When the weather gives you spring...

We've had basically no snow this winter, and lately the temperature has been getting above freezing during the sunny daytimes. It feels like spring, but it is still January. My husband said the other day, well, if the weather is acting like spring, then we should act like spring, and start working on our normal spring-time chores and property fixups.

We walked around, and decided where the next side of the yard fence would go, to keep the dogs a bit better contained (hard to stop the disgusting poo-eating behavior when you can't see them, ahem), and to better define the distinction between maintained yard/orchard/future pasture.

One of our goals this year is to get the rest of the yard fenced, so we have a safer place for the dogs to be, and a safer place for the kids to be, requiring a little less parent supervision. This way we are hoping that the dogs and kids (and thus us!) can be outside a lot more, but in a more contained space. That was part of the idea behind having the new side garden, and the playstructure right there, so that we could be close enough, but each be doing our own thing if desired.

As you can see from the pictures (taken at dawn as the moon set and the sun rays then started to hit the mountains to our west), there really isn't much snow! It might be a bad year for the river levels, and for wildfires, if we don't get any significant snow in the next couple of months. And this canadian expat is seriously jonesing for some white blanketed views!

I think this is going to be one of those 'when life gives you lemons, make lemonade' times, and the mister was already out earlier this week doing some pick up of leftover logs/boards from the side garden fencing we did last spring, and used them to keep working on burning the stumps out of the bottom of the yard. There is always work to be done, and if winter snow isn't going to force the work to stop, then I guess we had better make use of this time, who knows what weather the next months will hold!

Planning to plan, dreaming to dream

I've been doing a lot of thinking about plans for this coming year. We've started the initial brainstorming of what our financial goals will be, and that has meant a lot of thinking about future projects and ideas to be implementing. My problem always is overloading my plate with too many good ideas, and I'm definitley feeling that right now in this process, as we look at a huge list of potential things, and try and narrow the pool down and prioritize it!

Some of these goals are family goals, but the more personal ones, or ones with the kids that I'm taking the lead on, are fairly overwhelming me at the moment. Since I often use this blog as a sort of settling ground for my ideas to help me decide which I want to take further, I thought a brain dump was in order to help me sift through all these great ideas and prioritize them. I suspect when I redo my winter darkness goals into my 2014 priorities/goals I will use these as a guide.

For the Kids
Finances/Allowance - Little M is a good age to start learning about money (saving/giving/spending)
Chores - with some being paid and some being unpaid
Speech Therapy - Little M has a hard time with her initial consonants, and we're getting extra help
Bottle Feeding - Baby E is having a hard time learning to use the bottle, which complicates daycare
Ontario Grandparents - keeping in touch with them (skype, emails, photos) since we rarely see them
Weekly Rhythm - redoing it to better work with our schedule, especially as it changes come January

For the Farm
Expanding the garden - doing it in a manageable manner, choosing crops wisely, cover crops
Seed Selection - need some new seeds & varieties this year - irish eyes/seed savers/west coast seeds?
Fences - both for garden & yard space for the dogs as well as the orchard - plan, length, cost, poles
Chicks - having a broody hen raise our own fertile eggs vs. ordering new chicks (of what breed?)
Pigs - fitting them back into the budget, number (brothers again? friends?), source/breed question
Fruit trees - pruning the ones we have, new ones for the side chicken area if the fence goes up?

For Mama
Essential Oils - learning how to use the ones I have, reading up on ones to get in the future
Reading - for pleasure & bookclub, augmented by our weekly library trips, fit in during naps/bedtime
Simplifying - purging stuff, one in - one out, creating a handmade home, living more intentionally
Friends - keeping in touch with local & distant friends, via skype, phone calls, play dates, dinner
Crafting/sewing - meeting my creative needs, also inspiring Little M to create too
Finance/work balance - meeting our financial needs through paid work while still meeting family/house/cleaning needs around the home, also dictates daycare balance, and also wrapped up in here is meeting the little family checklist goals we have/will set for the next year

Back Burner things for some year in the future:
soap making
fixing the house up!
a 100 dollar startup (something sewing/crafty, etsy? still very much in the dream phase)
more animals - fish/lizard/snake/bunny for the kids inside, cow/sheep/barn! for the farm
all those saved bookmarks! (move to pinterest??)
a new (thrifted obviously) wardrobe to replace the failing remnants of my (thrifted) grad school garb!

