I did not plan for 2025 to be the year I stopped blogging regularly, but here we are. I do miss it and would love to get back into it, but life has only continued to get busier, even though the last season of farming had been the best yet for better work/life balance. Now that I’m back in the slightly slower-paced season of our year, I’m hoping to get at least a few posts up, but we shall see 🙂
If nothing else, I wanted to make sure I recorded our annual year in review post!
Here’s what we were up to in 2025:
January
January has usually been a tricky month for me because my mental health tends to dip in winter, and this January was both better in some ways and worse in others than expected. The hardest part was that Matt was working a winter job two hours away from us as a running/speed and agility coach, which meant he was gone during the week and only came home on the weekends. That put everything onto my shoulders, and it got pretty tricky at times, as we had out of town doctor’s appointments, I had to teach an evening class twice a week, and I still needed to keep up on my winter farm tasks, like tax prep and planning for the season ahead.
On the one hand, because I was so busy having to do literally everything, the month did seem to pass by more quickly than usual. On the other hand, I was completely exhausted by the end of it, and I still had many weeks to go of Matt living apart from us after that.
It wasn’t all doom and gloom, though. My good friends Kylee and Brandon helped watch our kids every evening I had to teach, and that was so great for me to have a supportive safety net built in to my weeks. Enrollment in both sections of my class really took off this year, too, which was so much fun. I decided to start teaching an intermediate/advanced cut flower class in addition to teaching my usual beginner one, and both sections were just a hoot. I really loved the opportunity to share all I’ve learned and connect with flower friends new and old.
One huge part of 2025 (one of the biggest things, really) was that our flower farm joined up with the Utah Flower Market, which is a grower’s co-op about 90 minutes north of us. It meant an intensive weekly time commitment, but it also meant a steady paycheck in the season, and the whole thing has ended up being a FABULOUS fit for us. Seriously though, such a blessing! We had our first growers’ meeting with everyone in January, where we met many of the other growers for the first time and kind of got a lay of the land for how everything was going to work once the season started.
In kid news, Raven had a big month in January — she started taking dance lessons for the first time (something we’ve wanted her to do forever but just hadn’t found a studio that had openings), and we ended up finding the perfect fit. We didn’t want her to do competitive dance and wanted it to just be a fun outlet for her (but where she could still actually learn specific ballet and other dance skills), and one of our neighbors ended up starting her own little studio in her basement this year. Raven has loved it! She also took first in her class spelling bee and advanced to the school spelling bee, where she made it to the sixth round.
Another fun thing in January was that my in-laws treated all their kids and spouses out to a very fancy steak dinner (no kids allowed!). Matt and I have had a really hard time logistically figuring out going on dates since Naomi was born in 2023, so it’s always such a treat when we get to go out. (Plus it was literally the best steak I’ve ever had in my life.)
We also continued to push towards greater minimalism in our home by renting a huge dumpster in January. If it wasn’t so expensive, I would seriously do it every year, just because the combination of a 7-day deadline and a quick, visual turnaround makes a HUGE difference in my motivation.
February
Matt continued to work away from home during the week throughout this month, which only continued to get more challenging as there were a lot of things going on this month. I finished up teaching my classes through the local college, and I was also asked to be the featured speaker at a local Chamber of Commerce event. It went really well, but having to figure out childcare for everything started to get tricky. Doing the Chamber event also led to our farm getting a feature in the local paper, which was kinda fun.
At the beginning of the month on the weekend, my mom watched our kids so Matt and I could attend the Utah Flower Conference (a great professional development event, not to mention a fun day out with flower friends!). It was amazing to get so much uninterrupted time together since he’d been gone so much in the winter, and I always love the conference.
There were other really fun things in the month, too — we celebrated Valentine’s Day a date late (as per our norm) by giving the kids a bunch of little treats and gifts at breakfast, and I was so touched when a local florist friend dropped by unexpectedly and gifted me a huge arrangement at the end of the day. Later in the month we had a Chinese New Year party with my side of the family, which is a fun tradition my mom has started. Raven and I also drove up north one weekend to attend the bridal shower of my niece, who was getting married the following month. I also spent a lot of time with my friend Kylee, which really helped me get through all those weeks on my own, including a day when I gifted her a session with my massage therapist and we drove up to Bountiful together for that.
Some other wins: we paid off our credit card in full this month thanks to getting our tax return back, and I also applied for a prestigious farm grant. We didn’t end up getting it, but I was proud of myself for taking the time and effort to go through the process, and it taught me a lot.
