May 2020

After several weeks that felt like we were speeding right into summer, this week was a cold, drizzly one where we had not just one or two, but THREE frost warnings. We got lucky in that everything seems to have survived the chilly nights, and I just reveled in the chance to make soup again and in the desire to turn on my oven, which meant that we ate particularly well this week.

This was also the week of getting haircuts, as both Matt and I were in desperate need and as we now were able to, with salons recently having opened up again around here. (Note: I naively thought that a few at least had been open this whole time, but I was apparently wrong on that point.)

My hairstylist said that her husband and father (both farmers) have always made her wait each year to plant until after Memorial Day (no matter how much she may want to plant earlier), and this week, I’ll admit, had us kind of on pins and needles as we wondered if we were about to lose much of what we’ve planted thus far. (We did take a tarp and cover the bed with our tomato plants in it, at any rate, but that was the only one). We woke up a couple mornings to a sort of frost on the mountaintops right outside our window, but none of our plants had blackened or shriveled or showed any other signs of having been frozen, so I think we’re in the clear.

As for the rest of the week, we’ve been trying to tackle some to-do list items while our children did their darnedest to make sure we kept losing our focus, which you’ll read about in more detail below.

Note: There are affiliate links to products mentioned below, which means I may get a small commission on any purchases made through those links, at no extra cost to you.

In the Kitchen

Spring and fall are my favorite times of year, for many reasons–the colors! the foliage! the traditions and holidays! But perhaps the biggest reason is the mild temperatures and drizzly days that drive me right into the kitchen, eagerly turning on the oven and pulling out onions or baking supplies before I even quite know what I’m in there to do with them.

Once it gets past a certain temperature outside (around 80 degrees or so), I avoid turning on the oven as much as possible, but with us having turned off our heater for the season, there were many mornings we woke up to a chilly house in the low 60’s this rainy week, so making pumpkin chocolate muffins or whipping up a batch of cookies (both gluten-free AND not gluten-free, so I can eat the dough at will and not have to share) seemed the most natural thing in the world.

There are plenty of things I don’t love about this current period of history we’re going through, but one thing I AM digging is that we’ve been spending weekends largely at home, with zero plans to speak of. It’s made for leisurely breakfasts (or at least, the kinds of breakfasts where we feed the kids something simple quickly and then make something special that will take a bit longer) and lunches that consist of more than just quesadillas or peanut butter sandwiches. It’s meant naps in the afternoon and family time throughout the whole day. And because we’re spending our weekend days doing things equal parts productive and relaxing, we’re not so tired by 9:00 p.m. that we can’t put on a movie for just Matt and me.

Both last week and this week we did a sheet pan bake involving salmon, green beans, and potatoes (russet last week, sweet potato this week), and we’re big fans around here! Even the kids have taken better than expected to the salmon, which was a nice bonus. Basically you peel and cube your potatoes (or do matchsticks, if you’re wanting “fries”), drizzle them with olive oil and salt, spread them over one side of the sheet pan in a single layer and pop them in a preheated 400 degree oven. Then after about 15 minutes, you put some green beans on there with them (and do some olive oil and salt on those,too) and put some frozen salmon fillets on the side. We melt two tablespoons of butter, mix it with about a teaspoon of dried dill and a couple light shakes of garlic salt, and brush that over the tops of the salmon. Then you cook the (now full) sheet pan for about 26 minutes, or until the salmon is cooked through and flakes easily with a fork. (If your salmon is thawed, only put it in for about 16-18 minutes). And that’s it! Delicious, easy, and super good for you (though you shouldn’t hold that against it).

On the Menu Last Week: Instant Pot Sweet Potato Curry + Rice (the recipe itself was pretty bland, but after I added quite a lot more seasonings to it, it was decent), Beef + Bean Taco Soup (from The Food Nanny Rescues Dinner), Salmon/Sweet Potato/Green Bean Sheet Pan Bake, Garlicky Chicken + Rice Soup (from America’s Test Kitchen’s Baby + Toddler Cookbook), Slow Cooked Pot Roast, Carrots, and Mashed Potatoes

In the Yard

One thing I didn’t learn until we had a yard and garden of our own was that often after transplanting something, or after planting certain bulbs/tubers/shrubs for the first time (like peonies), you have to wait multiple years before getting any blooms.

Three years ago when we first moved to this house, we transplanted a whole bunch of daylilies from my mom’s garden and a whole bunch of mini purple irises from my sister’s. The daylilies bloomed the same year they were transplanted, but the irises didn’t, so we just figured we had missed the window for that year. But then they didn’t come up the next. Or the next. And we kinda just figured we were going to only get greenery from them year after year without ever getting flowers. But then this week I saw it—the first purple bud of a bloom! This is the fourth summer they’ve been in our yard, and it’s the first time we’ve actually been able to see what they look like. It was such a fun surprise.

A similar thing happened with our peonies—we’ve gotten zero blooms thus far from all of the plants we’ve transplanted and the one we planted from a tuber, but this year, I really think we’re finally going to get a few! We have some definite buds on a couple of the bushes, and we CANNOT WAIT to see what color they’re going to be. These are the things we geek out about, folks.

Now that Memorial Day weekend is past, which is considered the point at which we’re past all danger of frost, we’re planning on direct seeding a few more flowers for my cutting garden this coming week. Sure, we still have no idea whether or not we’ll still be here in this house three or four months from now to see them all in full bloom, but we figured that we might as well gain as much experience as we can, even if the end result gets cut short this year. Matt’s coworkers, who have already listed their house and which is now under contract with a buyer, gave us two of the tomato plants they had grown from seed, which pushes our total tomato plant count up to 8 (though it really is 7, since one of our tomato plants didn’t seem to survive a particularly chilly night a few weeks ago). Seeing how much success they were able to have growing tomatoes from seed (which we didn’t dare try) has made us want to try growing EVERYTHING from seed next year, just to save on our garden costs and just to see if we can.

