June 2020

The last two weeks have been insane. I mean, I know it’s only a precursor of what’s to come, but it’s still been insane.

Nearly two weeks ago, on Monday night, we got word from our realtor that he had someone that wanted to come see our house before it was put on the market. He thought our house might be just what she was looking for. The only problem? She was here from out of state and would have to look at it on Wednesday. That basically left us 24 hours to get the house as ready as possible for a showing, and trust me, we needed a lot more time than that to get it looking how I wanted it to!

Tuesday we accidentally slept in (of course), which is also insane since the baby almost never sleeps past 6:30 or so, and of course, the one day we wouldn’t have minded getting an earlier start, he doesn’t wake up until 8 and Matt’s alarm somehow didn’t go off, either. I had been hoping Matt would be able to help me knock out a few quick projects in the morning, but that wasn’t going to work out, so it was just me vs. the clock all that day. I’ll admit, Disney+ totally babysat my older two kids all day, and luckily Hyrum was pretty easy, which allowed me to focus almost all my attention on clearing clutter, vacuuming floors, washing windows, and at least somewhat trying to stage the house. Matt helped me as much as he could once he got home from work, and by the time we both collapsed into bed, exhausted, the house looked a million times better.

The buyer came the next day, and everything went great–she loved the house, she wanted to meet us, and she said she wanted to make an offer. We were elated! We were going to avoid the whole hassle of having to put the house on the market and do multiple showings and possibly wait weeks!

Then, inexplicably, she changed her mind. We have no idea why.

We hadn’t been planning on putting the house on the market until the beginning of July, but since we had already gotten it close to ready, we decided to bump up our list date by a week. We got word from our realtor that Wednesday was the day the photographer would come to take pictures for the listing (the Wednesday of this last week, so a week later than when the potential buyer came), so Tuesday we went into major crunch mode. My mom was miraculously able to come up with almost zero notice (bless her!), and she helped us knock out one of the biggest projects on our list–putting a fresh coat of paint on the front door and redoing some of the door hardware, as well as cleaning up the rosebush in the front and weeding all the beds, which greatly enhanced curb appeal. Matt redid all the grout in the bathrooms around the tub and showers, and we were shocked at what a HUGE difference that made–they almost look like new again! As for me, I packed, cleaned, and staged, all while trying to keep the kids fed and out from underfoot.

All said and done, we felt like we pulled off a small miracle when the house and yard were almost totally ready by the time the photographer came (and the projects that weren’t really wouldn’t matter since they wouldn’t show up in pictures). Thursday and Friday had us doing last-minute staging and cleaning, and by the time Saturday rolled around, we took off to spend the day with our parents while the house had nearly back-to-back showings for the majority of the day.

So lemme tell you, IT HAS BEEN CRAZY OVER HERE.

In the Kitchen

Let me introduce you to my super gourmet secret for a quick breakfast, lunch, and dinner–Le Cèréal. Only mildly filling and a bit bland, it can be spiced up with sliced bananas if you so choose, though that won’t prevent you or your kids from cram-eating cheese balls (the rip-off Cheetohs) until the next meal.

Honestly, I feel like my diet hasn’t been this bad since college—I was too crazed to keep eating gluten-free this past week, so I majorly cheated on sticking to that diet (thankfully my autoimmune disease seems to have maybe gone into remission during the 3 or so weeks I went off of it completely?), and I basically polished off a bag of Tootsie Rolls Midgees almost totally by myself in under a week (quantity = 360 pieces). I’ve been guzzling Diet Dr. Pepper like it’s my job, and the two pounds I’d lost since going off gluten came back with a smug sneer.

This two week binge of eating junk, sweets, and convenience foods has had me googling how to meal prep salads for the week and looking up meal prep containers on Amazon (aff link). While I will probably make do with the Tupperware we already have, I am planning on ordering the Damn Delicious Meal Prep cookbook (aff link), which is written by one of my favorite food bloggers (and which I was planning on buying eventually anyway).

On the Menu the Last Two Weeks (other than takeout): breakfast egg “muffins,” baked oatmeal, Instant Pot Mexican Ground Beef Casserole, 10-Minute Prep Chicken + Rice (made with homemade GF version of the “cream of” soups), and lots of our favorite go-to quick dinner–corn tortillas with melted cheese, avocados, and hot sauce

In the Yard

Can I just say “everything” and be done with it?

I will say, it is amazing how much you can do when a hard and fast deadline is staring you in the face. Over the past two weeks, we pruned the shrubs and the big rosebush, covered all the beds with a fresh layer of mulch/wood chips, weeded like crazy, and de-rocked the front beds.

All the curb appeal work aside, it’s been astonishing to watch how much the garden has taken off the past two weeks. We now are starting to see the first of the tomatoes, zucchini, snap peas, and blackberries, and I imagine the green beans aren’t far behind. Our red cabbage plants are “hunormous” (a word Raven uses that mixes “huge” and “enormous”), and I’ve been using fresh herbs for multiple meals, especially the cilantro.