In kid news, Naomi finally started gaining weight a little better (partly thanks to us starting feeding therapy for her), but she was still on oxygen at night, which was kinda scary to deal with my on my own, especially because she just kept getting sick with stuff. At the end of the month, Naomi, Raven, and I all got strep, which just made things worse.
And that about sums up February.
March
Ugh, March was HARD.
My anxiety, which had been nearly nonexistent or very much under control for a long time, really came roaring up again this month from all that was on my shoulders, especially with Matt still being gone during the week. I took Raven and Mathias to go see Anastasia (Mathias’s first musical!) which was so awesome, but Raven started feeling more and more sick as the performance went on, and we ended up actually having to take her to the ER in the middle of the night that same night, where it turned up she had a severe case of influenza A. She felt a lot better once she had fluids and we were thankfully able to start Naomi on Tamiflu as a precaution, which ended up being a very good thing since she did end up getting sick a few days later.
Unfortunately, Naomi’s sickness collided with my niece’s wedding down in St. George, something we had all been looking forward to for months. So Matt ended up taking the three older kids (Raven was fully recovered), and I ended up staying home with Naomi because I also ended up coming down with strep. It was SUCH a bummer, but at least Matt and the other kids had a really nice trip. Raven was also asked to be her flower girl, which was special.
My anxiety was so bad finally that we ended up having Matt come home two weeks early from the job he was working at. I just couldn’t handle all the flower farming deadlines and household stuff and Naomi constantly being sick (and still on oxygen) on my own anymore, so he came home around the middle of the month. My anxiety didn’t immediately go away again, but it was significantly helped, and I was able to finish up my marketing work I was doing for a friend and handle all the farming tasks as they came without totally losing it.
We did squeeze in some fun stuff, including making leprechaun traps and doing a ‘Green Feast’ for St. Patrick’s Day, and my kids were on spring break at the end of the month, which we celebrated by taking them to a children’s museum and then went out to our friends’ house after for dinner.
March was hard, though. I was relieved to see the end of it.
April
My anxiety and mental health always seem to do way better once spring hits, and it also helped that Matt was now around all the time and that our farm season started this month. As mentioned in the intro, a huge thing that happened for us in 2025 is that we joined up with the Utah Flower Market, which is a wholesale market for florists and retail comprised entirely of locally grown flowers. It was a bit of a steep learning curve at first to figure out the ins and outs of how the market works, but even from the get go, we LOVED IT. It was amazing having such a strong and dependable outlet for our flowers, and a more stable form of income.
As far as our actual spring crops went, we actually had the worst spring we’ve ever had in farming but still managed to make more than we’d ever made in the spring before, which goes to show just how amazing having that outlet was (as well as the organic growth that tends to come when you hit that fifth year).
Naomi was still having to be on oxygen at night and seemed to constantly be sick, so I finally felt like we should maybe see if she needed to have her tonsils removed. We ended up having an appointment to check everything out, and the doctor determined that it would be best if we removed both her tonsils and adenoids, so we scheduled that surgery for early June. Naomi had a big month all around, as she started standing and scooting around the furniture this month, as well as started speech therapy.
Lots of other good things in the month, too. Raven turned 10, which we celebrated by meeting grandparents at Pizza Pie Cafe at the halfway point between our houses. Naomi turned 2 at the end of the month, which we celebrated with a small party here at the house. We also celebrated Easter in the usual fashion with multiple eggs hunts and family parties. I was also asked to speak about our NICU experience at an event the local college was doing for future healthcare providers, which was interesting.
After a long and hard winter, April seemed to mark the shift towards progress, momentum, and sunnier days ahead.
May
May is always insane. The height of spring flowers collides with the necessity of getting everything planted NOW, and then on top of that you add in end of school graduations and programs, sports, Mother’s Day and our anniversary, and it ends up being a CRAZY month.
That is always what May holds, but in 2025, some special things along with all that were:
- I got interviewed by The Salt Lake Tribune about the Utah Flower Market, which was kind of crazy (especially since I was one of the newbies). It was a great article though and helped the market gain further visibility.
- Largely thanks to the market, we were able to hire our first part-time employees this month, which made a WORLD of difference over the course of the season. Not only did they help us get everything in the ground on time (for once), but they really gave us a sense of work/life balance at last.