So many fun experiments up ahead!

Blooming This Week: the last of the tulips (our yellow ones turn a coral/red tone at the end of their life span, pictured above), the yellow columbine, *almost* the mini irises and the one bearded iris that has a bloom on it (from all that we transplanted last year), the lilacs in the front yard (which bloom later than the ones in the back), our Jupiter’s beard transplants, and some of our other flowering bushes that I’m not sure of the names. Oh, and the chives, which I don’t really know if you’re supposed to “let” flower, but we’re still taking cuttings from it to season things, so I figured we might as well enjoy the fun purple blooms, too.

In the Coop

Our big news with our flock was that we finally moved our pullets (not-quite-grown-up chicks, basically, for those of you who don’t speak chicken) into the outside coop/run with the older hens. We had done pretty extensive research on this process with very conflicting advice, so we decided to pick and choose what seemed the most sensible and just dive in. More than anything, we planned to sit out and watch them for a few hours just to make sure everything went okay, as we’d heard that sometimes established chickens don’t take well to newcomers and had consequently been a bit horrified to read some particularly brutal stories from seasoned farmers about some of what they had seen happen in the process.

We made a big family night out of it and brought out our lawn chairs and put them facing the chicken enclosure (almost as if we were watching a movie screen), and the kids gazed on open-mouthed as we wrangled the pullets into a plastic bin so that we could transport them from the garage to the coop, and then we set the bin down in the midst of The Patch and waited to see what would happen. The pullets seemed completely nonplussed at first and more than a little timid, and it didn’t help that Chipmunk (pictured below) seems to be our alpha hen and started flapping her wings and puffing her chest out and pecking at a couple of the smaller ones who got too close once they had flapped awkwardly (or been rudely pushed by us) out of the bin and into their new world.

There were a few tense moments but nothing that required intervention, and by the time we transported the chicks into the roost to stay the night, all seemed to be well enough. The little buggers still try to bed down for the night outside on top of the little hill of plants rather than filing up into the coop on their own like the older hens every night, but hopefully they’ll get the gist eventually.

For our own notes, we transported the chicks when they were about 11-1/2 weeks old, and we had six new pullets being introduced into an existing flock of four established layers. We put out pullet feed in addition to the layer feed, but now all the flock seems to just prefer the pullet feed, so we’ll see what happens from this point on. Egg production doesn’t seem to have been affected yet, so we’re assuming the laying hens are getting enough calcium and other nutrients from their constant foraging.

In the Playroom

I’ll admit that my one-on-one “dates” or “focused time” with each of the kids wasn’t anything super planned or “special” this week. I made sure to do focused read-aloud time from Raven’s longer chapter book nearly every day though, and since the two boys were in Struggleville this week thanks to teething (Mathias) and constipation (Hyrum), they basically just got lots and LOTS of quiet snuggle time with Mom for their one-on-ones.

Some weeks are just like that.

We did do a special lesson on Sunday about Memorial Day and the importance of remembering those who have gone on before us, which involved a Pioneer Bingo game my mom made for us a few Christmases ago and a trip to one of the local cemeteries, where we located Matt’s grandpa’s and great-grandparents’ headstones. Before we went to the cemetery, I read the life sketch his great-grandma had written, and we made the somewhat startling assumption/connection that since his great-grandmother said in her life sketch that at the time she was living in the town by ours, there were only about 25 families in the valley, we realized that she almost certainly knew my great-great grandma (who lived in the next town over), or at least her parents would have–they almost certainly would have been in the same ward (aka, church congregation). I would have to do a little more research to verify that, but it was kind of a fun thing to think about.

The kids loved it all, and Raven especially has been asking ever since when we get to play Bingo again, and now she’s also all gung-ho about visiting cemeteries. I didn’t catch the family history/genealogy bug until I was in my mid-twenties, but maybe she’ll catch it early. I can always hope.

In the Home

I was planning on having more than a “Before” picture to show you, but alas! I didn’t quite get that far, ha ha. This is a picture of the dresser in our bedroom, and it’s already had a tendency to be a bit of a catchall for clutter, but it’s gotten especially bad since we had Hyrum in December, just because he sleeps in our room, so it makes sense for us to have his clothes and such in with us, too.

My big plan this week was to clear out enough from my side of the closet so that we could put all three of his bins up there, which would then clear the way (literally) for me to see what else was on the dresser that needed to be relocated, tossed, etc. I made some decent headway on my closet project, but just as I was about to tackle the last box, I got interrupted by children waking up from naps and a baby that needed to be fed, so now our master bedroom has MORE stuff on the floor from before, as I need to finish clearing out the closet in order to put everything back again.

So it goes with house projects around here—I start with high ambitions and the best of intentions and with a great talent for overestimating what I can get done during a naptime, and I end up with half-finished projects that we trip over for weeks until I find the time, energy, and mental space to devote to it again. Ah, well. Maybe for next week’s Homestead Weekly, I’ll actually have a finished project for you. Now wouldn’t that be something?

Matt was able to successfully complete his big To-Do List Item this week though and put together the Ridgid wet/dry vac we got for Christmas, which he then used to vacuum out the garage. Between that and the fact that I finally scheduled someone to come service our garage door this week (which was sometimes stopping in the middle and being terribly loud every time you opened it), I feel like we got an entirely new garage this week. Big win!

