July 2020

Now, to clarify, this is not a goodbye to the blog, of course—this will just be the last edition that fully takes place in our first little homestead. I don’t know if I will continue the series while we’re staying at my mom and stepdad’s place, but I do plan to start it back up again once we have another place of our own.

But in the meantime, still keep checking the blog as I have lots of other kinds of posts I have planned!

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 continue on in the quest of trying to use up as much food as possible so we don’t have to pack/move it, and this week had me recycling used-up cereal boxes and bottles of salad dressing and lemon juice and cottage cheese like a madwoman. I’d fallen off the strict meal planning wagon a few months ago, but now I am back with a definite plan for this next week, including spices I’ll need (so I can pack the rest), as well as which dishes can be boxed up.

I also discovered that apparently I can’t get by without any sheet pans handy (and apparently not even with just one), and I also discovered that eating out of the kids’ bowls instead of the breakable ones (which have been packed away) generally makes me eat less.

(Note: We recently bought these inexpensive colorful kid plates and have LOVED them. Not only are they pretty much indestructible, but they’re also dishwasher and microwave safe, AND they’re actually made from recycled milk jugs! How cool is that?!)

I re-discovered the joy of homemade meatballs this week, as well. It had been ages since I’d made any, but this week I actually whipped up TWO batches of these skillet Swedish meatballs on two separate nights, and I felt like I could have made them two more times this week and still not gotten sick of them. Before, I didn’t really like to make meatballs because I didn’t relish the thought of having to roll them by hand, but I’ve discovered this week that using our small cookie scoop works perfectly AND keeps my hands totally mess-free.

I also watched not a few videos from this YouTube channel, which is inspiring me to seriously meal prep and do freezer meals in the future (and inspired me to at least make Matt some GF bread this week, as well as some more of our now go-to blueberry muffin and chocolate chip cookie recipes from this cookbook, both of which we froze for quick grabbing).

On the Menu This Week: Swedish meatballs + rice, salmon + sweet potato fries, egg and hash browns breakfast casserole, fluffy oat pancakes, taco salad

In the Yard

We’re FINALLY seeing some of our tomatoes ripen! Granted, we’ll probably only get a handful this week before we move on Friday, but nothing beats those first fresh tomatoes from the garden. Mmm…too bad I won’t be able to make more homemade GF bread to enjoy them on a BLT!

The squash bugs here have always come out with a vengeance, and this year is no exception–they’re positively feasting on our zucchini plant, which is slowly but surely succumbing to their greedy mouths (and is only being helped along by the fact that we’ve just chosen to let them be since we don’t have time to battle with them due to the move). We also have mini grasshoppers or crickets or something having a field day with all of our herbs and our African daisies, and something else has almost destroyed both our bean plants. In the future, we will have to really be a lot more on top of the pest problem so that we don’t lose so much of our harvest to insects.

We are getting to see a few of the zinnias fully in bloom before leaving, which feels like such a gift. We’ve been listening to the Little House audio books a lot lately (which we LOVE), and I’ve been thinking a lot about the scene in one of them–Little House on Plum Creek, maybe?–where it talks about how the Ingalls family had cultivated all this land for their homestead and built their home with store-bought wood and fitted it with glass windows, and then they just had to up and leave it all. The pioneers were so much tougher than I’ll ever be, but I know it must have been achingly hard for them to move away and leave all that hard work and years of toiling and scrimping and saving and building behind. Now, we didn’t build our home from scratch, but it will still be hard to say goodbye to all our hard work, especially as right now is the time when we’re actually starting to see all the results of it.

But we knew going into the planting season this year that this would be a definite possibility, and I don’t repent of it—we’ve learned a lot and delighted so much in seeing our plans come to fruition, that I’m at peace (mostly) with the idea of leaving it behind.