- Matt and I celebrated our 14-year anniversary by…farming 🙂 One of these days we’ll actually do something to celebrate! I think we did at least go out for burgers and shakes with the kids the weekend after, though
- We’ve started celebrating Mother’s Day for me the week before the actual holiday since the holiday weekend is totally insane as far as flower stuff goes. We had our best Mother’s Day sales ever this year, even despite having the worst spring crop loss we’d ever had since we began farming
- Even with the spring crop loss, we quickly saw that we were going to need a walk-in cooler installed, and FAST. We had a friend start on the electrical work for that this month.
- The two older kids participated in the elementary school’s May Day program, which is basically the big graduation program the school puts on where each of the grades does some special dances and songs. Raven was especially excited because she’d gotten a special little solo part in the dance.
- Hyrum graduated preschool
- Mathias lost his first tooth and graduated first grade
- Raven started playing softball for the 4th year and graduated 4th grade
Frantic, frantic, I say! But a good month.
June
June is generally a nice breather of a month, simply because by then we have most crops in the ground and we’re kinda just waiting on everything to grow and then doing weddings and stuff. We did two smaller DIY weddings this month and continued to sell weekly at the market.
The biggest news from June was that Naomi had surgery to get her tonsils and adenoids out. Up until this point over the entire extent of the winter and spring, she’d had to go back on oxygen at night and had basically been constantly sick. Once she was recovered from this surgery, we saw an EXTREME improvement in her health. She not only was able to completely go off oxygen at night (even while sick), but her sleep apnea also virtually disappeared. She’s hardly been sick at all since, and I am SO grateful.
Raven finished up her softball season and started taking private dance lessons to try and catch up a little (since we looked for years to find a studio for her to join and couldn’t find one until this year, when she was 10). She likes softball okay, but she LOVES dance.
I also put the three older kids in swim lessons at the community pool again. Raven is in the final level offered now, and Mathias isn’t far behind. Hyrum used to be scared to death of the water, so he made big strides in his confidence being in it. I also like the structure that swim lessons bring to summer days, as they give the kids something concrete every day to look forward to and to kind of anchor our days around.
Mathias turned 7 in June, and we celebrated by taking him out to the local pizza place and putting up the swimming pool in the yard and having grandparents over. This birthday was a far cry from the previous birthday thanks to his allergy shots — he was able to be outside for the duration of the day and actually enjoy himself without having to take Benadryl and turn in early!
July
July was a GREAT month for us! We celebrated the 4th of July by going up north to attend a parade with my in-laws (and were joined by our friends and their daughter, too), and Raven had a mini dance recital to show off what she’d been learning during her private dance lessons. The kids also continued with a second round of swim lessons (all except Hyrum, who wasn’t old enough to advance to the next level yet).
The biggest news from July was that our friend Aaron who had been helping us install our new walk-in cooler finished up all the electrical work this month, which was just in the nick of time since our flowers EXPLODED in July! The funnest part about the installation though was that Aaron brought the whole family every time he came out, who are some of our closest friends. All of our kids are super close in age to each other, so it was a BLAST for both us and the kids. And at the end, we were left with a gorgeous piece of equipment that I am still grateful for every single day!
In other farm news, we also had two big weddings in July, one of which was the most stressful I’d had to deal with up to that point, just because the bride was pretty particular about the color palette and it was a really hard palette in some ways for that time of year. But in the end, we got just what we needed, and it actually ended up being one of my favorite of the season! The other wedding was actually the exact same weekend, so it was pretty intense there that week. I was really proud of how both weddings turned out, and it gave me a great opportunity to develop my skills and learn some good time management with floristry 🙂
In July, it was confirmed that Naomi had scoliosis pretty bad. We started the process of getting her set up for appointments to get fitted for a brace.
At the end of July, Matt competed in his first ever triathlon (Spudman) up in Idaho. The week before, we took the kids out to a nearby lake so he could practice doing the swim, which was a fun break for us and a good chance for Matt to actually practice swimming in open water at least once before the event, lol. He ended up successfully completing the triathlon along with two of his brothers. The kids and I didn’t end up going just because it would have been too tricky with everything going on at the farm (and we’d been told the triathlon course was not a good fit for young kids). And Matt, being the champ he is, drove home after the triathlon and was back to harvesting scabiosa that same night. The man’s a gem!
August
We always operate in August at a breakneck pace, and this year it was even more intense because we needed to try and make up income from our flowers since the spring crops were so lackluster. Thankfully, because of the weekly markets and more weddings and two u-pick events, we had lots of places to send our flowers, as well as lots of notes to make about which crops to grow way more of (lisianthus!) and which to grow way less (bright colored zinnias!).