In the Soul

My mind continues to be consumed much of the time with the uncertainty of our situation at the moment–will we be in a new house in four months? If so, do we rent? Buy? Build? Will we decide for Matt to go in a different direction and take a new job? If so, do we pursue a job closer to family, or do we stay where we are?

There are so many different directions we can go, and they really all hold appeal for us (if they didn’t, this decision would be a lot easier!). Just when I think things are starting to fall into place for one option to rise above all the others, another, equally as tempting option comes up, and we start back at the beginning.

There’s a possibility that some of the paperwork at Matt’s current company could be finalized this week, so there is also the possibility that we might be given an actual ballpark timeline as early as this week, as well. Fingers crossed, as a timeline would definitely make some things a lot easier in the planning process!

When my mind wasn’t involved in debating the various merits of our different options, I was neck-deep in trying to keep my patience from waning as this week involved a lot (and I mean a LOT) of screaming and crying from the children. Because the baby was so uncomfortable for much of the week, he also didn’t sleep well at night, which meant that most days started sometime in the 5 or 6 o’clock hour after having been woken up many times in the middle of the night as well, and so this week had me relaxing my rules a lot on how many movies my kids could watch (it used to be that they’d watch one or two a month and basically have no other screen time, but that’s been relaxed quite a bit the past little while). I’m not letting myself feel too much guilt over it, but I do want to be mindful not to make it too much of a habit. (Note: One thing I’ve discovered that’s really helped with limiting our kids’ screen time naturally is the placement of our t.v. We only have one television, and it’s in our basement. This means, simply by sheer convenience (or lack thereof), that we don’t watch too much t.v. around here since we spend the bulk of our time upstairs together.)

This week I also realized that I’ve regained back most of the 5-6 pounds I’d lost when Matt and I were in a weight loss competition with each other before our Hawaii trip (which was cancelled), and I know that I definitely need to start taking better care of myself again. So, this next week I’ve finally got a chiropractor appointment scheduled so that I can start exercising again, and I also have solid plans to not buy so much chocolate (aka, nothing other than chocolate chips) at my next big grocery haul next week. These are baby steps, but baby steps are usually what get me to slowly lose the rest of the weight from a pregnancy.

That’s the hope, anyway.

Here’s to a good week ahead, and hopefully one that involves a bit more sleep and a bit less crying over here!

I hope that you enjoyed your holiday weekend, and that you have a wonderful week ahead too!

Whew, what a doozy of a week! If you read my last post, you’ll know that we had a loooong day on Friday that involved driving three hours’ south of here to where the company my husband works for is moving so that we could look at houses. It was a long day that ended in disappointment, but at least it gave us some concrete experience to draw from when it comes to deciding whether we’re going to move with the business or not.

Here’s what we were up to the rest of the week, though:

In the Kitchen

I hadn’t planned on going grocery shopping this week, but I ended up having to make a stop on Wednesday because we were almost out of diapers for Mathias. (Having two kids in diapers, man…it will seem like such a vacation when we just have one!) It also ended up being for the best that I went when I did because both of our gallons of milk (that had expiration dates of the 18th) ended up going sour before then rather than a few days after like they normally do, so it all worked out.

My goal for the next few months is to do just two grocery shopping trips per month—our usual huge one at the beginning of the month, and then one smaller one mid-month. My reasons for doing this are many, but the main ones are that 1) We will save money by not going to the store at all in between planned trips since we often make at least some unplanned purchases every time we go, 2) It will force us to be better at not wasting food, and 3) As there’s a very high chance that we’re moving in the next few months, I want to start using up what we have so that we have less to transport. I was already in the habit anyway of doing just one main shopping trip per month and then 2-3 smaller ones later on, but if I can cut those smaller trips down to just once, that would be the ideal.

I still haven’t been wanting to bake much, thanks to the rising temps outside and because gluten-free baking seems to be more time and labor-intensive than normal baking. However, I did try out the fluffy biscuit recipe from America’s Test Kitchen’s How Can It Be Gluten-Free Cookbook for lunch on Sunday. While I personally wouldn’t call the biscuits “fluffy,” the texture and taste were fine, especially smothered in the country sausage gravy that we poured all over them. Granted, I had to sub in sour cream for the whole milk yogurt, and I didn’t wait the full 30 minutes to let the mixture sit before baking, so it would probably taste better with following those two guidelines.

We wanted to start grilling this weekend, but then Matt found three wasp nests in our grill, so he spent the weekend trying to get those out. The nests are now gone, but Matt reports that the wasps are still going inside and just hanging out in there, so we’re wondering what to do moving forward—we don’t want to use our wasp spray on our grill (because we cook food on it, obviously), but we don’t know how else to guarantee that they won’t come back and just keep building. Any suggestions?

On the Menu Last Week: Instant Pot Creamy Chicken + Rice (twice, actually), Salmon/Potato/Green Bean Sheet Pan Bake, Biscuits and Sausage Country Gravy, Cinnamon Apple Baked Oatmeal

In the Yard

A lot of my efforts this week were focused on inside projects, but Matt did spend a significant portion of his Saturday getting most of the rocks out of our front beds (which we’re going to cover with wood chips instead). There’s a good chance we’re going to need our house ready to list in the next month or two, so we’re trying to tackle the projects both inside and out that would help with that. We are planning to order a huge delivery of wood chips to cover many of our beds (especially the areas where there were already wood chips before), and we’ll start calling around for estimates on that probably this week.