Harvesting this week: the first tomatoes (grape), blackberries, what seem to be the last of the peas

In the Coop

In March, we added six more chicks to our flock, and this week, some of them started laying! The six chickens we added this year were all chosen very specifically based on their egg colors, so we know that it’s our two Olive-Egger chickens that are laying, as the eggs have been an olive green hue, and then one of our Legbars, we think.

We’ve also been getting quite a few “fluke” eggs (such as a few shell-less eggs), which makes us wonder if some of the other new chickens are starting to lay and just having some issues. We’re hoping that none of our chickens are sick or anything and that it’s all just a matter of inexperienced layers. The overall egg production has also gone down for some reason—maybe from it being so hot outside? Time will tell.

The biggest news on the chicken front is The Big Plan to move the coop today. By far this has been the biggest stressor about our upcoming move, and we ran through just about every scenario to try and determine A) where we were actually going to keep our chickens and coop, and B) how to actually get them there. For now, we’re taking the coop to my mom and stepdad’s (where we’ll be living for the next while), and we’re going to have to remove a section from our fence to do it. (We actually tried seeing if we could borrow some construction equipment to move it OVER the fence, but it wouldn’t have been able to clear it with the equipment our neighbors had available.)

Seriously, I will be SO much less stressed tonight, when *hopefully* the whole thing will have gone off without a hitch.

In the Playroom

The kids are getting REALLY excited for the move—they can’t wait to live with Grandma and Grandpa! They are not, however, as excited about the fact that pretty much all of our time lately (esp. on weekends) has been hijacked by packing and moving preparations. I’ve been trying to make sure we squeeze at least some family time/fun time in when I can, but we are now in crunch mode, so that’s not happening very much. I am really grateful though that they only have super positive feelings about the move–it’s made it quite a lot easier in many ways.

I’m starting to get my homeschool plans in place to teach Raven, and I think we’ll officially start the third week in August. I’m thinking about starting to teach her piano this year too, just since we’ll already be in the habit of one-on-one instruction time every day anyway. I think she’s got the right temperament to start this young, but if it’s not working after several weeks, I’ll just put it away and plan on trying again in a year or two. (In case you’re curious, I’m going to be using this piano curriculum, and I did a whole post on my other blog about all the homeschooling resources we’re using.)

In the Home

Not much to report here, because obviously we’re just trying to pack everything up. Since we haven’t found our next house yet, the packing process has been a bit tricky since most of our stuff is going into storage, but not all of it (as we still are bringing some things to my folks’ house, where we’ll be living for the next few months).

I have taken to marking our boxes with three different colored stickers, just so we can at least try and be somewhat organized—orange for stuff that’s coming with us, green for the stuff that can go in the back of the storage unit, and pink for the stuff that needs to up in front of the unit, just in case we need access.

Should be interesting over the next few months to see how it all goes down.

In the Soul

I wasn’t super stressed about the move until this week, when my stress levels seem to be off the charts. (It doesn’t help that the kids–probably feeding off our stress levels–have been quite a handful.) I’m waiting for the meltdown, but it probably won’t happen until Moving Day since I won’t have time before then to fall apart, ha ha.

The biggest stressor, as mentioned above, has been the enormous undertaking of trying to move our chicken coop, which is happening today. Once that has been successfully done (hopefully, hopefully, hopefully!), I will breathe quite a bit easier. Matt is also taking down a large load of things to my mom and stepdad’s house with the coop, which should help me to assess what still needs to be done, as it will visually clear up a bunch of space.

Moving is stressful, there’s no way around it, and I don’t anticipate the next several months will be easy as we’ll be moving again (once the business does), which will require finding a house and going through that whole process, all while Matt is either commuting for two and a half hours a day or just staying up here in Cache Valley during the week.

I get more stressed just thinking about it.