Remember all the snapdragons we grew from seed and transplanted? They’re starting to bloom this week! I was especially eager to harvest those since I’ve heard that the more you harvest the blooms, the more they produce. So I cut a very country-looking bouquet from the garden this morning of yarrow, flax, a silvery foliage I don’t know the name of, and our first snapdragon right in the center.

Blooming This Week: roses, bellflowers, delphinium, snapdragons, Asiatic lily, daylilies, the last of the salvia, columbine, Mexican primrose, the last of the foxglove

Harvesting This Week: raspberries, cilantro, oregano, lettuce

In the Playroom

Even though the kids have had more screen time the last two weeks than they’ve had for their whole lives combined (at least that’s what it feels like), we’ve also had some good old fashioned fun squeezed in among all the work on the house.

Last week, Mathias turned two and we had ourselves a little party with grandparents. Matt got off work a couple hours early so we could take the kids to the park for the first time since the pandemic hit. It was the first time Mathias had been to the park since he learned how to walk, and man, that kid is adventurous! I loved how fearless he was, just trying out everything and climbing up the slides (even the highest) with no reservations. It felt so GOOD to be outside all together, doing something for the pure fun of it and without having to worry about the house for a couple hours.

I’ve also tried to balance the days when the kids hardly get any attention or fun with more “normal” days, which included pulling out our kiddie pool one afternoon this week, which also gave me time to finish up an overdue library book. On Saturday, since we had back-to-back showings of the house, we packed the kids off to spend time with my mom, who brought out her own pool (and had the water sitting out for hours beforehand so it was preheated and everything!) and spoiled us and the kids with root beer floats and popsicles and dinner and naps. We also had an impromptu lunch of Chinese food with Matt’s parents, so all in all, it was a great way to unwind a bit after a very stressful week.

All the kids had their well-check appointments with our pediatrician one last time before the move, and I decided that for everyone’s sanity, I would transition Hyrum to having formula during the day so that I would only have to pump twice, once first thing in the morning and once right before he went to sleep for the night. He was starting to get stressed having to wait all that time in the day for me to pump a bottle, and I was getting stressed having him scream the whole time (not to mention how time-consuming it was). Already I feel like it’s helped him to put on weight the past couple weeks, too. I was proud of myself for basically pumping exclusively for over 6 months, but this new change really has been the best thing for us both. As far as the other two kids, Raven remains our only “average” child when it comes to height and weight, but the good news is that Mathias went from the 2nd percentile to the 9th in weight and from the 1st to the 3rd in height. And Hyrum? He finally showed up on the charts! Sure, he only shows up when you adjust his age (and is only the 1st percentile), but he didn’t even show up when you did that before!

#progress

In the House

I’ve decided that although the house LOOKS great for showings, this level of expectations and tidiness is unnatural. It’s weird having to keep our shampoo under the bathroom sink rather than in the shower, and although it LOOKS much nicer to have our dish drying pad put away, it sure is inconvenient to be constantly pulling it out and stashing it back away.

We currently have about a third of our house packed up (maybe a little more), and since we’re now zoning in on our move-out date in a few weeks, I’ll start packing up a few boxes every day to make it less overwhelming. The whole packing process is much trickier this time around because we’re probably moving in with my mom and stepdad for a month or two and then renting down in Sanpete once the business moves, so I’m going to have to come up with some sort of packing system so we know what will need to be put in storage, what we’ll need when we’re renting but not while living at my parents’ place, etc. That’s on my to-do list for this next week—figure out packing, labeling, and storing. Oh, and how on earth we’re going to move our chicken coop.

As I’ve been staging the house to sell, I’ve hit the conclusion that so many others have come to–Why on EARTH didn’t we do all this before?! It’s a sad irony that your house always looks the best right before it’s about to belong to someone else, and it makes me want to just try out new things more in the future without worrying about things looking “perfect.”

In the Soul

This was the first week that the reality that we’re moving started to hit. I hadn’t even had time to think much about the emotional side of it, but when our realtor (who is a close friend of ours) knocked on the door to get a spare house key from us for a lockbox and I saw the For Sale sign in front…my heart squeezed inside me. I’ve long come to terms with the fact that we’re moving (I’ll admit, I was pretty upset/mad about the idea for several weeks), and lately I’ve even been getting excited for a new adventure. But the start of every new chapter must mean that an old one must close necessarily, and man, this chapter of our lives has been good.

Weirdly, the pandemic and all the social distancing has made it easier, just because we’ve seen so little of everyone that it kind of feels like we’ve moved already. We hadn’t planned on living at my parents’ house, but now that the business will be up here for a little longer than we all thought, it makes more sense for us to remain somewhat close until it does, and the thought of living with family and living close by so much family has really softened things too. Of course, that will just make it harder when we move down to Sanpete because then we’ll be FARTHER from family than we ever have been before in our married lives, but two hours is not ridiculously far…at least that’s what I keep telling myself.

All told, I’m doing okay, I think. (I’ve honestly been too busy to be anything else, it feels like.) The next several weeks will be stressful and a huge adjustment and hard, but we also are excited for this next part of our adventure, especially as we’re hoping that we might get our mini homestead for real!