I made an appointment with a local lawn care company to come this week and spray for weeds and to do a lawn treatment, which should help our curb appeal significantly. The weeds haven’t all died down yet, but it already looks a bit better, and I feel like our lawn already looks better too, even though it’s only been a couple days. (It helps that they spot-sprayed all the dandelions we had coming up.) We have another lawn treatment scheduled in a few more weeks.

Even though the offer we made on a house this week fell through, it has still made me hesitate to make too many garden plans for our current yard. We’ve already planted the majority of our vegetables, but I was going to try sowing carrots and maybe radishes this year, except now I don’t feel there’s much of a point. If a move is at least three months out, we might be able to harvest *some* things, but by then we’ll probably be so busy with moving that we won’t even have time to do much with it.

Or who knows? Maybe we’ll find a job here and stay exactly where we are.

At any rate, we’ll have to learn to conserve our limited energy and time for the “curb appeal” projects and limit how much time we need to spend on anything else right now.

Blooming This Week: All the lilacs still, more of the columbine (some of which is somehow coming up in the middle of our lawn?), this funky blue-ish purple spiky flower (pictured above) that I can never remember the name of (I think it’s called Mountain something maybe…), and yellow and white tulips. Our peonies have buds on them, and a whopping ONE of our plethora of irises has a bud on it.

In the Playroom

Now that Hyrum is more or less sleep trained (we still need to sometimes rewrap him or put in the binky at night, but I’m no longer needing to feed him), our next thing to work on with him is to get him used to eating solids. My first try a few weeks ago was a total fail, and then our second try this last week took a looooong time—about an hour to go through a half jar (and that’s of the little-size jars!). But by the third try last night, he had gotten significantly better at not automatically thrusting it out with his tongue and of opening his mouth when the spoon came close, and he polished off the rest of the jar in about 15 minutes. Progress! (We’re also hoping that since we fed him pears, that will help with some of his constipation issues.)

Hyrum turned 5 months old on Monday, and he is developing some little fat rolls, which is adorable. He’s still really small for his age (last we checked, he wasn’t showing up on the charts even when you adjusted for the fact he was born a month early), but he’s a healthy, growing boy all the same! He’s started to eat between 4 and 5 ounces of pumped milk per feeding, and he usually takes 2-3 naps a day and then sleeps a good 11ish-hour stretch at night, as long we’re quick to put the binky in. He’s basically almost always been able to roll over from tummy to back (since he was about 4 days old), but now he’s doing it with a bit more control. He’s also started doing the “clock walk” on both his belly and back, where he moves himself around in a slow circle as he tries to move around and grab at things. He’s overall a very happy baby and loves to smile at everyone.

Mathias seemed to be teething again this week. His teeth have come in very strangely—he got his two-year molars well before any of the teeth in between filled in, and he still just has the four two-year molars and then huge gaps between those and his front teeth. However, he does seem to be getting a few more (and has been more whiny than normal this week as a result). My one-on-one time with him was to go out in the backyard and do some bubbles, but he kept getting frustrated because the wind was blowing like crazy so that he couldn’t “catch” any of them. So we ended up going on a little walk, where he proceeded to fall down multiple times but where he still didn’t want to hold my hand or have me pick him up at any point. Tough kid. We did find a bird’s nest on our little jaunt, though I was more excited about it than he was—he just wanted to point out all the cars and walk down to see our neighbor’s gigantic trailer parked at the end of our street.

Raven was especially excited for her one-on-one time because I painted her nails, which she absolutely loves doing. I used to be able to keep up on having my toenails painted all the time (even if I didn’t love doing it), but since having my second and especially my third children, it has fallen low on my priority list. So it was nice that we both had fresh toes for the weekend!

So we took that 3-hour drive down south to look at houses on Friday, and we were a little nervous as to how the kids would handle a total of 7+ hours in the car throughout the day, but we lucked out! All three of them handled the drive like champs and traded their time napping, watching movies on the tablet, listening to an audiobook, or playing with toys or looking at books. We only had one small stretch of about 20 minutes in which the baby was crying, but other than that, it was as stress-free a drive as we could have hoped for.

Raven was particularly sad that we didn’t get the house we put an offer on, but hopefully there will be other houses we like just as much.

In the Home

I’ve been working on various systems for staying on top of clutter and mess better so that whether we list our house in two weeks or two months, we’ll have an easier time of keeping the house in showing-ready state. What that’s looked like so far is transferring a lot of the kids’ toys downstairs (and donating some), getting into more of a cleaning routine every day, and purging, purging, purging where we can. I absolutely want to move the most minimal amount of stuff I can get away with, and since when the time comes to list, the time to purge will largely be over (because we’ll be in crunch mode), I figured I’d better start now.

Our local donation center cannot open fast enough because the boxes are accumulating in our garage at an impressive (or disturbing, depending on how you look at it), rate!

I’m also making mental note of what still needs to be done, and I’m starting to list things on our local classified ad that I think are worth the time, which should help clear things out more. We still have a daunting amount left before the house could even be close to ready, but by working on it bit by bit each day, I’m at least making visible progress.

In the Soul

Even though I knew it would be a long shot for us to get that house we put an offer on, I’ve still been a bit down about it ever since. It was the only house we’d found (after looking online for several months now) that made us actually excited about a move, and now we feel like we’re back to square one—not sure if we’re going to need to rent or just buy a house we don’t like as much to sell in a couple years, or whether we want to throw ourselves more into a job search and stay up here. For a few glorious hours on Friday, there was the delicious anticipation and adrenaline of What Could Be, and then afterwards? Just exhaustion.