But I will be okay—we’ll get through this! 🙂

We are officially T-minus 12 days away from Moving Day, and things are finally starting to sink in—I am forwarding mail, sending packages to my mom and stepdad’s house (where we’ll be living for the next few months until we find our next house) in case shipping times are delayed, returning things to neighbors, and trying to pack…always trying to pack…

I’ve started unofficially saying goodbye to people, or at least telling them that we’ll miss them and that we’re sad we’re moving away. I am checking real estate sites probably no fewer than a dozen times a day to see if anything new has been posted in our area that would be a good fit (nada, nada, and more nada). Matt keeps trying to sway me towards building our own home (something that I’m railing against, which, in writing that out, makes me realize that I also railed against the idea of this move in general until I finally was forced to accept it and finally embrace it).

But even though the logical part of my brain knows how close the move is and how near we are to closing this chapter of our lives, my daily life still marches on largely unchanged—a constant lineup of diaper changes, filling cups with water and milk for thirsty mouths, washing dishes and prepping meals and folding laundry. We are still basically almost never leaving the house thanks to the pandemic, so we stick to our daily schedule to keep our sanity—breakfast, outside time, getting ready + chore time, lunch, naps + quiet time, dinner prep, family time, bed.

The kids remind me daily to stop and drink it all in and to take delight in the smallest of joys. I made one last grocery trip before the move, and when Mathias saw me come in from the store with two bulging bags full of nectarines, he shrieked in delight, stamped his feet back and forth, and shouted, “I LOVE it! I LOVE it!”

And indeed, despite all the change and the uncertainty swirling all around us, there is so much in this season to love.

In the Kitchen

The name of the game lately is “Let’s Use Up Everything So We Don’t Have to Move It.” All in all, I think we’re doing all right, though since I am one who believes in stocking up and food storage and the like, we are still going to be moving a lot of food. I will say though, that while seeing cans of vegetables and bags of pasta all stacked up on top of each other brings me joy, there’s also a sense of delight–a particular satisfaction–in using up something until the very end and then recycling the package. It’s similar to the satisfaction I feel when I’ve worn a shirt until it has holes, and then I use it as a rag or burpcloth, and then I finally throw it away when it’s no longer become serviceable. In a world with so much needless waste, it feels wholly satisfying–virtuous even–to truly “use it up and wear it out.”

Some food items we’ve managed to use up in the past week: cereal (always), a large jar of peanut butter, a ginormous bag of chocolate chips (mostly used for snacking there near the end, I’ll admit), the rest of a box of pasta (Banza is our favorite gluten-free brand), several packages of frozen meat, a bag of flour, and a bottle of salad dressing. There’s more, but as I see our fridge and cupboards get emptier and emptier, it feels like one gigantic checklist where I’m able to put a nice thick line through each item as we consume it.

Even though we’re now facing the typical July high heat, we’re trying to resurrect our old tradition of eating Friday night’s dinner outside on the back patio. It used to be Friday night was Grill Night, but since Matt and I are now both gluten-free and we always made hamburgers before, well…we’ve only done a couple grill nights this whole summer. But eating al fresco is still a fun way to add a little novelty to our weekly routine, and the kids love it–they squeal with excitement every time, as if we’d just thought up the idea for the first time that day.

On the Menu Last Week: penne alfredo + broccoli, salmon/sweet potato/green bean sheet pan bake, Korean BBQ beef bowls, taco salad, pizza

In the Yard

There is something freeing about knowing that you have a limited, finite amount of time left with your garden and your harvest. Whereas before, we would research and debate endlessly over whether we should try some technique or pest treatment or whatever, now we simply just experiment. After all, we aren’t going to be around here for much longer, anyway—it is all just a giant agriculture lab at this moment.

Our tomato plants are growing wildly, but the fruit is not ripening quickly, nor coming on as thickly as we would have thought, considering the plants’ size. So we try an experiment—water the plants less, so that they are forced to put their energy into the fruits. Has it worked yet? We don’t know. But at any rate, they haven’t died yet either. We have tried spraying our squash bugs with soapy water to try and save the zucchini plant (verdict is still out there, too), and we have been pinching off flowers with wild abandon in the hopes that we’ll get more blooms.

So far, no experiment has failed. Some have even showed promise.

