated a bit. I still need to do this!
Add truck to car insurance- I did at least get this one completed!
Get oil changed in van- August was a good month for getting nagging car maintenance things done, apparently!
Get oil changed in Mazda
- Write up next NICU post
- I didn’t do anything on this in August, so this was moved to September.
Finish 3 books(ideally two off of Summer Reading List)- I finished The Rom-Commers off my summer reading list (so much fun — I loved it!), and then I also finished God of the Woods (another winner, which is a bit surprising since “quiet thriller” isn’t really my usual type of book), and Arcade Catastrophe, which was our family read aloud.
I always think life is going to slow down a bit in September (perhaps because the days are *slightly* cooler and the kids are back in a solid school routine), but the past four seasons of farming have taught me that September is often even more intense than August. I think a lot of it is because people realize that the end of the growing season is near, so our sales of cut flowers explodes (it helps that September is dahlia and lisianthus season around here!).
This year, our weather went a bit berserk on us in September.
We had scheduled one final u-pick night for the farm on Sept. 13th, and even though it was only the second time we’d ever offered a u-pick (the first being in August, a bit experimentally), ticket sales were hot, and we were pre-selling tickets at a much faster clip than the first one we held. However, LITERALLY THE MORNING OF THE EVENT, we got a somewhat freak frost that killed 80% of the field. We of course had to cancel the whole thing, refund all the money, and then live with the knowledge that we ALSO just let a couple thousand dollars’ worth of potential dried flowers go to waste because we didn’t harvest it in beforehand.
Hard lesson learned, my friends.
Luckily the same week, I booked a very last minute wedding, and it was actually the very first time I’d ever agreed to do the bridal bouquet in addition to just providing buckets of flowers for DIY stuff, or just doing the table centerpieces. It was overall a very positive experience, and the extra income definitely helped soften the blow of the extremely early frost that greatly hindered our sales for the next month.
Flower farming craziness aside, Hyrum started up preschool again in September, and he took to it much faster then he had the previous year. Matt and I also both turned 38 at the end of the month. While we didn’t really do much out of the ordinary to celebrate other than go on a hike (for mine) and out to a somewhat local burger place (for Matt’s), it was still a nice chance to slow down a bit and feel a little celebrated. I was pretty reflective going into this particular birthday, which I already covered in my annual birthday reflection post.
September Goals
Register van- Cuz Momma needed some easy wins over here, peeps.
- Register truck
- Fix issue with truck
- Do something fun for our birthdays
- We kind of half-heartedly tried to plan a date night, but life was so crazy with flower farming that it just didn’t happen. It’s been a long time since we’ve had a date night though, so we need to plan something now that we’re going into winter!
Go on a hike- My favorite part of the shifting of the seasons into fall is the start of hiking season for us!
Complete Clutterbug’s 30 Day Decluttering Challenge- I was all gung ho to finish my Minimalist by 2024 checklist last fall/winter, but then it took a major backseat once we decided to go full time with the flower farm. I’m trying to pick it back up again, but it’s felt harder than normal because I took several months off. This free YouTube challenge was a good way to ease myself back into the habit again, as the content creator just posted a short 5-7 minute video each day tackling a different area of the home, and so I just followed along with that for the entirety of the challenge. It definitely helped take the edge off the clutter that has accumulated around here, not to mention re-motivated me to keep going with my quest towards minimalism!
- Publish 5 blog posts, including next NICU post
- Uh…no. Not even close. I have at least started the NICU post, though!
- Read 3 books
- I finished two — The Wedding People (quite a surprise, actually! I didn’t love all things about it, but in general, I really liked it) and Four Thousand Weeks (excellent — one of my top nonfiction reads of all time, I think).
I laugh now when I read the goals I put down for October…clearly I thought life was going to slow down a bit since I anticipated getting a killing frost that would take down the rest of our crops (which it did…eventually), but we were kept so busy with the million other things we were trying to do with fall prep and selling specialty stuff to local growers that all the non-farm goals didn’t stand a chance.