We squeezed in two fun family events though before school started in the middle of August – the first was that we were invited by my sister-in-law and niece to join them for a day at Thanksgiving Point. My kids LOVED exploring everything like unearthing “dinosaur bones” at the outdoor sand pits and jumping on the gigantic outdoor trampoline. They probably would have stayed twice as long if they’d been able. And then, just before school started, our ward had its annual pool party, which we attend every year. It was one of the few times Naomi has ever really been in a pool situation, and that kid, man! She LOVES the water. Unfortunately, she has zero fear about the water, so we have to have a constant hold on her since she’ll just immediately put her whole body (including her face) in. The pool party is always a highlight at the end of summer for us.
The kids started school on the 14th – Raven started 5th grade (her last year of elementary!), Mathias 2nd, and Hyrum started his first year at the “big school.” We decided to just put Hyrum in half-day kindergarten, the same as we did for our other kids. He was quite shy about it all at the beginning, but liked his teacher immediately and started warming up as time went on (especially as he watched his siblings and saw how excited they always were about school).
That about sums up the month!
September
If we thought August was going to be busy on the farm with the new weekly markets, we had no idea how much bigger September was about to get! Our demand was INSANE in September, and we smashed all kinds of records both personally and even some at the market itself. We even had to drive up two vehicles one week to make sure we covered all our orders! It was quite a relief really to be able to sell so much, since we knew we’d need to start putting money aside for the winter (when we don’t have flowers to sell), especially because I wanted to avoid at all costs another winter where Matt would have to travel away from us for the winter. Our main field was taken down by frost halfway through the month, but we made enough in the first two markets of the month plus a bigger DIY event later in the month that we felt pretty good about our ability to have enough for the winter.
After our second market in September, I was picking up an order of contacts from my eye doctor when I noticed a breaking news story on the television at the office, as well as my phone going off like crazy. Turns out that I was only minutes away from where activist Charlie Kirk was assassinated — I’d literally driven right through the area only minutes before. Things got pretty crazy on social media and in the general atmosphere over the next 48 hours, and we could just feel a tension in the air wherever we went. We decided we wanted our farm to step up and help ease some of the fear and anger that a lot of people were feeling, so we put out a social media post offering free sunflowers — one for you, one for someone in need, and one for someone you didn’t always see eye to eye with. The post ended up going viral, and we had hundreds of cars stop by and get some. It felt good to take action during such a hard time, and it reminded me that taking positive action in our communities will always beat endlessly refreshing the news, especially when it involves scenarios we have little control over directly.
My dad also flew out later in the month to visit. We kept it pretty low key since our farm tasks were still insane, but we were able to go out to eat and enjoy having him here at our house.
September is also when we usually start going on family hikes again. It’s something both we and the kids look forward to every year — we love escaping for a couple hours into the local canyons enjoying the fresh mountain air free of distraction. Our fall hikes are also a sign that the busy-ness of the farming season is finally starting to wind down.
Matt and I also both turned 39 at the end of the month.
October
The beginning of October was heavy…I was out making bouquets for the farmstand when a man pulled up and asked if he could get a quick vase arrangement using one of the bouquets from the stand. I usually just sell the vase and let them handle it, but he looked so sad that I got to work doing it myself and asked him what it was for. He said that a colleague of his had just died the day before. I happened to have seen a news story that there was a fatal car wreck and asked if that’s what caused it. He confirmed that it was. I asked him offhand who it was, not expecting to recognize the name, and felt immediate shock as he told me the name of a former student who took my cut flower class and who I was in regular contact with about her cut flower plans and questions. She wasn’t much older than me.
I was devastated.
The cut flower community came together and we all donated flowers to do a massive bouquet bar at the local college campus (where she’d worked) for anyone to come and get flowers for free. I also donated centerpieces for the funeral luncheon. I was glad to have something I felt like I could do, but I was heartbroken.
In the same month, we got Naomi fitted for a custom brace for her back to see if we could try and straighten some of her scoliosis and hopefully avoid future back surgery. She absolutely hated the brace and it made her throw up, so we actually had to not have her wear it other than at night because gaining weight was her #1 priority before her heart surgery. Naomi also started taking some tentative steps on her own this month.
In the middle of the month, we wrapped up our season selling at the weekly market, which was a relief. Our main field had actually gotten taken down by frost all the way back in mid-September, so we were scrambling to find enough to bring every week after that to make it worth it. Although we absolutely LOVED our first year participating, it is still a crazy amount of work, stress, and pressure, so it felt like a huge accomplishment to finally be able to close the books on the season.