Life is endlessly showing me lately that sometimes I just need to stop Googling, stop debating, and just try. Just play around with it. Just allow for the chance of failure, but also for the chance of success.

We don’t know what last-minute surprises our harvest might bring us over these next twelve days—perhaps a ripe tomato, perhaps not. Perhaps ripe blackberries, perhaps not. But for the moment, we are enjoying armloads of snapdragons (which I am cutting multiple times a week and putting around the house) and snapping off fresh peas every time we pass by the vine. Every time a recipe calls for basil or oregano or parsley or chives, I get it fresh from the garden.

We may not be around to enjoy all the end results, but we have learned to deeply delight in the process anyway.

Blooming this week: snapdragons, daisies, daylilies, columbine, the last of the short-lived Shirley poppies (which were so magical, and so unexpected)

In the Playroom

We are trying to intentionally carve out some solid fun time on a regular basis so that the kids aren’t constantly left to play by themselves while we pack (or watch Disney+ all day). I have, somewhat on accident, come up with a loose schedule for each day to provide some structure for all of us, and to also make sure that this summer isn’t marked only by the work of moving and packing, but also by the unique pleasures of staying at home pretty much all the time. The past week or so, I have caught myself longing for a future day when we can go out to a restaurant together or on a family vacation or to a public pool or amusement park, but there are benefits to spending so much time together at home, too.

I just have to remind myself to look for them sometimes.

Hyrum recently turned 7 months old and is furiously trying to crawl and sit and talk and explore. He puts so much energy and determination into every attempt, and even though he sometimes falls flat on his round little face, he doesn’t cry–he just pops right back up and goes right back to it. Perhaps the fact that we was born so early and had to fight from his very first few hours of life has already endowed him with a sense of tenacity and grit.

He also basically slept through the whole night from about 8 p.m. to almost 6:45 a.m. for four nights in a row, and just like that, I felt like a new person. Perhaps I’m jumping the gun by saying this, but it *appears* that we’ve turned a corner with sleep, and that hopefully we can expect more of this from now on.

Saturday morning we went on a hike in the canyon just up from our house. We left early in the morning, just after breakfast, and we all drank in the cool misty air and the twittering birds and the growing sunflower stalks with all of our might, especially as we knew (or at least, Matt and I knew) that the rest of the day was earmarked for packing up the garage and continuing to attempt the monstrous task of trying to pack up the kitchen.

I carried Mathias on my back for the majority of the way (which freed up my hands to take pictures), but we did decide to let him walk the last little bit back to the car on his own. And I couldn’t believe it—even in his Tevas and down a bit of a steep slope filled with rocks and pebbles, he still managed to only stumble and fall once, and the rest of the time he kept up really quite well with his short two-year-old legs. i kept asking him if he was tired and wanted me to hold him, but he would tell me over and over, “No, Mama. I walk.”

In one last note, Raven surprised me on Monday by sitting down to make a to-do list. I don’t think I’ve formally ever really taught her this concept, though I of course have made my to-do lists and grocery lists and goal lists for years. On Monday morning, she just sat herself down at the table and told me that she wanted to make sure we planned out our day so that we “wouldn’t forget to have fun.”

Indeed.

While most of her list included such practicalities as getting dressed and making her bed, she did make sure to include a family activity that night for Family Home Evening, which we made sure to follow through on.

In the Home

I feel like I’ve started to think like I’m in a constant Tetris game—which pieces will fit in which box? How many items can I effectively cram into each container to best ensure that there is minimal movement?

This week I packed most of the guest room, almost all the decor (not necessarily the wall art, at least not much of it, but the rest), and more of the kitchen. Matt decluttered and trashed a ton of stuff in the garage and got it down to where it’s mostly ready to go, or at least it’s a lot closer than it was. Almost every surface is bare, unless the kids have played for any length of time by it.