Do you keep a list of back burner type ideas? Those things that you want to do some day, but know you can't fit them in right now? How do you keep those future dreams in check to focus on the dreams for today?

On future goals and things to learn

I started this post near the end of last month, before the craziness of September hit, and then never had time to come back to it and publish it. However, looking back at what I drafted up, I'm finding it amazing to see what progress I've already made towards these future goals I almost shared! I inserted my progress in bold italics...

I'm slowly surfacing from new-baby-itis, and I'm realizing that since back in January I didn't really set goals for the year other than having a healthy baby, I'm starting to feel a bit aimless. Now let me assure you that my number one goal this year is still to have a healthy baby - that doesn't stop just because she's out in the world. Oh no, I'm still breastfeeding her like crazy, and we won't be starting to introduce solids until she's good and ready (whenever she decides that is). So really, for the rest of the next year plus, I'll still be primarily focused on keeping myself well watered, de-stressed, and eating as healthy as I can manage in order to keep her as topped up on breastmilk as I can.

But I'm starting to feel a bit restless, which generally means I need to define my future a bit more clearly for myself. Some things I'm thinking of putting on my learning goals list in the near future include:

• making our own vanilla (I happen to know a great recipe book with this in it is hidden somewhere in the house for my upcoming birthday!)
• making soap
• looking into essential oils, maybe buying a first one or two - peppermint? lavender? (I'm hoping next month to get an intro pack of 3 doterra oils - peppermint lavender and lemon) 
• making and freezing/canning? our own chicken stock
• sourdough. I wanna bake bread with it - thus my own starter is needed... need to learn more!
• ferments? not sure about this one, still don't know enough to feel comfortable
• brewing my own beer now that I'm not pregnant!
• decide on a chicken breed or 2 to stick with from the seven we have currently... and decide whether to add to the flock this coming year or try to hatch our own - need a rooster first for that though! (We brought home a free americauna cross rooster last week, he's young still, and apparently pretty shy, but we'll see how that goes over the winter and then perhaps settle on Speckled Sussex if he doesn't work out) 
• getting back on the cloth diaper bandwagon I've not yet got started on with baby #2 - every time I put her in them she has a crazy blowout poop. totally coincidence, but not making my life easier! (I determined that the problem is our old ones have shot elastics, and the inserts needed to be replaced, something about using them solid for almost 3 years with Little M! I've started to order replacements, 5 should be coming in the mail later this week, and I'll slowly build my stash back up!)

Other future plans I need to think more about in my free time (usually when I'm walking the baby getting her to sleep, or nursing her at night)

• setting some (easy) rowing goals
• doing a better job recording our garden harvests for planning for next year - for example 22.5 & 6.5 lbs of potatoes needs to be written down somewhere or I'll forget come next spring let alone next fall! (I've started developing a spreadsheet that I'll print and put in my home notebook once it's finished, with columns for seeds sown, amount eaten & preserved, etc)
• figuring out a plan for next spring's most likely outside big chore - in-ground irrigation and some grass seed, plus figuring out the ideal fence location on the east side of the inner yard.

Well, there you have it, some plans and dreams for the future year. Hopefully this will give me some guidance on lonely evenings and quiet days for what to research and think about! Nothing like setting goals to get me motivated :)

New Garden Planning - the side 'yard'

In the presence of more energy aka more time to do things these days, with the house back to the good-enough stage after my pregnancy-induced lack of cleaning this past fall, and in the absence of any grabbing-my-attention-yarn laying around, I've been working on something equally as easily picked up and put down as a batch of knitting - garden planning! Or rather, NEW garden planning! That's right, I've been sketching up plans for the new side garden I've been thinking about for about a year now. Mostly just coming up with ways of planting and orienting things to maximize the space available, but also spending some time thinking about chicken coop designs and greenhouse/potting shed ideas. If you are on pinterest and want to check out my garden inspiration board, click on over here, and to check out some greenhouse/compost bin/homesteady pins, click on over here :)

I'm sure I'll pick up some great yarn soon, as a couple of my plans for decorating Little M's big girl room involve some knitting & crocheting, but in the meantime, whenever I've got a spare couple minutes in the evenings, I've been picking up my plans and sketching out better details about where the raspberries will go, how we'll separate the chickens from the garden, and all those fun details.