I will try and keep up with posting these weekly at minimum (and I definitely have a ton of future posts planned for when I have more time), but if I don’t, just know that this time is super busy for us and that I’ll be back here as much as I can be 🙂

Each week lately seems to have the amount of reflection and change and decisions and deliberating that you’d usually expect from a half a year, or at the very least a quarter of one. Since so much can change from week to week, I hesitate to say anything with certainty, but at this point, our plan is to put our house on the market at the beginning of July and then rent in the new area for awhile until we figure out more of a life plan (and until we can find the right place, since nothing has felt quite right since that other house we put an offer on).

In this now-rushed timeline, a lot seems to be falling by the wayside–the children are watching movies daily (sometimes two), our plan for Mathias’s birthday coming up this week is very simple, I’ve hardly been reading or working on personal projects at all (including blogging), and I’ve kind of just accepted that I’m going to feel like I’m failing at a lot of things during this (very short) season of getting our house ready for the market.

In the Kitchen

I suppose it’s a good thing in some ways that both Matt and I are eating gluten-free right now, since it’s forced me to keep cooking. If we weren’t, we would definitely have been getting pizza and fast food a lot over the past week. We did eat out once though, on Tuesday–just Matt and I went on a trip down to Central Utah again to look at houses, and on our way back, I insisted we stop by one of my favorite pupuserias in Provo for a late lunch/early dinner. Pupusas are a naturally gluten-free food hailing from El Salvador, which is where I served an 18-month religious mission. Eating them again always takes me right back, and I order them exactly as I ate them down there—one with just queso, a couple with just queso and beans, ample red sauce, and no curtido (not because I don’t like it, but because it was against mission rules to eat it because the lettuce had a high danger of parasites). I always burn my fingers as I dig into the pupusas with my fingers (the only way to eat them), laughing to myself as I remember how the people would always tell me that the dirt on your hands just enhances the flavor. We both ate three, and we both decided that was probably slightly too many now, but oh, it was worth it.

This week, the name of the game was minimal prep and no extra hands-on time in the kitchen, so we went exceedingly simple (with the exception of Sunday breakfast, which I always seem to have more energy for, probably just because I know I have a full day of rest ahead). I even pulled out a “recipe” (if you can call a 3-ingredient dish a recipe) that we hadn’t eaten in years and years for shredded chicken for tacos. Basically, you take two large chicken breasts, 12 ounces jarred salsa, and a 1/4 cup of brown sugar, and you put them all in the Crockpot on low for 6-8 hours. What you end up with is chicken that shreds at the lightest touch, with juices that are slightly sweet but that still provide that familiar tomato-based flavor for tacos. Combined with fresh lettuce from our garden (our first time harvesting any!), fresh cilantro, cheese, and avocados, they were tacos that I feel like we could have sold to people and had some very happy customers.

On the Menu Last Week: salmon + potato sheet pan bake, baked apple oatmeal, salsa chicken tacos, slow cooker breakfast casserole, Instant Pot butter chicken and potatoes + rice, diner-style sweet potato hash + sausage

In the Yard

The major goal this week was adding curb appeal, which largely boiled down to adding a layer of wood chips and filling in some bare spots with annuals. It will also mean pruning down our overzealous shrubs in the front in the next two weeks, as well as our wild rosebush that seems to just grow with even more vigor every time we cut it back.

The wood chips Matt put down over the weekend were a tricky business. We’re still not done with that particular project, but at least we are further along than before. Around here, it seems to cost about $50/cubic yard for quality wood chips, plus a delivery fee. Seeing as we needed about 15 cubic yards, that wasn’t really a viable option. I ended up going online to the KSL classifieds, and I found a guy in Ogden who was willing to deliver a dump truck load (which he claimed was 7 yards, but that seemed more like 4) to our place for $175. We had no idea what to expect from the quality, and sure enough, it was decidedly mixed. The load didn’t cover nearly everything we were needing it to, but it did give us a decent start. At any rate, the yard overall looks better than it did, though far from where we’re wanting it to be on that front.

I found a bunch of annuals on clearance at Walmart, which we used to fill in some of the front beds where the tulips were dying back and where nothing else will be growing when the house is put up for sale. I also swapped out the mixed-color dahlias I had put in the porch pots and planted those elsewhere since I’d regretted the decision ever since I saw how all the colors clashed with the purple and white pansies I’d already planted. Now the front planters have a definite pink-purple-white scheme, and they look a ton better.

One day this week, I was clearing out my vase collection and trying to decide what to keep when I came across a small vase I was on the fence about. I didn’t think it was a good size, but I decided to give it a trial run. Since I’d planted my cutting garden, I had yet to actually harvest anything from it (mostly because a lot of it simply hasn’t bloomed yet or hasn’t done very well), but I changed all that this week. We had a bunch of salvia blooming, and even though the stems aren’t as long as they someday will be once the plant is more established, they were the perfect height for the vase. Since I didn’t have enough to make a real bouquet, I just went around the yard and looked for things to supplement it with. I cut some beardtongue, butterfly bush spires, Jupiter’s beard, and some raspberry bush foliage to round it out, and I think it looked pretty good for a very first attempt at flower arranging!