We do feel confident that something will work out for us—that we’ll come to an arrangement that we know is best for our family right now. I guess I just wish I had more clarity now of what that arrangement actually WAS, but if there’s anything our life experiences have taught us over the past several years, it’s patience, so we’ll keep exercising more of that.

We’ll keep you posted!

P. S. If you’re trying to grow more vegetables and other crops this year and could use some high-quality education to help you maximize your space, learn how to preserve your harvest, and much more, there’s an awesome deal going on right now for the Gardening and Sustainable Living Bundle, where you can get access to several online classes, ebooks, printables, and more for just $19.97. The deal is limited though, so make sure you get your bundle quick!

When planning when we would get married, Matt and I didn’t really think about anything other than getting married as soon as we could swing it, which meant getting married the Saturday after taking our college finals for the semester. What we didn’t realize was that having May 7th as our anniversary would mean that our anniversary, my mother-in-law’s birthday (on the 6th), and Mother’s Day would always fall right next to each other. It basically guarantees a really busy week every year, but it also guarantees a really exciting one!

Here’s how that week looked this year.

Note: There are affiliate links below to products mentioned, which means I may get a small commission on any purchases made through these links at no extra cost to you.

In the Kitchen

The warmer it gets outside, the more my motivation for cooking seems to plummet. This week I only made three dinners: The other nights we made something quick/easy (like cheesy toast for the kids and nachos for us), Matt and I went out to Texas Roadhouse on Thursday for our 9th anniversary, and then we got takeout from Cafe Sabor on Friday (mostly because I felt bad that Texas Roadhouse’s gluten-free options were not great and wanted Matt to have a restaurant meal he’d actually really enjoy).

We still have a ton of food in the house from my monthly grocery haul at the first of the month, so I should definitely be okay not to go grocery shopping until late next week as planned (and even then, that will only be for milk, bread, and probably bananas). One of these months, I’ll probably try challenging myself to literally just grocery shop on one day (and freeze enough milk and bread for the whole month) and see what I think. Just the simple act of staying out of the stores saves us so much money, since I can’t make any impulsive purchases if I don’t enter the store to begin with!

We haven’t busted out the grill officially yet (aka, it’s out on the back patio but we haven’t used it this season yet), but I think this next week would be a good start. We should really start bringing back our Friday night grill nights eating alfresco in the yard, since the kids would totally love that (and Matt and I would too, naturally). Guess that means I should probably start looking at good gluten-free recipes for the grill instead of just Instant Pot stuff all the time 🙂

On the Menu this Week: Instant Pot 3-Bean Enchilada Casserole, Weeknight Beef Tacos (from America’s Test Kitchen Baby + Toddler Cookbook, Instant Pot Tandoori Chicken (again)

In the Yard

My mom has always taught me to plant all my annuals, vegetables, and non-hardy plants over Mother’s Day weekend (since we usually don’t get any hard frosts after that point), so Thursday night as part of our anniversary date, Matt and I went to the local garden nursery to pick up the vegetables and flowers we’re putting in this year. We would have considered putting them in the ground that same night, but the nightly temperatures were predicted to be in the mid-30’s, so we decided to wait until Saturday when the temps got a bit warmer. Even with us probably moving this year, we will likely be around for the next 3 or 4 months at least, so we figured we were good to plant some vegetables with maturity dates less than 90 days away (we tried not to go above 80), and we only picked up a few annuals to fill in some bare patches rather than stock up on yet more perennials and bulbs like we normally would.

In the raised beds, we planted six different tomato plants (half funky heirloom varieties and then an Early Doll, Yellow Brandywine, and Rapunzel Cherry), an eggplant on accident (it had the same name as a zucchini plant we were eyeing–Black Beauty–so we thought we’d gotten a zucchini plant instead, which necessitated Matt having to make a second trip back the next day), the zucchini plant he went back for, two pole bean plants, two different varieties of cucumbers, four mild yellow sweet peppers and one green bell pepper, and four red cabbages (mostly because Matt thinks they’re cool-looking). We also planted some salvia and bush (non-tuber, annual) dahlias in our front pots and in a few other areas that needed some filling in.

We have at least three (seemingly) well-established snap pea plants coming up that we direct sowed the other week, and we noticed this week that our peony transplants from spring 2019 have buds on them this year for the first time (hooray!) and that our hostas, which we didn’t think had made it, have both come up again. The verdict is still out on the big fern we planted in between them in that shady bed on the north side of our house, but we’ll keep our fingers crossed, especially because the delphinium, foxglove, and hollyhocks that we planted in the same place are looking great.

Other things on the chore list that finally got done (pretty much mostly by Matt): mowing the lawn for the first time this year, repotting the indoor spider plant we bought the other month, cleaning out the chicken coop, and a decent amount of weeding.

Blooming This Week: More tulips (yellow, white, more pink + purple); all the lilacs; a couple of the columbine plants (pink, purple)

In the Playroom

My one-on-one goals with each kid were a bit hit and miss this week. However, the big goal was to start sleep training Hyrum, which we made a TON of progress on! He’s been sleeping in his bouncer since he was born because it helped him with his reflux enormously, and then Matt and I have taken it in shifts to sleep out on the couch by his bouncer so that the other spouse can get an uninterrupted stretch of sleep while in our bedroom. Hyrum had just been waking up once per night (usually around 3:30 a.m.) for awhile, so we wanted to see if we could push him to go the full night. And with only a few little hiccups (like needing to rewrap him in the middle of the night a few times at the beginning of the week), we were able to do it! The next step we’ve attempted over the past two nights is transitioning him to sleeping flat on his back in the pack ‘n play in our room with both of us in there with him. The first night (Saturday night) was a little rough, but last night he did pretty well!