Of course, with this baby coming this summer, I don't really plan to do much in the way of implementing this new garden area, after all, this will at least triple our garden space, and moving the chickens over to there will require either some serious shed moving or a whole new coop. These are more long term, 5 year plans. But I'm sure we'll put something in the ground there this year, even if it's just some extra raspberry plants when we thin out our current patch this spring, throwing up some junky fencing around it, and putting a pile of pig & chicken manure over there when we clean out Pat's old pen & the chicken coop this spring.

The really nice thing about taking my time on the evolution of our property plan is that over time we learn how we use the property, and what our plans are longer term for it. I can only imagine how much re-doing we would end up doing down the road if we had of implemented all of our plans after the first year of living here! This way we have goals, but can live with them in theory for a couple years and be comfortable with how well they will work for us before we put them into practice!

On learning to set weekly goals

I like having goals. And I like meeting them even more. So that means having the ability to set reasonable yearly goals. I've been doing pretty good at that the past few years. Last year, with my household notebook I was even better, and I think I did a good job at setting reasonable monthly goals that were in line with my yearly goals. Again with the help of my household notebook, I was really good last year about setting daily to-do tasks that were within reason. The thing I wasn't very good at was setting weekly goals that would get me to meeting my monthly goals, and taking daily to-do's from those weekly goals.

I still managed to make most of my monthly goals, and I still think my daily to-do's were ok, but I think I could have been better about meeting & exceeding my monthly goals, or accomplishing more ambitious monthly goals, or just being more effective in my daily tasks - getting the most important things done, if I had weekly goals to focus on & help me along to my monthly goals.

This year I am determined to make progress to improve my weekly goal-setting abilities. Part of what it means for me, especially in this season of my life where I am growing a new baby, preparing for said new baby to arrive, and wrangling a 3 year old, is breaking things down into discrete chunks of work that can be done in around 10-15 minutes per task. Because seriously, about the only times that I get longer than that to work on things is when Little M is napping, and that is about the only time I get to have any of my down time, so I don't need to be filling that precious time up with to-do things!

So on my list of weekly goals for this week is making a detailed list of everything I want to have in Little M's big girl room & what steps are involved in those items. Like that? See, no difficult tasks, just planning/brainstorming tasks! So yesterday I sat down and started that brainstorming process. I didn't have too long, so I just jotted down what I'd been thinking of including in her room. Next I'll likely make a more detailed list of what we have on hand of those things, what needs to be made, and what might need to be purchased to round out the items.

The one thing I think I still need to work out better is each week going ahead and not just putting down my weekly goal, but ahead of time, like when I make my weekly goal list, sitting down and splitting that weekly goal up into daily tasks that take about 10-15 minutes. I've noticed that when I have items on my weekly goal list that are basically just one task that takes about 10-15 minutes, those items are much more likely to get finished. But when I have items that need to be split into 2 or more daily tasks to be only 10-15 minute tasks, its not as common for me to get partly done as I would expect. For example, last week one of my goals was to '(finally) finish M's play kitchen'. I didn't break that down into all the little steps that I knew I could fit into my days - cutting the doors, cutting the oven shelf, cutting the back down, sanding the pieces, attaching the doors, screwing on the shelf & back, etc. And so while I definitely had time to fit at least a couple of those items into my week, because when I looked at my weekly list and saw 'finish play kitchen' and felt overwhelmed at all the little things that the play kitchen still needed, I didn't get anything more done on it.

I think this is going to require a bit of re-working the sheet in my notebook where I write down my weekly goals, to fit both the 10ish weekly goals as well as their broken down small task components, but that is ok - after all, practice makes perfect, right! I also think that I'll have to have some sort of rough guidelines on number of sub-tasks to my weekly goals. For my daily task list, I only have room on my sheet for 10 items. For my monthly goals list I try to only write down 6 main items to accomplish. For my weekly goals I try to have only 10 goals. But I think more that that, for the weekly items I need to make sure that if I have 10 goals, each can really only have 1-3 sub-tasks. Otherwise I need to have fewer weekly goals!

In the past few month of setting weekly goals, typically I've had about half of my weekly goals be items that really don't have a sub-task - like 'take the ashes out from the wood stove', or 'go to dentist appointment', so it has worked out ok for the most part, but if I had a bunch of items like last week's play kitchen one, where there might have actually been over 10 sub tasks, actually accomplishing all of my weekly goals would be doomed from the get-go! Realistically, starting & finishing M's play kitchen was a monthly goal, but because after I got it functional for her birthday that first week in January, I didn't work on it again until I realized in the last week that I had listed it as a monthly goal, I made it my weekly goal to finish it, without really looking at what all was involved in that as a goal.