Matt got to do a “man weekend” with his dad and brothers at an AirBnb not too far away, which they started off by coming over to our farm and digging our massive tulip trench for us, which saved us hours and hours and hours of work. I got to attend the end-of-season social with all the other growers at the market. The kids had fall break (although we didn’t do too much fun stuff — it was mostly spent on a large garden bed expansion project for the farm).
I cut out Diet Dr. Pepper this month to try and see if I could get on top of my autoimmune disease flare, which has been going since Naomi was born in 2023. Spoiler alert — it didn’t work, but MAN, the withdrawal was BRUTAL, and it actually ended up triggering old anxiety patterns just because withdrawal symptoms felt very similar sometimes to a pre-panic attack for me. Unfortunately, anxiety would continue to be a struggle through the fall and winter, although I have a lot more tools now to help me deal with it than I used to.
We ended the month by celebrating Halloween with the usual — a party at my mom’s the Sunday before, a city trunk or treat, and watching the kids participate in their school’s annual Halloween costume parade.
November
Matt and I got the chance early in the month to go on a special date to the temple sealing of Matt’s brother and his wife Kortney (if you want to know more about the importance of temples in my faith and what a temple sealing is, you can click HERE). It was actually kind of funny because we beat the bride and groom there, so the worker at the temple actually thought we were the ones getting married that day! Afterwards, Luke and Kortney treated us all to a super nice dinner out. Matt and I so rarely get to go on dates during this season in our lives, and we definitely don’t take opportunities like this for granted!
Even though our weekly flower markets were over for the season, we did have one dried flower market, which was kind of a “let’s try it and see” kind of thing. It was a total bust. We hardly sold anything, and it definitely wasn’t worth all the effort to get everything ready that we had for it. However, it was valuable information to know for the future (that we would need to market to a totally different customer base to have success at something like that), and it also was kind of a relief for the following year, since we no longer had to worry about drying anything.
Naomi really started walking in earnest in November, at 2.5 years old. The older kiddos had so much fun with her helping her practice. I have so many adorable videos of everyone gathered around Naomi, cheering her on. Hyrum also made some major strides this month — the year before in preschool, whenever he’d had a program, he was so shy and uncomfortable that he would have kind of a “deer in headlights” look the whole time and barely participate at all. However, for his first kindergarten program (an ABC program based on Chicka Chicka Boom Boom), he did AWESOME — he participated in all the songs, did all the actions, and nailed his speaking part. A huge step forward for him! He also had been too shy to really play much with the other kids in preschool, but in the first few weeks of kindergarten, he formed a close friendship with the younger brother of one of Mathias’s friends, which was really fun to see.
A lot of November was spent doing fall prep for the farm. We had a full season’s worth of data of what sold well at the market we’d joined, and we had BIG plans for the following season to improve upon our crop options. One big thing we were doing was to focus a lot more on spring crops, so we did a rather large expansion in our front garden bed to allow for more spring bulbs and perennials. We did a ton of work on that in this month, including making pathways, planting evergreens, making a master plan, and actually putting in the first of the bulbs (other things would come the next season).
Thanksgiving was pretty chill — we spent most of it with my family, eating the usual turkey dinner and playing games. The day after, we opened up our bouquet subscriptions for the following year, which went off pretty well. We tried a new bouquet subcription option that was every week (an upgrade from our former biggest option, which was every other week). Much to our surprise, we had several of the limited spots sell immediately, which was a reassuring addition to our winter buffer and Christmas fund. Later that evening, we took the kids to our city’s annual Christmas Light Parade.
December
December is the one month per year where we take a pretty solid break from farming. We’ll still do things here and there (like social media posts, some planning, even some weeding if there’s no snow, etc.), but by and large, it’s our one time per year where we get a true break. However, near the end of the month, the board of the Utah Flower Market approached me and asked if I’d like to take over the marketing (both social media and newsletter) for the market for a monthly stipend. I enthusiastically accepted, both because I hoped to really help the market gain some further traction and because I really appreciated having some extra regular winter income.
We enjoyed going to Raven’s Christmas dance recital this month and seeing how much progress she continues to make. Her dance studio is a small one and not competitive, so it’s a way for her to learn dance technique without the pressure I often see in bigger dance studios around here. It’s a great fit! And she’s learning loads.