I will say that tidying up has gotten about a million times easier—with so little stuff to clutter up the house, it sure is pretty easy to clean. While a part of me would love to keep this level of minimalism going all the time, I do admit that I already miss my easy access to books and all my kitchen supplies being unboxed and the carefully curated decor I’d finally settled on in each of the rooms.

A truly minimalist home such as we are in now is certainly easier, but I’m okay with a little clutter—it makes me feel cozy.

In the Soul

Other than a bit of a stressful start of the week, this last little while has been good. Really good, in fact. Call it the calm before the storm of change is thrust upon us or the forced appreciation for all that we’re about to say goodbye to, but it’s been a sweet past couple of weeks.

Each night in my personal prayers, I pray for peace amidst all the uncertainty, and each day, I am given it. I am at peace despite having literally zero houses come up in our price range or that would be a good fit for our family. I am at peace despite the fact that the company my husband works for still hasn’t given a timeline for when the business will be officially moved down. I am at peace despite the fact that in less than two weeks, I’ll be saying goodbye to the place where I’ve lived for 13 of the past 15 years.

I am constantly reminded to “Ask, and ye shall receive. Knock, and it shall be opened unto you.” I don’t know how or when, but I just know that things are going to fall into place for us over the next few months. And in the meantime, we’ll just enjoy this opportunity we have to live with family, something we’ll appreciate even more after having such limited contact with ANYONE over the past four months.

We are well.

I won’t lie to you–I treated this whole week like I was on holiday. No packing, minimal cleaning…it was like my whole self revolted against the packing and cleaning and staging frenzy that was last week, and just said, “All I’m okay with this week is reading. And maybe watching a few shows.”

I mean, some important phone calls were made and emails were sent and plans were discussed.

But by and large, we took it easy over here.

And we have no regrets.

In the Kitchen

My body, in addition to just wanting to relax and read, also was wanting me to feed it lots of salads and fresh produce to make up for all the junk it was forced to eat the last couple weeks. The base of said salads was formed using greens from our garden and some chopped romaine from Sam’s Club, and toppings often varied, but chopped sweet bell peppers were always included, as was a cheese of some kind (feta or cheddar), and a more “filling” topping (hard-boiled egg, avocado). We’re often disappointed with store-bought cucumbers, but as our cucumber vines aren’t producing yet, we decided to risk it, and we’ve been extremely impressed with the quality of the 3-pack of cucumbers I (also) got from Sam’s Club. All in all, it’s been a delicious week, and one in which I feel altogether better about my food choices.

I also did my big monthly grocery haul this last week, and I was proud of myself for not buying any sweets or treats of any kind. Sure, we still have stuff that I could use to make treats, but just forcing myself to add that extra bit of effort should hopefully be enough that my body can detox a bit from the past couple weeks.

It was a slightly cheaper grocery haul than normal (around $250, which should last us the majority of the month), mostly because we’re moving on the 31st, and I would rather not have a ton of extra food that needs to be transported. In fact, I might even make myself do a monthly meal plan again or try out meal prep or batch cooking, just so that I can make sure we use up the maximum amount of our food we can before the move.

On the Menu This Last Week: salad in all forms, chicken stir fry over rice (Matt and I both thought the BBQ-sauce base was super weird–not recommended), Mediterranean egg scramble + corn tortillas, grilled chicken for our laidback 4th of July dinner, and this sausage/apple/sweet potato bake that we’re liking more and more each time we have it

In the Yard

Since we did so much the previous week with the yard, there really wasn’t much to do. We pinched off a few of the herbs (cilantro, both varieties of basil) to hopefully prevent them from bolting and encourage bushier growth. We pulled weeds when we noticed them.

But most of all, we kind of just stepped back and drank it in–the snap peas and pole beans that have finally latched onto our makeshift trellis and started racing up it, the tomato plants slowly becoming heavy with blossoms and fruit, the bellflower that is literally so weighed down with blooms that it is tipping over.