The nice thing about setting weekly goals, (apart from the obvious help that give me in getting to my monthly goals), is that knowing what the most important things are in a week really helps me each week & each day in focusing on what are the important things for me to get done. Which really is only important because then it lets me let go of the things that aren't important for me to get done, so I don't rush around 'doing' all of the time, and can fully enjoy this 3 year old, only child, stage that I'm in right now with Little M!
I think that's one of the biggest benefits I started to see last year of having my to do lists. Once I had my 10 items on my to do list nearly done, or well on their way, I didn't feel guilty, or rushed, spending quality time with Little M. In the past when I had a miles-long to do list, which I was always quite good at generating before I started keeping my daily list to 10 items long, I would never feel good about how much I was doing, so I could never really enjoy my down time, whatever my down time happened to look like. Now, when I can see that I'm doing just great on my 10 items, I find it easier to truly relax & enjoy myself.

I know that not everyone is like me, a person who enjoys checking things off a list, and that's totally OK! But for me, as a person who feels most content when I've set goals and clearly completed them, having concrete goals & clear steps to get me to them is a really great way to feel satisfied and content with certain parts of my life and what I've accomplished. There are other parts of my life that I really don't want or need to-do lists in to make me feel satisfied. For example, a lot of people have big lists of things to accomplish by the time they turn 30. I'm going to be turning 30 this coming fall, and honestly, although when I was in my early twenties I thought 30 was just so old, now that I'm almost there, I'm pretty satisfied. I don't feel old, I just feel good. I mean I look at my life, where I am right now, where I'll be at 30, and I just feel really content - I have a life out in the country, a great husband, a decent job that let's me focus on my family, an adorable and spirited 3 year old, and by the time I'm 30, if everything goes smoothly, I'll have a new baby to boot. Married with 2 kids at thirty? Sounds pretty happy to me!

As an aside, with this pregnancy, the baby hormones have been producing these amazing satisfied & content & happy feelings pretty regularly - which is pretty awesome for me, and you can be sure that I've been savoring them to the fullest extent possible when they hit! Definitely making me think about what I can do in my day-to-day life to make sure even post-pregnancy that I keep producing these feelings! (that's where I'm hoping having a great goal & to-do system worked out might come in handy!)

Balancing gardening & pregnancy

I'm just itching to start planning this summer's garden. I can't wait to look through my seed bins and see what is left over from past years & will still be usable, what seed was saved from last summer's garden, and what seed I will need to buy. I've got a tentative list floating around my head of what I want to change from last year's garden, and a couple of new plants I want to try growing.

The problem is, this here baby, just starting to be kicking up a storm in my belly, is due in mid-June. Now most of my more tender plants get planted out in the first week or two of June most years, depending on the weather. So regardless of whether this baby is early or late, I don't know how much gardening I'll be getting done about that time of the season this year...

I've told myself that one year of not having a huge garden is perfectly acceptable, and I know that with a newborn I won't have a lot of time to be keeping up on weeds, but I'm just still not sure what level of gardening I want to aim for this summer... There are some things that it seems like a no-brainer to grow based on planting time (for example to not-so-tender crops & the crops I just sow as seeds), however some of those crops need a fair amount of weeding throughout the season to grow optimally (onions anyone?!).

So in the meantime I'm trying to put off even looking at my seeds, much less making a list of plants to grow or putting a garden plot plan down on paper until it is a little closer to go time when I need to decide whether I'll start onion seeds or how many I'll start... Since last year we had an amazing onion crop, and I started my onion seeds sometime in March, I've been trying to put off thinking of gardening until February at the earliest. Maybe even mid-February. I figure as long as I've decided on at least the onions by planting time in early March, I should be ok. And really, I've grown onions from seed planted once the ground was workable in the spring too. Not huge onions, not a bumper crop like this past year, but a crop nonetheless. So we'll see. And in the meantime I'll try not to fall asleep thinking about the garden... :)

Falling off to sleep dreaming of garden plans

Last night I was awake for a bit in the middle of the night, and as I drifted off to sleep I realized that I was planning out where the corn and tomatoes would go in the garden next year. I then realized how strange it was that I was thinking of the garden instead of planning out Christmas presents or events, and how it was strange to be thinking of next years garden when this past years garden is barely even covered with snow... But that's where I was at apparently!