Hyrum turned 6 this month. I was really not feeling great the day of his birthday, so cleaning up the house and making dinner and cake and such was a bit of a stretch, but Hyrum loved having grandparents over and feeling celebrated. I felt a little bad we didn’t do more, but it’s kinda hard to do a lot for his birthday anyway since it’s just before Christmas and the weather is often crummy and people are so busy.
The three older kids all participated in their elementary school’s Christmas program, which is a Big Deal in a small town — so many people come out to see it, even those who don’t have kids in school anymore. Once again, all these “lasts” for Raven really started to hit me — our kids are growing up so fast!
We had Naomi’s regular half-year checkup cardiology appointment in December too. These have always been fraught with tension because we’ve known since she was born that she needed heart surgery, but the strategy keeps changing and you never know if things will have gotten worse since your last appointment. In this appointment, the doctor was pleased at the weight gain Naomi had managed since her last follow-up (which was the main thing we were supposed to work on), and he told us to expect an attempted heart closure in the catheter lab in May or June of next year.
We had our usual Solstice dinner on the darkest night of the year, which is our kids’ favorite December tradition (and mine, too!). It’s a chance to reflect on what’s really important without being overshadows by noise or games or gifts. It’s always a very quiet, peaceful affair, eating our special dinner by candelight and talking about what we’re grateful for with the year that’s passing and what we’re excited about in the year ahead.
Christmas ended up being kind of a bigger affair than expected. We had a family in our neighborhood who said they wanted to do something special for us for Christmas. We told them the farm had done well and we didn’t need any help or anything this year, but they said it wasn’t like that and so we agreed. Well, we truly had no idea how much above and beyond our expectations they were about to go, lol. Our kids basically got two full Christmases as far as presents went! While a part of me wanted to feel a little embarrassed by their generosity, I’m working hard on becoming better at receiving as warmly as I try to give, so I allowed myself to feel all the love and friendship that was offered by this thoughtful family. We had our usual cinnamon roll breakfast, and the boys were especially excited by what Santa brought them both this year — two new “big boy” beds since they’d both definitely outgrown their toddler beds! The kids thought it was grand fun to have two big beds in the front room all day and had a blast playing with all their new toys all day. It was a sweet day.
I was ready to look ahead after Christmas, and started planning for the following flower season in earnest as soon as the 26th hit. I maybe went a bit crazy with it, but I was so excited to have a full year’s worth of data at our new market to plan around, and I was so excited by the possibilities that it opened up for us that I didn’t want to waste a moment. So I went into the new year with a head full of big plans and lots of actual big plans already made up!
Reflection on 2025 as a Whole (Written Later, in October 2026)
This might sound weird, but for me, I think 2025 marked the last of the really hard years in a string of hard years. We’d basically had a constant stream of challenges and hard things to go through nonstop since about 2015, and even though I couldn’t explain why at the time, I felt as 2025 was winding down that it was kind of the close of that hard decade and like we were finally going to get a break. (Spoiler alert — the first part of 2026 didn’t give us quite that break yet, but I can tell you that from about June 2026 on, it really has been like we’re operating on a different, much less challenging level!).
2025 felt a bit like — “Just hang on, good things are coming” — mixed with lots of professional wins on the farming level (joining up with the market, hiring our first employees, and not needing Matt to work through the winter to make ends meet). All of that growth on the farm came at a price, however, and while 2025 was much more balanced than 2024 had been thanks to our employees, we still realized that we still had to change more big things in order to be able to farm long-term. My health and anxiety were also not great at the end of 2025 — I was trying to use old perfectionism loops to try and fix my autoimmune disease and anxiety, and I would get frustrated when I didn’t handle things perfectly, which only perpetuated both due to stress.
While the end of 2025 ended with a lot of frustration with myself, it also paved the way for change in 2026. I recognized that I literally could not keep up these impossible standards for myself, and that it was foolish to keep doing so. The winter provided a much-needed break from the immediacy of farm demands for me to take my first really hard look inward in a long time (especially since I actually had the margin to do so, since Matt wasn’t working away from us this winter and the kids weren’t constantly sick).
It’s hard to quantify growth in any meaningful way for anyone else, but I can tell you that a HUGE shift was coming for me personally, and while the winter itself was a bit brutal as I was tying up some loose ends with stuff I still really needed to let go of, it marked a very positive and real change going forward that has continued throughout 2026.
You know big changes had to have already happened when at the end of 2025, I just knew that 2026 was going to be a really, really good year, which was a certainty I definitely hadn’t felt at any point over the previous decade.
I’m excited to share what 2026 has brought us 🙂