Blooming This Week: more wild roses plus our one non-wild rose that is alive, foxglove (sooooo pretty right now), beardtongue, butterfly bush, salvia, asters, Mexican primrose, columbine, Jupiter’s beard

In the Playroom

The two older kids had their dentist appointment this week, and while I never worry about Raven doing well (she’s a champ at the dentist! She actually really loves going, actually), I WAS nervous about Mathias. His first dental checkup was 6 months ago, and let’s just say, he did not love it. He’s also getting into that lovely hallmark of toddlerdom, tantrums. And he is LOUD. So I was nervous about how he would react. Sometimes in an unfamiliar situation, he’ll just get shy and quiet and silently cry into my shirt. Other times (usually in slightly more familiar situations), he’ll just flat out scream and have a meltdown.

Raven went into the back to get x-rays and the hygienist decided to clean Mathias’s teeth first, so he didn’t even have a chance to watch Raven go first. We had him lay back on the reclined chair, and then he noticed all the movies on the ceiling…and he thought it was the funniest, most interesting thing ever that there were FOUR different movies all going at once, and they were all up on the ceiling. He was even more delighted when I switched his screen to play Cars, and he didn’t put up a fuss AT ALL–not even when the dentist came by to check for cavities. While Raven got her teeth cleaned (and did equally well), Mathias kept giggling and pointing at all the screens and saying, “Movie!” and then moving his finger to the next screen and shouting “Movie!” again. He also thought the bubbles and lights display they had in there was fascinating. Basically, any bystander would have thought that the dentist’s office was an amusement park for our kids—they thought it was about the most fun way to spend a morning ever. Weird. But I WAS SO RELIEVED! I’m sad that we won’t be around to still have this dentist, just because it’s been so great. In fact, I still let them schedule our kids’ next appointment for December, and a small part of me is tempted to just make a day trip of it. I’m serious, though.

Hyrum turned 6 months old this last week! He is getting much more mobile, rolling both ways and doing the clock walk on his back and reaching for anything he can. Unless he’s hungry, he’s basically the happiest baby ever, and even though he can be extremely hit or miss when it comes to napping and sleeping, I did feel like we finally turned a corner this last week—he finally stuck to a somewhat predictable nap schedule, and there were a couple nights he did really, really well and basically didn’t wake up at all, mostly due to the fact that he’s finally learned to self-soothe a bit. There is hope!

In the House

This week, it’s been all about packing up more stuff and getting the house ready to stage. Although my actual “completed tasks” list for the house is short, I still made a lot of frontloaded progress, meaning that I’ve made decisions about how to stage rooms I was unsure of, I’ve read up a bunch on how to stage a house, and I ordered several things from Amazon and IKEA to bring all that vision to life. (I’m hoping to do a more complete breakdown on what that process has been and what products I’ve ordered on the other blog.)

One thing I’m proud of is how I’ve staged this little bookshelf, which was one of the few things I actually finished this last week. I picked a color scheme–blue/green, cream/yellow–and I unpacked the books that had spines in those colors. Then I gathered a few of the decorative pieces we had lying around and mixed them in there, too. I really like how it looks now! I’ve never taken the time to do anything like this before and never would have if it weren’t for the idea of needing to stage my home, but I’m sold.

In the Soul

There was one day last week when I finally got a really, really good night’s sleep—the baby didn’t wake up during the night (or, if he did, I wasn’t woken up by him), I was actually able to fall asleep quickly (something that’s become pretty rare lately), and I got a solid stretch of probably 8-9 hours. Honestly, I feel like it changed EVERYTHING, at least for that day. Sometimes when you’re so sleep deprived for so long, you don’t realize how much of your day-to-day moods and energy levels are because of that lack of sleep. That day, everything felt easy—it was easy to be patient with the kids, easy to make and clean up after all the meals, easy to fit in plenty of laundry folding and box packing and personal projects. The rest of the time? I feel like I’m just trying to ride out the waves every day—how is it lunchtime already? I should be doing this, that, and that, but I really need to take a nap…Just make myself load the dishwasher and start it before bed so that I’m not overwhelmed in the morning.

That day on full sleep gave me hope. Maybe that hope is a bit premature, yes, but it still gave me hope that I’m somehow going to have the energy and time and alertness to deal with everything we’ll be handling over the next month and a half or so.

In short, my soul is usually just really, really tired, but I manage to go through most days and manage several moments of pure joy with the kids, a few solid belly laughs, a general sense of patience with the tantrums and the whining (unless I’m REALLY tired or stressed…then all bets are off), and the feeling that life is passing by quickly and messily and chaotically, but that’s okay.

How’s your soul feeling lately?

This week was exhausting.

I felt like my well of energy and emotional wellbeing started to become severely depleted by the end of the week, so I tried to take some conscious steps to regroup and recharge. I still don’t feel like I’m operating at full capacity (it would help if the baby would give us a full night’s sleep!), but I’m at least a bit better than I was mid-week, at any rate.