I've received a few seed catalogs in the mail, and have leafed through them although I haven't yet started marking anything, or started a list of the seeds I will need for next years garden. I know we want to add Arugula. And I'd love to increase our garden space by putting up a new fence by Little M's playstructure, although that likely won't happen in the spring and will likely be a project for the following year. I am looking forward to starting the garden planning come the new year though, something fun and green to make the snowy cold days of January and February sail along faster.

Hope you all are enjoying the Christmas season and savoring the slowing down that winter brings.

My 2012 Household Notebok

I've mentioned that I've been working on it several times in the past couple weeks, but finally I have finished my household notebook! I'm lucky enough to work across the street from a little local business supply store, and they do wonderful things like laminating and binding. What I couldn't just do by myself for this notebook, they could do for me!

Over the past year of blogging, I've seen lots of other bloggers share their household binders. I always thought the principle of having all those important lists, numbers, goals, and recipes in one spot made so much sense, but I wasn't all that keen on using a 3 ring binder. I liked the idea I've seen some people use of having the pages bound, but I was worried I would want to add pages as my home needs changed. What I did to try and work around that is have a couple blank pages at the end of key sections. For example, after my Garden planning page I have a couple extra sheets for extra planning. Likewise after my Chicken info page I have a blank sheet or two so that I can plan another coop, or brainstorm new breeds if I feel the need this year. All told my notebook ended up being almost 120 pages, but since I double sided it that only worked out to about 60 sheets of paper - not too thick & not too thin!

I tried to organize it in an order that made sense to me. Going through the notebook, I've got the following sections:

• Daily to do list
• Weekly schedule
• Cleaning & maintenance checklists
• Yearly goals
• Rowing challenges and a table to record my workouts
• My book list for 2012
• Monthly & season goal worksheets
• Sheets for filling out our house projects - room by room
• Vacation & trip ideas
• Garden Planning
• Chicken Info
• Blogging planning
• Finance worksheets
• Daycare & car trip checklists
• Vehicle maintenance logs
• 2012 yearly & monthly calendars
• Meal planning worksheets
• Preparedness lists
• Emergency numbers
• Important contact numbers
• List of addresses
• List of birthdays
• Gift giving records & ideas tables

It's a long list, and in fact I've got a bunch more single sheets that fall under some of these sections that I didn't even mention, but it is an information-packed notebook that I think is really going to be a time saver! I can't count the number of times I've searched high and low for my address list, or forgotten to add an address from one year to the next and had to ask for it again! I'm very hopeful that I'll use this notebook and have all those important bits of information right at my fingertips!

If you look closely at my photos, you might realize that I didn't laminate all of the pages. Laminating was the most expensive part of making this notebook, and while at $1 a page it isn't too expensive, laminating all 60 sheets would been crazy expensive! I chose to laminate the 11 sheets that I would need to reuse over and over and over. I think next time I will take the laminating process a bit slower. If I had cut the sheets to be laminated down a little bit on all sides, then after laminating I could have cut the laminated part down a bit to make the laminated sheets the same 8.5 x 11 size as the rest of the sheets, without messing up the lamination. As it is, this time I will just have to deal with 11 sheets that are slightly larger than the rest. I'll let you know if I can deal with that or if I end up breaking down and redoing those sheets!

For those of you thinking about making a notebook of your own, there are just so many great ideas out there online, and if I had one suggestion of where to start, it would be on Pinterest - do a search for homemaking/homekeeping/etc binder/notebook, and all these great printables will come up, some free, some customizable. I got a lot of my inspiration from Pinterest while I was making up my templates and filling in all the little details that make my notebook so perfect for me :) Happy searching!

Clever use of space on the boat

I'm giving you all a break from hearing about my new chicks to share some space saving solutions that I experienced while on my in-law's boat in Alaska last month. Don't worry, the chicks are all doing great and are now out in the chicken coop (they were stinking up my front hall!) enjoying more space and some ants!

So we were on a 42 foot Grand Banks for 2.5 weeks in the end of June. As you can see below, the outside of the boat has a fly deck on the very top where you can drive the boat from outside, and a deck around the entire main level including a low wide back deck.The boat has 2 sleeping rooms, 2 bathrooms, and one main cabin area with a table, 2 chairs, a bench along the wall, a kitchen space, and a high bench seat by the wheel.