My original one-on-one goal with Hyrum was to start him on solids this week, but with the sleep training, I didn’t feel like starting two major things at once. So we’ll be waiting a bit on that! (Hyrum is officially 5 months old as of today (5/11), so if we need, we can still wait a month before doing this.)

My goal with Mathias was to do some drawing with sidewalk chalk with him, but he wanted to do that for all of 60 seconds before wanting to go try something else. I’m thinking that I’ll probably alternate my goals with Mathias to be more structured things (like teaching him a skill or working on a particular activity) with just having one-on-one free time that he dictates.

With Raven, my goal was to get back into the habit of doing our read-alouds of longer books together, since we’d kind of fallen out of doing it over the past few weeks. So last week we finished Magic Tree House #1, and then we also started Magic Tree House #2. I also checked out some books from the Frog and Toad series from the library to read together when we’re done with the second Magic Tree House.

This last week was particularly fun for the kids since Grandma (my mom) came up on Thursday to watch them so Matt and I could go out for our anniversary (and try out socially distanced restaurant dining!), and then we all went down to see two of their sets of grandparents (my mom and stepdad and Matt’s parents) on Sunday for Mother’s Day, and they LOVED being able to play with a few of their cousins again.

I’ve been reading the book Free-Range Kids over the past week, and as a result, I’ve been consciously trying to relax the reins a bit, especially with Raven. Basically if she asks me for something and it’s something she can reasonably do herself, I’ve been having her do it, including pouring things like milk or syrup by herself. (Or, if I need something while tending to one of her brothers and she can help, I’ll ask her to, even if it’s something I normally wouldn’t ask her to do.) Sometimes she gets frustrated and just wants me to do it because she knows it will be faster, but I’ve been pretty firm and have had her try multiple times before stepping in. Once she gives her full attention and effort, she’s usually able to figure stuff out. I feel like it’s been a big confidence boost for her, and it’s also started to save me lots of time and effort as well!

In the Home

As I mentioned, my mom came up on Thursday so Matt and I could go out for our anniversary that night, but she also stayed overnight and then watched the kids in the morning on Friday so I could get some sorting done that I needed to. We’re fortunate to both have older siblings who are done having kids, which means that we get a LOT of hand-me-downs. This is awesome on so many levels, but it does mean that at almost any given moment, I have bags and bags of clothes that need to be sorted by size and then put away into bins. At the beginning of last month, I believe we had 12 bags or bins of clothes from other people that I needed to go through, and I only managed to get to one in the whole month of April. On Friday, I managed to power my way through four more with my mom here, which at least made a sizable dent.

Since the likelihood of us moving is high, I’m trying to go through and sort things in general to try and get rid of as much stuff as possible before we would need to pack everything up. I currently have five big boxes in the garage ready to be donated to the local thrift store (whenever it reopens again), and I anticipate that the pile of boxes to donate will only grow in the weeks to come, especially as my energy levels will overall be higher once the baby is consistently sleeping through the night.

In the Soul

My heart was glad this week, and I felt grateful for so many reasons—grateful to be celebrating 9 years of marriage with my best friend and perfect (for me) partner, grateful to have the social distancing guidelines in the state eased up enough that we could spend time with our families (finally!) this week, grateful for the little victories, like that I was able to put down an extra $200 this month to paying off our van early.

Mother’s Day or not, I’m always grateful for the blessing of being able to be the mom to our 3 beautiful children, but it’s always nice to have an extra reminder to really soak it up and consciously give thanks for the blessing of motherhood. We have hard moments and hard days and slogs through spit up and poopy diapers and tantrums and lots of interrupted sleep at night like anyone else, but we also have countless joys mixed in each day, like baby smiles and cuddles and coos, and Mathias starting to play the same “Hug Game” like his big sister used to and bringing his toys and stuffed animals to make the baby feel better (without being asked to), and Raven endlessly being my reliable helper, my source of hilarious (and insightful) commentary throughout each day, and the most empathetic 5-year-old you’ve ever met.

And I’m so thankful every day for Matt, who is truly one of the greats. Did you know that for every single anniversary (as well as for multiple birthdays and Mother’s Days), he has written me a card, letter, or poem? Other people may prefer flowers or breakfast in bed or some other gesture, but for me, those written words of love are really all that I want (though I never say no to chocolate!). And Matt’s the kind of guy that doesn’t just save all those words of affirmation and love and gratitude for the Big Days of the year. Nope! This man tells me EVERY SINGLE DAY that he loves me, that he appreciates me, and that he is grateful for me and all I do. Marrying him was the best decision I ever made, because it’s led to all the other greatest blessings I enjoy.

Our life together isn’t always easy (because that’s just how life is!), but it is always, ALWAYS good.

Hope you had a good Mother’s Day weekend, and I wish you all the best in the week ahead!

Well, we made it to May. April *kind* of feels like it both didn’t exist and like it existed TOO MUCH, if you know what I mean. (I’m sure you do.) Here in Northern Utah, the statewide pandemic restrictions lifted this week so that many businesses saw a “soft opening” on the 1st, like dine-in options, gyms, etc. (all with precautions, of course), and now the group gathering has been extended to include up to 20 people, rather than the 10 it was before. In our particular county, the numbers have looked especially good over the past week and a half or so—multiple days in a row without new cases, no community spread, etc. Life hasn’t looked much different for us yet as a result of all this, but we do have a few things coming up this next week that are indicators of the slight let-up, like my mom coming to babysit the kids on Thursday so that Matt and I can go out for our anniversary, and a little get-together on Mother’s Day with our immediate families next Sunday.