I was ecstatic to see, however, that the weekend forecasted stormy weather and drizzly days. Our summers here are often extremely hot and dry, so I am soaking up these cool rainy days with everything I’ve got and going the full nine yards—hot soup, fresh-baked bread, naps under cozy blankets. Rainy weather is my favorite.

In the Kitchen

Last month I tried something new with menu planning–rather than plan each week’s menu on Sunday night as I did my weekly to-do list, I opened up a new Google Doc and made a list of 23 dinners based on ingredients we already had on hand and then just chose from the list each night based on how I felt and the weather outside. There might be sometimes in the future when weekly planning would serve me better, but for these months when the weather is so up and down and so much of my dinner prep depends on my mood, this system was, in a word, revolutionary. It made it so that I didn’t have to do the 4 o’clock scramble about trying to decide what I could make, but it also meant that I wasn’t groaning when I’d planned a time-intensive meal on a night when I just wasn’t feeling it, or a dinner that required a 450-degree oven on a boiling hot day outside.

I still have yet to do one for June, however, which meant that our dinners this week were not nearly as impressive or as well-thought-out. I do plan to sit down and make one today or tomorrow though, and one major change I’ll make going forward is to actually link the recipes in the Google Doc to their primary source, at least if they’re available online (as opposed to out of one of my cookbooks).

My favorite food blog–Mel’s Kitchen Café–has a series of gluten-free muffins you can make in a blender, and I’ve slowly been making my way through all three of those. We finally made the final one this weekend–this double chocolate banana one–and even though it’s our least favorite of the three, they were still pretty amazing.

Each month I’ve been cooking at least four recipes out of a different cookbook that I own, and June’s cookbook is Whole30 (aff link). We’re not actually doing the whole program, but as the recipes in there are all gluten-free, it will help to simplify things that way.

On the Menu Last Week: springtime penne w/ peas + asparagus, Instant Pot sausage + veggie casserole, baked Amish oatmeal w/ apples, Instant Pot chicken, rice, and kale soup

In the Yard

After a week of hot days and a weekend of drenching rain, our plants are thriving. I noticed when I compared last week’s garden bed pics to this week’s, there was a noticeable difference in pretty much everything. While most of what we’re growing is doing remarkably well at the moment, there are a few notable exceptions–caterpillars or some other bug has been taking greedy gouges out of our cabbage leaves, and our peony buds (which we have been beyond excited about!) seem to be shrinking smaller, and we don’t anticipate we’ll get blooms on them this year. (Any idea on why? This is now the second year this has happened!) We’ve never had much luck with roses in our yard other than the one wild rosebush in front, which is currently blooming (pictured above), and this year, we lost yet another rosebush to who-knows-what. We got blooms on it last year–delicate, antique-looking peach blooms with gilded edges–and then this year, the entire bush is dead: no leaves, nothing. It’s a bit frustrating, but seeing as we’re not likely to be here for too much longer, we’ll just plan on starting again in another place and hoping they fare better there.

On a more positive note, almost everything we direct sowed early last week is coming up, and a few are already a few inches high. All of our plants that we’re trying to train up the arched trellises–cucumbers, beans, peas, sweet peas– are *almost* latching on, and we think that once they do, their growth will likely accelerate. We have blossoms on our blackberry bush (though not nearly as many as usual, not sure why), and I finally glimpsed our first green strawberry.

We also started trying to measure out how many square feet of wood chips we would need to cover everything, and…it’s a LOT. So we might just tell the local company to give us a certain dollar amount worth and then make it work. Once those are in place, we’ll just need to do a good weeding (though it’s not too bad at this point because we’ve been doing a little bit on most days), some pruning around a few of the shrubs that have already flowered for the year, and mow and edge the lawn, and our yard will basically be ready for when we put our house on the market.

Blooming This Week: the first of the roses, foxglove, beardtongue, Mexican primrose, salvia, the last of the Siberian irises, phlox (?), butterfly bush (I think that’s what it is–see the shrub the kids are sniffing at below), Jupiter’s beard, columbine

In the Playroom

Overheard tonight as the kids were in bed: Raven praying with Mathias about whether we should buy a house or build a house, then her waiting to hear the answer and her teaching Mathias how to hear an answer. (“Try to feel it in your heart what we should do…// I feeled it in my heart! I feeled it in my heart that we should build one!”)

Well, apparently we’ll be having her pray about all our major decisions from now on, since our answers rarely seem to come that quickly or that clearly!

Oh, how we love her.

(Of course, if our answer ends up being different than hers…that will be an interesting conversation to have!)

Mathias seems to still be teething (this kid, man—it seems to take him a month to grow one tooth), and so I had a bit of a rough week again just because he wasn’t sleeping well at night or napping as long as usual during the day, and he also was crying a lot of the day (which is not usually how he is). From what we can tell, the new teeth seem to have at least broken through, so maybe it will get a bit easier from hereon out. The older two kids do have their dental checkup this next week, so maybe the dentist will be able to give us some more feedback. (Of course, Mathias’s last time at the dentist–which was his first time–was a bit of a fiasco. Let’s pray it goes more smoothly this time.)