 

You can see the deck was fairly narrow, with a low full railing and a higher wire railing. We were pretty careful when Little M was walking around the deck. She always had her life jacket on her, and she also always had one of us right with her to grab the handy loop at the top of her life jacket in case she decided to look overboard. We didn't have any close calls with her on the trip, which was great!

 The fly deck, the wheel you can just see a curve of below Little M's toes.

Looking forward from the table area, the kitchen is to your left in the photo, my husband is driving the boat at the inside wheel. In front of him there were about 4 different storage areas under the surface that the computer is sitting on. They stored everything there from can openers (to the left by the microwave), to pencils (in a small compartment under the computer at the front), to maps and papers.

This view looks from the table area towards the front of the boat again, but towards the kitchen. behind my husband you can see the short door that leads down to the V berth where we slept. There is a short little fridge and freezer in there, a gas powered 3 burner stove top and oven, and a sink that was big enough for Little M to have a bath in :)

This view looks from behind the kitchen area towards the side of the boat. You can see the L shapes bench and a bit of the folding table. The table was really neat, it had to long sides that folded down, and a narrow middle strip that stayed put. When the sides were up there was plenty of space for all 6 of us to eat meals, but when they were down you could walk between the tables edge and the bench.

This is the V berth where we slept for the trip, me a little curled up to avoid kicking Little M's head - see her there taking a nap? You can also see the little hammock strung to the right for gear. These are your typical kids stuffed animal hammocks, used here to stash anything and everything! We kept our rain gear (when it was dry), the Ergo carrier, Little M's warm outside clothes, and there were some spare blankets too. You can see the bottom of the little bookshelf on the wall at the top of the picture, which they were using for movie storage (there is a TV and DVD player in the captains room apparently) but we put a couple of Little M's books and a field guide up there too during our stay on the boat. One of the bathrooms was down here - very simple, a one stall shower with a toilet and sink in it.

Here you can see the back of the boat - see the dungy and the one kayak stacked up? The kayak I was in to take this picture gets stowed on top of the other 2 boats. Up on the fly deck at the very top, they had a number of waterproof type bins with secure lids where they stored other items - extra food, parts for the dingy and kayaks, etc. Under the cover in the fly deck is where we stowed Little M's car seat while we were on board. It was wrapped in the plastic bag from the airline and stayed protected and dry there. The cat litter box was also up in that area, as was more storage for non-perishable items.

This is the neat pulley system they have for getting the dingy and the larger of the 2 kayaks up on top of the boat. It makes it easy to move the heavier items up out of the water and onto the top of the captains berth area.

You may have noticed the small dog they had on the boat - Cocola. They also had one of their two cats on board with them - Honda. Here she is below. Behind her you can also see the fake grass area for the dog to do her business. Clever idea to allow the dog to be with them for the months they are on board!

 


What I really liked was all the built in custom storage. The boat had everything from those compartments in the front by the wheel and computer, to dresser drawers of different depths according to the boats exterior hull under our beds (deeper high ones, shallower low ones). There was even a small compartment in the table surface that could hold placemats. It was so impressive to see how much function (and stuff!) could be fit into such a small tight space on the boat, and it really made me certain we could do more with the spaces we have in our home. I'm now finding myself imagining builtins everywhere around our house! I'm sure they wouldn't have quite the same charm though :)

Exercise & prioritizing priorities

I've been having a bit of a problem making progress on some areas of my life that I have been wanting to improve on. Namely, getting back into the habit of regular exercise, getting up earlier, eating from (and enough of) each of the four food groups each day, and doing a better job staying on top of household chores. And then a couple days ago I read a great post where Crystal of MoneySavingMom talks about how to deal with exactly that problem here (scroll down to point #4). She had a great suggestion to make a list of all the things you want to work on (done), and then prioritize them.

Ahah. So I'll do that next, here we go:

1. Regular exercise
2. Eating from the four food groups
3. Household chores
4. Waking up earlier

Her next suggestion is to focus on one thing at a time, starting with the highest priority item, for 3 months, then moving on to the next one. Well, that makes a lot of sense to me! And it works out great that I have items to focus on for the next year, and also that waking up earlier is almost a year away, as Little M still is waking up once or twice to nurse throughout the night so I need my rest in the mornings often! So I guess I know what I need to work on through July, August & September - regular exercise!