In fact, even now, a good third of the way through December, and we’re STILL trying to finish the last of the fall prep.
Anyway, the rest of October brought the news that Naomi might need heart surgery much sooner than we’d originally been told to expect (and possibly even open heart surgery at that, which was not in the original plans), so with that in mind, we went to a million specialists right and left to try and get everything figured out in November, which has meant LOTS of long trips up north to the children’s specialty hospital about two hours away.
October also brought allergy testing for both Mathias and me, and now both of us are getting immunotherapy shots throughout this winter to help both of us lessen our response to the intense seasonal allergies we have during the growing season. Basically, it’s just been an insane amount of medical appointments over the past eight weeks, which has added an extra layer of stress on top of the farm level of stress we already had.
However, Halloween was fun for both us and the kids. I took our kids down to Grandma’s for her usual Halloween party (Matt stayed behind to get our peonies in the ground), and then Matt took the kids out trick or treating on the actual holiday (and it was Raven’s first time going out trick or treating with her friends rather than us…so strange to see how much she’s growing up, and how fast!).
October Goals
Finish getting truck fixed- This didn’t get done in October, but we did finally do it in November! (Of course, in the end, the delay was more on our car mechanic than on us.)
- Register truck (for reals)
Fix brake light on van
- Publish 5 blog posts, including next NICU post
- I was once again delusional in thinking that I’d have tons of time to blog in October, not to mention fix nagging blog issues like the email and RSS feed lists enumerated below. I do still have hope that I’ll get around to all of this at some point this winter, but I’m definitely past totally counting on it now 🙂
- Get email list fixed
- See if I can get RSS feed fixed
- Have a date night as a belated birthday celebration
- This has probably been our worst year for going on dates of all time. I think we’ve maybe gone on 3(?) dates this whole year? And almost all of them have lasted only about two hours or less because we’ve been so dang busy. My #1 goal for 2025 is that we HAVE to figure out a better work/life balance because I can’t have another year like this one.
- Plan a mini adventure for the kids’ fall break
- We did plan this, but then our oldest ended up getting sick and we couldn’t do it. It ended up working out okay though, because we just did it about two weeks later, and actually got a way better price, to boot!
- Read 3 books
- I finally finished Simplicity Parenting (after multiple failed attempts, but I was determined this time!) and Carnival Quest, the last in the Candy Shop War trilogy (for our family read aloud). If you want to read reviews more in real time as I finish books, you can friend me on Goodreads.
I actually quit setting monthly goals entirely after October since I just wasn’t as committed to actually checking up on them throughout the month like I used to be, so there aren’t any goals for November. Lately, my “goals” have just been about what’s the main focus for each month, like “fall prep” or “nagging car tasks” or “decluttering.” I find that this has been working much better for this season of my life, and I’ll be incorporating it into the new monthly series I plan to start from hereon out.
November consisted of fall farm prep and medical appointments. End stop. We’ve been driving up north to medical appointments around 2-3 times a week for the last month, which has just been kind of insane.
We did have a nice (quiet) Thanksgiving at my in-laws’ house (ours were the only kids there! so strange!), and then Matt was offered a job for the winter through the same friend I did marketing for earlier this year in the spring. It will mean he’s living away from us for part of the week (which, while I’m not thrilled about it, I’ve also done this before, so it makes it easier that it’s not my first rodeo with it, not to mention the fact that all our kids are older now than last time, with the exception of Naomi, who wasn’t born yet). That will start sometime next week, we think. I’m also doing more marketing work over the winter for him, which will give me plenty to keep busy with, in case you were worried I didn’t have enough planned already, ha ha 🙂
Sorry for the super long, probably slightly boring post. This was obviously meant more as a catch up for me than for you, and I really do have high hopes of somehow fitting blogging back into my life regularly again, just simply because I love it and miss it.
Thanks to any of you who made it to the end, and I hope your December is way more restful than mine so far! 🙂