Hyrum finally found his feet today as he was playing on the floor–now I’m just waiting eagerly to get that picture of that first time he puts his toes in his mouth. It’s just my favorite. In other Hyrum news, we had a rough few nights with him. Matt took the brunt of it because he wakes up more easily than I do (so he’s usually the one to reswaddle him, put the binky back in, etc.), but the one night I told Matt to sleep out on the couch so he could finally get a decent stretch of sleep, the baby really wailed, probably because I didn’t respond to the earlier fussing stages like Matt and soothe him back to sleep right away. I keep reminding myself that I won’t feel this tired forever–that he’ll probably be much better in a month or two. But man, sleep deprivation and frequent sleep interruptions are no joke.

In the House

My mom came up Friday afternoon to watch the kids so that Matt and I could go out to dinner and meet with a house-building company to see if we wanted to go that route, and she stayed overnight and spent most of Saturday helping us try to get our house ready to put on the market. I should have taken some before pictures, but we (and by we, I mostly mean my mom) got a lot done, including packing up nearly all of the non-essential stuff in our basement. We still have a couple more solid days of work before we’ll be ready to take pictures and list the house, but it’s at least MUCH less overwhelming than it was before.

I currently have about 10 boxes and garbage bags full to donate to our local thrift store, and it’s always so freeing to just clear everything out. Matt and I were joking that if we don’t miss all the toys we’ve packed up over the next couple months, we should just donate them. It would be instant peace of mind! We’re kind of really considering it, though I know that some of the stuff we’ll want to keep. So very tempting, though…

In the Soul

This week I was weary. There’s just no other word for it. I felt drained on nearly every level, and everything felt much harder as a result. I don’t often wish for certain stages of life to pass quickly, especially because there is SO much that is so sweet about exactly where we’re at in our lives and in our parenting right now, but WOW, it can be exhausting. We would really like to have one or two more children, but this week there were multiple days where I thought, “Maybe we should just stop at three.” Of course, we won’t be making any decisions about that based on just a few hard days, but nevertheless, that was about how this week went.

We went to Factory Homes Outlet on our date on Friday to check out the idea of building a modular home. There is so much about it that appeals, like that we could get a brand-new home with so many updated and beautiful features that we’d love, but there’s also so much to hesitate on there, like that we’d have no yard until we put one in, and that in the end, that would probably be the most expensive route once you calculated the cost of eventually putting in a garage, fencing the yard, putting down sod, etc. But it’s also almost the only way we could afford more of a “real” homestead (meaning a couple acres of land, rather than just a quarter-acre lot). Lots to think about.

This next week, we’re planning to head down south again to look at more houses and then look at a plot of land that we might consider building on. The last time we went down, we made an offer on a house that ended up not being accepted, so who knows what could happen this week? We might be under contract the next time you hear from me! Or we might be exactly where we’re at now, totally unsure about which direction our lives are going to take. Most of the time, the whole thing feels tinged with adventure and the excitement of possibility, except for this week, when it just felt overwhelming.

Here’s hoping we get a little bit more clarity on what to do in the week ahead, though. (Or if nothing else, hopefully I can start looking at it again like a grand adventure.) Wish us luck!

What a week.

Like much of the nation, I’ve found myself thinking deeply this week about what I believe, and about why I believe what I believe. I’ve found myself examining experiences I’ve had over my life and asking myself hard questions–were there times I should have spoken up but didn’t? (Yes.) Were there times I made concerted efforts to speak out against racism and injustice where I saw it? (Also yes.)

I don’t generally talk about politics, mostly just because my personality has always been such that I tend to avoid contention wherever I can. I can usually see both sides of an issue, which is often another reason I remain silent. I’m thankful for the protected right to peacefully protest those things that are unjust, to fight for change, and I pray that the protesting of last week will spark some much-needed policy changes and mental shifts from hereon out. There is no “side” where racism is justified or okay on any level, and enough is enough. I was anxious and upset, however, as I watched the protests both far away and close to here (in Salt Lake City) devolve into violence, vandalism, and looting, and I feared for my brother-in-law, who is a police officer. I was impressed by the way the police force of SLC handled the violent protesters: I was proud to have someone in my family who is an officer that can be respected. I also recognize, however, that not all officers bearing the badge are worthy of respect, and I’m tired of brutality where there doesn’t need to be brutality. To me, everyone deserves to feel safe, both innocent groups of marginalized populations AND police officers and those trying to uphold the laws protecting us.

The truth is, I just have the (perhaps naïve) wish that everyone could just get along—that we could all learn to respect each other, even if we are different and even if we disagree. In an ideal world, we would learn not only to tolerate difference but to celebrate it, and to keep our hearts and minds open that the current way (or the way it’s “always been done”) is perhaps not the best way, or that our way isn’t the only way. But lately, I think we’d all just be willing to settle for awhile for some civilized discourse that didn’t involve shaming, name-calling, and a refusal to hear other opinions.

I don’t like to feel helpless, so I try and make a difference where I can, especially in how I teach my children. I pull from things I learned from taking diversity education courses in college, from resources I’ve found from other bloggers and books, and from my own experiences, including living in El Salvador for a year and a half and teaching a culturally diverse class while I did my student teaching.