July is such a fun time in the garden—you aren’t so weighted down with produce that you feel overwhelmed, but there is enough coming on that every day brings something exciting, whether that’s noticing a flower bloom for the first time (like our peachy-pink hollyhocks in the front bed) or the daily (eager) check of the zucchini plant to see if one has gotten large enough to harvest yet. We picked our first snap peas this week, their sweet crunchiness like the garden version of candy. We also finally identified some of the seedlings that have been growing like crazy over the past several weeks as African daisies. (The night I sowed the flower seeds, I didn’t actually label where I’d put anything, so it’s been a fun little guessing game to see what we think everything is.)

Most evenings, I take a walk about the garden, often with Matt, sometimes alone. And each night, I get preemptively nostalgic for the walks, even while I’m in the middle of them, since I know we’re so close to leaving behind all this evidence of years of hard work and planning.

Blooming this week: bellflower, delphinium, the last of the Asiatic lilies, daylilies (not all of them yet), Shasta daisies (both varieties), snapdragons (oh, how fun it is to see the colors finally reveal themselves!), the rest of the roses, Mexican primrose (still!), Mexican Hat flower, hollyhocks

Harvesting this week: basil, oregano, cilantro, snap peas, lettuce greens

In the Playroom

Matt had Friday off of work for the holiday, but we kept our weekend super low-key since we weren’t comfortable gathering with a whole bunch of people. Friday night our community did a huge fireworks show, which Matt and I both watched from our front yard. We tried to wake up Raven to watch them too (since she’s actually still never seen fireworks because we’re lame parents and stick to bedtimes for the most part), but she was sleeping like a log and didn’t even squint or move the slightest bit when we turned on her bedroom light, tried to sit her up, etc. At that point, we just felt bad trying to wake her up, so we laid her back down and just enjoyed the fireworks with just the two of us.

Saturday we set up the little kiddie pool in the backyard so the kids could splash around and go in and out of it while we grilled some chicken and burgers in the backyard. We used to have a grill night and eat dinner al fresco every Friday night, but we’ve gotten out of the habit since we added Hyrum to the family. I ordered a new gluten-free cookbook (aff link) that has a recipe for hamburgers buns in it, but it hadn’t come yet, so Matt and I just tried out a new recipe for grilled chicken and let the kids have the hamburgers. Compared to other people’s holidays, it was probably pretty mild, but we enjoyed ourselves anyway!

Hyrum has been on a terrible sleeping kick again. This kid, man—it’s like he’ll tease us with several good days and nights and we’ll high five ourselves, thinking he’s finally sleep trained, and then we’ll have a whole slew of days where he just goes on these sleep strikes. Sometimes we’ve felt like we’ve kind of figured out the reasons behind poor sleep, like the fact that we need to feed him solids AND a bottle just before bed, or the fact that he seems to sleep better in long sleeves than in short. But this week, it seems like the reason was because he discovered the sound of his own voice and thought it was funny to babble loudly at five a.m. and do random little shouts, almost as if he were listening for an echo.

I’m REALLY hoping that this next week he’ll start sleeping better again because I’ve noticed that my motivation to pack up the house seems directly proportional to the amount of sleep I get, so…let’s all keep our fingers crossed.

In the House

Nothing. Glorious week 🙂

In the Soul

I was listening to a vlogger this last week who talked about how she was so tired lately that she hadn’t had energy or time to think deep or profound thoughts.

That’s kind of exactly how I’ve felt.

I’m still waiting for the emotions of the move and all the accompanying stress and change to hit me, but lately, I have just enough energy and emotional reserves to get through each day, and I leave it at that.

I have started stepping away from social media even more lately though, just because I have recognized that it’s once again become more toxic than not for me. I wasn’t on it that much to begin with, but lately it had seemed like every time I did happen to get on for a few minutes, everything was soooo negative and political and just…draining. So I’m really trying to step back and try to replenish my emotional reserves, which are obviously pretty depleted right now.

Hoping that that combined with (hopefully!) more sleep this week will have me feeling a bit more energetic and a bit more like myself in general.