I know we’re far from being back to “normal,” but boy, are we extra excited for these get-togethers coming up! (even if they won’t involve many hugs!)

Note: There are affiliate links to products mentioned below, which means I may get a small commission on any purchases made at no extra cost to you.

In the Kitchen

We officially had to turn on the A/C this week (since I draw the line at the house being 80 degrees!), which also means that I’m officially entering into that stage where I have to really think, “How much do I want this?” before turning on the oven. We did decide that a few things made the cut–pumpkin chocolate chip muffins, monster cookies (naturally gluten-free!), blueberry baked oatmeal, and the breakfast casserole recipe from last week that we liked so much–but from now on, I’m getting even more freakishly devoted to making things in my Instant Pot (and slow cooker, when I can plan ahead that far), as well as utilizing our big skillet/griddle.

I did my big grocery shopping run this week, like I do every month. Basically, I drop 90% of our grocery/household budget in the first day or two of the new month, and then we only go to the store a couple times later in the month for milk and fresh produce (and try to keep those trips to around $20-25). My goal this month is to just see if I can go once more in the month of May, probably around the 20th or so. I noticed while grocery shopping that there is a definite shortage on meat, so I ended up buying some protein sources I normally don’t as much (salmon, sausage). I usually meal plan on a weekly basis, but because I only intend to go on that one super small grocery run later in the month (instead of going on 2-3 small grocery runs as needed), I tried something new–rather than planning out a weekly menu, I just came up with 22 dinner ideas based on ingredients we had on hand, and I can pick and choose from the list at will as I go through the month. In last week’s Homestead Weekly, you might remember I talked about making a weekly menu blueprint (aka, soup on Mondays, Mexican on Tuesdays, etc.), but I ultimately decided to look at protein sources we had on hand and then combine that with as many non-oven meals as possible to come up with my list of 22. Our menu is still rice-heavy, but that’s okay–it’s about the only gluten-free base option that’s super cheap, it seems! (I’m kidding, but kind of not.)

The list of 22 dinner ideas includes several meatless options, six Instant Pot dinners (one of which I’ve made already), four recipes from the cookbook of the month as part of my Cook Your Shelves challenge, and four entrees that definitely count as ‘breakfast for dinner.’

It’s a little too early to say for sure, but I think I’m going to prefer this monthly way of doing menu planning rather than weekly, as it makes an allowance for the fact that I’m a bit of a “mood cook” (aka, sometimes I want to put in an hour of work to make something special, but sometimes I’m only willing to put in about 10 minutes of hands-on prep). I’ll have to let you know come June how it works over the course of the whole month.

On the Menu this Last Week: Ham-Fried Rice, Breakfast Casserole (again), Instant Pot Creamy Tomato Chicken over Rice, Baked Blueberry Oatmeal with Fruit Salad + Fresh Whipped Cream, Instant Pot Tandoori Chicken + Broccoli over Rice

In the Yard

We transplanted out our second set of seedlings this week, and they actually look great!!! It’s a miracle!!! We have had almost zero success with successfully transplanting seedlings outside up to this point (like I said last week, I plan to do a post on our garden failures at some point in the near future), so it was really exciting that almost none of them have died yet, and that they almost all look really healthy. We transplanted lettuce, lemon balm, verbascum (a flower), and lots and lots of snapdragons. Other than a couple snapdragons which were already looking sad to begin with, everything else (thus far) seems to be thriving. I’m going out daily to water them and check on their progress, and each day they’re still alive feels like a little miracle, ha ha.

I also direct sowed a few things this week, too–Shirley poppies, sweet peas (the flower), and snap peas (the vegetable). You might remember that we had transplanted both kinds of peas out about a month ago, but literally nothing survived. We do have one snap pea plant coming up already, and *maybe* a sweet pea, but I can’t be sure. I just put those in Monday, so it’s still a bit early, but hopefully over this next week we’ll see what kind of success we’ve had.

Our weeds are growing at an alarming rate, so we thought we’d test out the new chicks’ grazing ability this week. We’re currently keeping our six new chicks (which aren’t really chicks anymore) in the garage until they’re old enough to be introduced into the coop, so this was their first excursion into the Big, Wide World. I think it blew their little chicken minds—they walked around clearly bewildered and only thought about pecking around for food right when we were about to take them back in, after about an hour or so. Oh, well. At least they got some sunshine and exercise.

I’m in the process of calling around to find the best price for a local company to do a lawn + weed treatment package for us, as our lawn is being overrun with dandelions and the weeds, as always, are trying to take over the world. Cache Valley locals–do you have any suggestions?

This morning I had Matt cut some of our tulips that were blooming in the chicken’s patch and bring them inside. I figured that none of us could really enjoy them out in that corner of the yard, so why not? Plus, since we’re doing a cutting garden for me this year, I figured we’d better get used to actually cutting flowers since it’s so tempting to just leave them outside since they look so pretty 🙂 But although I usually go outside at least once (if not multiple times) a day to look at our gardens, there’s just something about having fresh flowers in the house that brings an even bigger boost to my spirit, probably just because I see them so much more frequently.

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Matt’s work gifted us the most beautiful pot of succulents this week as a way of saying sorry that they’re adding more stress to our life because of the company moving. I literally know nothing about succulents, but as this is probably the prettiest living arrangement I’ve ever been given, I’m determined to figure out how to keep them alive for the long term!

Blooming this Week: More tulips! (including our new double tulips that look like peonies and many in our white/purple/pink garden beds up front (see above pic)); apple tree blossoms; grape hyacinths + forsythia (still!)