I’m not perfect. I know there are things I need to be better about—sitting with the feeling of being uncomfortable, for one. But I am trying.

It’s always going to seem silly to talk of such quotidian matters as what we ate for dinner and what projects we’ve been working on around the yard after a week filled with weightier things, but such is life—the complex mixed with the mundane, the uncharted territory amidst the daily routine.

So here goes.

In the Kitchen

I finally made myself dive into the fiddly recipe from America’s Test Kitchen for gluten-free sandwich bread, and we were not disappointed! The picture below may not look like much (kind of like a loaf of bread with headgear on, thanks to the foil collar meant to help it at least somewhat keep its shape), but it represented hope that there are indeed GF bread recipes that don’t taste like cardboard or have the consistency of wet clay bricks. This was an especially important discovery because now, Matt isn’t the only one in the family off of gluten–I went off it too, as my autoimmune disease started flaring up again (and cutting out gluten is the quickest way to send it back in remission without going on medication).

Because making the homemade GF bread takes 5 hours from start to ready-to-eat, I’ve been looking for other options for quick meals so that we don’t use it all up the same day it’s baked. This week we tried egg and sausage breakfast muffins, which were awesome—they gave a good hit of protein, could be zapped in the microwave for about 20 seconds whenever you had a hankering to eat something, and they were reasonably filling too (and also reasonably healthy). I plan to make them again this next week, but using this other recipe that calls for cottage cheese.

We successfully went another week without grocery shopping, and since we had quite a lot of apples left from the grocery trip at the first of the month, I made a delicious apple crumble with those for an-after dinner treat on Friday. One thing people wonder is how we can get by with only doing one major grocery trip per month, and the answer is to time your produce right. Bananas, peaches/nectarines/plums, lettuce/kale/salad, and berries need to be prioritized and eaten first. Apples, citrus fruits, potatoes, and carrots can be saved until the end of the month. And then, of course, there’s the frozen produce that can be used all the time.

This week we did run out of milk by the weekend, which meant we largely had to go without, although I did mix up a bit of our powdered milk to go with my oatmeal on Sunday. I haven’t had prepared powdered milk since I served my mission in El Salvador (where they don’t serve cow’s milk at all in the grocery stores), and although I’ll always prefer my usual cow’s milk, it was kind of oddly comforting to taste some of the powdered stuff and be transported right back to my mission, where I would pour the box of premixed milk over a bowl of Cheerios, which were $7 a box.

On the Menu Last Week: Pesto Ranch Chicken, Smoked Sausage/Sweet Potato/Apple Sheet Pan Bake, Instant Pot Butter Chicken + Chickpeas over Rice, breakfast for dinner (pancakes, German pancakes)

In the Yard

We direct sowed a lot of the flower and herb seeds we’d bought back in February and March, putting them into the raised beds literally wherever there was the smallest bit of space to spare. There will be a crazy mix of vegetables and blooms with very little order to speak of, but it will be fun (if we’re still in this house in a few months) to see it all grow together. All the flowers I bought were for the sole purpose of having a cutting garden I could bring blooms into the house from, so we sowed cosmos, zinnias, sunflowers, African daisies, globe amaranths, and lavender. We didn’t expect anything to germinate so quickly, but many of the cosmos had already sprouted by the weekend (we planted Tuesday night), which was a welcome surprise.

Matt continued to remove the rocks from the front bed and fill in with a top layer of more dirt this weekend, as well as fix the leveling on the bottom of one of our gates, since it kept scraping against the concrete and sticking. Every time I went out to look at the state of the plants, I made sure to pull up at least 10 or 15 weeds (and sometimes a lot more), which should hopefully help to keep it at least a *little* bit under control. Since we’re likely going to be listing our house in the next month or so, we’ll have to do a whole lot more weeding than just that, but this is at least preventing a lot of the little ones from getting bigger.

Last week was mostly hot and even a bit muggy for here (we’re used to some seriously dry weather here in Utah), and most of our plants noticeably thrived under the conditions, especially since Matt was giving them all a nightly watering with the hose. About half of our tomato plants have blossoms on them, which gives me hope that we *might* be able to harvest at least a few things before we move.

I’ll admit, it’s been a hard thing to garden this year—we have SO much enthusiasm for it (which is why we’ve continued to do so much!), but the likelihood we’ll be around to see the fruits of most of our labors is slim to none right now. It’s still been giving us valuable experience though (which is mostly why we did it), and watching the miracle of small plants emerging from seeds you put in yourself is something that will never get old for me.

Blooming This Week: salvia, beardtongue (starting to), foxglove (starting to), bearded iris, Siberian iris, the rest of the lilacs in the front yard, the yellow and red columbines up front, some kind of phlox (at least that’s what I think it is?), hardy asters (though they’re not looking great), and some fuzzy-looking palest-of-pink flower up front (whose leaves look a lot like columbine leaves)

In the Coop

After over a week of Matt having to physically pick up each pullet and/or herd it into the roost at night, the young chickens finally caught on and are mostly getting themselves into bed at night. (Of course, some of them started actually going in first and taking the old girls’ spots in the far east corner, so we’ll see how that goes down.)

Chipmunk (the alpha hen, seemingly) has taken to flying through the six pullets whenever they congregate together in one of the older girls’ favorite spots for too long. She doesn’t seem to be too physically aggressive in other ways, but we’ve noticed that they generally keep their distance from her. Matt put out an extra feeder and waterer by the bushes where the pullets spend the most time, and Chipmunk and the other laying hens seem to think that all food and water needs to be tried by themselves first and have subsequently seemed to claim it as their own. Buggers. The pullets have gotten noticeably bigger in the two weeks they’ve been outside (or maybe we’re just better able to see it), and a few are approaching the size of the smallest of the older hens. Should be interesting to see how the pecking order plays out over the next couple months.

In the Playroom

The children have been spending large chunks of each day outside in our backyard, which I just love. I’ve never taken for granted the fact that we moved to a house with a fenced-in backyard (esp because we lived in an apartment complex with no yard or playground or anything prior to living here), but man, am I consciously grateful on a daily basis for it even more now! I love that Raven is old enough and trustworthy enough to be in charge of both herself and Mathias out there, and they just will spend hours digging in the sandbox, playing under their willow “house,” riding bikes and pulling each other in the wagon, and enacting make believe of all kinds. They come in from their morning play stinky and worn out but flushed with the pleasure of independent outside play, and Mathias will just crash for his afternoon nap every day from it, while Raven retreats to the coolness of the basement to listen to her audiobooks and draw for hours.

Raven’s preschool had one last “graduation” day this last week—the only time she’s been to preschool since the end of March. She went for one last normal day with her classmates, and then parents and immediate families joined for the last half hour in the backyard as the children each received their diploma and had cookies. It was quick and simple, and honestly, kind of great to not have to sit through a huge, grand production in the heat.

Mathias has started trying to sing lately, and it’s just my favorite. We do this thing when we’re brushing the kids’ teeth where the one parent will sing “aaaaah” as they go in to brush, and the other parent will chime in with the harmony (on a 1-3-5-octave scale). Raven had started doing it (and she’s actually got a really good ear!), and now Mathias is starting to try and match pitch. It’s basically the cutest.

Hyrum finally rolled over from back to tummy for the first time on Sunday. He’s been awfully close for weeks, but just couldn’t figure out arm placement. He’s also working out how to reach for toys and grab them while he’s on his belly for tummy time, so he’ll probably start scooting around a bit soon, too. He still is basically the worst daytime napper in the world, but he does at least sleep through the majority of the night without needing to be fed anymore (though needing to be swaddled, well, that’s a different story).

We took the kids on a Sunday drive to the nearby poppy fields of Mantua on Sunday, thinking they would be awed and delighted by the vast swaths of orange blooms (and wanting to use the beautiful backdrop to attempt a more thought-out family picture to print out). Turns out they mostly just complained about how pokey it was, frowned or grimaced or outright screamed through many of the pics, and put up zero complaints once it was time to get back in the car. Oh well. We did get a few fun family pictures out of it, though no one whole family shot that made me go, “Wow!” Such is taking family pictures with young kids, though, and one reason I’m glad we take them every Sunday—makes them not seem so high-stake.

In the House

Um…pass? I feel like I’m getting nothing done around here lately, or at least nothing “extra” done besides just staying on top of the dishes, making the beds, and trying to not break a limb from the toys strewn everywhere. We definitely do have some better systems in place for keeping everything generally much tidier than before, but there are soooo many things I feel like we have to do before we’d be ready to list the house, almost none of which we’ve done. My mom’s coming up this weekend though to help me with a few of those, so that will mean that next week I’ll actually have something noteworthy to report.

In the Soul

It’s been a stressful year for everyone, and having the personal stressors of uncertainty with our plans and Matt’s work and where we’re going to live hasn’t made it any better.

But for the most part, we’re doing well. When I get too stressed or anxious, I simply go outside to work in the garden or feed the chickens, or I dive into a book or read my scriptures. For me, it’s about finding a balance between keeping up on what’s happening in the world and keeping myself mentally, emotionally, and physically healthy, and most days, I think I strike a pretty good balance. It helped that I finally went in to my chiropractor last week—my back had popped back out of alignment well over a month ago, and I’ve been dealing with the constant back pain ever since. Having everything back in alignment has helped me feel a lot better overall, and I hope to start doing some stretching and back strengthening exercises this week to help it STAY aligned, which seems to always be the problem ever since I injured it. It always amazes me how much more energized I feel when my back isn’t hurting—I’ll admit it makes me long for days past when I never had to think twice about pursuing any sort of physical activity. I’m trying to remain positive though and tell myself that surely it won’t always be like this. And if it is? Well, at least I know what brings some relief and that I’ll survive.

The last half of May was wearying, and even though June makes no promises that things will be markedly different, there is always the hope that it will be so. Plus, I love it when a new month starts on a Monday–it just screams fresh starts all around.

Happy June to you, and I hope that wherever you are, that you’re doing okay, staying safe, and finding moments of peace and calm.