In the Playroom

I continued with the challenge I set myself last week of scheduling one-on-one time with each kid during the week (and actually putting it on my to-do list), so here are this week’s mini dates:

Raven got lucky in that she tends to have more one-on-one time with me because 1) she demands it, and 2) her two brothers both sleep in the afternoons, which gives us a natural opportunity on most days (as long as I’m not napping myself, that is!). This week, she helped me make new recipes for gluten-free pumpkin chocolate chip muffins and monster cookies, we decorated sugar cookies that a neighbor had graciously made for us as a fun at-home activity to do together, and we played Candyland. You can definitely still tell she’s the only one that has known life without a sibling though, because she totally bawled when she heard I was going to go on a little date with just Mathias and had serious FOMO about not being able to come. Or maybe it’s just a five-year-old thing.

Mathias and I went on a little nature walk to the nearby park, just the two of us. I let him set the pace and the general direction, and he loved having the chance to point things out to me (airplane! bird! bawk bawk! (chickens)). He particularly loved running across the newly built basketball courts, which he’d never been to before. Everything was deserted and quiet, and we had the chance to enjoy the breeze, listen to the birds chirp, and pick lots and lots of dandelions (for the bawk bawks). He had no interest in climbing the grassy hill, but I could definitely tell he relished everything else.

With Hyrum, we worked every day together on helping him sit up by himself. He can already roll from his tummy to back (and has been doing so for most of his life, crazily enough), and he’s getting quite close to being able to do it from back to front as well. He can sit up for a few seconds by himself before keeling over, which the other kids think is hilarious. He also hit a BIG milestone last night–he slept through the night from 8:30 – 7:30 this morning! It was glorious. One of my monthly goals for May is to sleep train him, so this is a great start, especially considering we haven’t even “officially” started yet!

Other fun things: We went on some walks as a family, put on the sprinkler in the backyard for the kids to run through, watched Mathias eat mud (twice), started watching Onward together for our family movie night (which we’ll finish tomorrow), and had some family pics taken by a neighbor who’s a photographer who offered to do a “Front Porch Portrait” for free. I’m excited to see how they turned out!

In the Home

Hmmm…did I do anything productive in our home this week? Above and beyond the normal do-the-dishes-daily and try-to-pick-up-after-the-kids and do-laundry-endlessly thing?

Not really.

I vacuumed our basement. I cleared some of the books off my nightstand and put them downstairs (sure, it was just to make room for MORE books from the library, but still). I put away about half of the groceries from my gigantic grocery haul this weekend (ha!). Yeah, I didn’t do much inside this week. I really need to step up my game, especially if we end up needing to sell our house here soon—might as well try and make the workload lighter by frontloading some of the stuff now.

In the Soul

There were parts of this week that were really hard (again)–where the endless repetition of day after day of feeling cooped up with few options just got to me. Generally on those days, if I was able to squeeze in a short nap in the afternoon when the two youngest napped, I felt significantly better.

I’ve also realized something really important lately–I know “self care” is a buzzy word right now, but I’m starting to internalize the importance of it. One thing I’ve realized since having our third kid is that if I didn’t advocate for it or make time for it, there would be many days when I wouldn’t get any time for myself at all. And while I can handle that *sometimes*, I know for a fact that as an introvert, I can’t handle it for long, at least not if I want to be able to function at my best.

For awhile, self care just felt like one more thing to do, and that made it unappealing. Sure, I knew I should be exercising more, but just the thought of trying to squeeze it in (usually late, after the kids were in bed and I’d studied my scriptures) was exhausting. So I usually wasn’t doing it. And sure, I knew I shouldn’t be eating so many sweets during the day. But I was doing it because I felt like I didn’t have the time to eat real meals–like I was so busy taking care of everyone else that I couldn’t even find time to eat. In other words, I have developed a lot of bad habits that have come about because of a lack of taking the time necessary to take care of my own basic needs.

So I’ve started doing baby steps.

It started with me getting dressed in real clothes every day. Now, I’ve been a stay-at-home mom for four years now, and let’s just say that unless I had somewhere I knew I was going outside of the house, I usually didn’t get dressed. But I changed all that a couple weeks ago–I started getting dressed every day. Putting on makeup every day. Doing my hair every day.

Then I realized I literally had one pair of pants that fit and very few other options of what to wear with them, which I hadn’t noticed before because, well, I wasn’t getting dressed in real clothes every day. So I ended up spending $150 on clothes for myself in the past couple weeks, which is more than I’ve spent on clothes for me in about 3 years (combined). And you know what? It felt great! It felt great to start taking that time in the morning to make myself feel a bit more polished and ready to take on the day!

So then I started deciding that instead of stressing myself out by making exercise into this Big, Sweaty Thing, I just set the goal to get 5,000 steps a day. And while it hasn’t made any difference on the scale in helping me to shed the last of the pregnancy pounds, it’s at least gotten me into the mindset that exercise doesn’t have to be an all or nothing thing–a sweat-fest or a couch-fest. It can just be something in the middle, and that’s good too.

And all these little victories meant that I realized I needed time to work on personal projects (uninterrupted!), so I told Matt that I needed him to take the kids for two hours (minimum) every week so that I could work on things like blogging or photography or my own personal goals with zero interruptions. And something that’s been really fun about that? As someone who is so used to having to cram any amount of productivity in wherever I can, I now know that I can get a LOT done in those two hours! It’s a glorious, glorious thing.

So, self care. It’s a work in progress, but it’s progress that seems to be working!