I'm lucky in that I have an erg (inside rowing machine) out on the sunporch that I can use whenever I want. It's a Concept II for those of you who care about that sort of thing, and I make use of all the great online support and challenges that Concept II offers - check them out here. I am also lucky in that we live in an area with lots of trails and wild space for recreating, with public land literally right outside the house (the vast hillside across the road is all public land).

I am also a fairly active person, we go for walks with the dogs regularly, and I do yardwork on a regular basis as well, but I don't have a routine that makes sure I get enough each week.  I also find that even though I am out doing things often, because I am not out for the purpose of exercising, I don't feel like I am exercising as much as I should. So since I am pretty much a goal driven person, I'll set monthly goals - slowly increasing my exercise each week over the next 3 months. Because I am already fairly active, I'll try to intentionally do activities that are more along the lines of 'real' exercise, and not just yardwork to make up my weekly exercise quota :)

July - exercise 1 time per week
August - exercise 2 times per week
September - exercise 3 times per week

I think ideally I would want to exercise more, but with a little one, 3 dogs, a big garden & yard, not to mention being a working mom, 3 times a week is likely all I can fit into my schedule at the moment.

I'll try to keep you updated with how my exercise goal is coming, and look for more of these sorts of posts in 3, 6, and 9 months time as I move on to the next priorities!

Preparedness Challenge

For several weeks now Amy over at Homestead Revival has been holding a Preparedness Challenge on Saturdays. I've been meaning to join in, but haven't been doing very good at fitting preparedness into my weekly routine. This week my husband and I decided that over the weekend we would start working on our Bug Out Bags (BOBs), so I was thrilled to wake up this morning and read that Amy was working on hers as well!

This week I am working on our 'take everywhere' bug out bags. For me that means a backpack that will go in my car with me to work, or when I am out with Little M. So my BOB has to carry things for me and potentially for a one year old. My husband's BOB needs to hold slightly different things. Since he is in law enforcement and is into hunting, his bag will hold guns and ammo, and more woodsy things - firestarters, rope for making shelters, etc. Of course, my bag will hold some of that stuff, but as I will be limited by having Little M, I need to have things that are easier to use & make (lighters instead of firestarters, emergency blankets instead of rope to make a stick shelter). Longer term we will need a larger 3 person kit at the house, including items for our three dogs.

For now I am focusing on the basics - food, water, & shelter. I've ordered several stainless steel water bottles (to avoid plastics, and in theory they could be used to boil water in if we needed), some energy bars, and some paracord (thin strong lightweight rope). We already have a couple of emergency blankets and iodine tablets. I'm thinking about also getting one or two headlamps & a couple of whistles depending on how far I can make our money stretch. We already have things like knives & extra clothes, but we still need to work on our first aid kits.

We set aside money from our tax return this month to pay for these items, but for the future we need to think about whether we want to have a budget line for preparedness items so that every month we can beef up our preparedness kits a bit more, or whether we want to get preparedness items when we have extra money come in one month.

Gardening in March in years to come?

Where our veggie garden is right now, it doesn't get direct sun during the heart of the winter. This means that come this time of the year, when other locals are starting to work in their gardens, I am left staring at a pile of slowly diminishing snow...

this was monday afternoon - sunday all of this was still snow covered

However, if I had raised beds near the orchard, house, & chicken coop, I could be gardening right now!

this area has been snow-free for days and days!

When we first started working on the garden, the old renters hadn't yet moved out, and our purchase of the property wasn't yet final. We picked a spot in what we now call the middle field, where a garden had once existed (based on the bare ground at the spot).

summer of 2009, pulling weeds where our garden is now

This spot is a fair ways from the house though, and its lower elevation and closer situation to the hills that block the winter sun make it less ideal than we would have chosen not that we had that much of a choice at the time.

summer of 2010, looking at the house from the garden

Now that we have put so much work the last 2 years into getting the garden going, I am reluctant to give up on the spot, but I am definitely thinking hard about adding raised bed near the chicken coop! Especially since we plan to build a playstructure for Little M near there, so I could garden while she played...

Keeping a goal plan

One thing my Mom got me started on at some point in my late teen years was to come up with a goal plan of where, what, and who I wanted to be in 6 months, 1 year, and 3 years, and then sit down occasionally and go over it and make sure that I've been doing things to meet & keep me on track to meet these goals. This was when I was in my early university years. More recently in married life, where I can see further down the road, I have added a 'longer term' for distant future goals. I set goals to meet personal expectations, family dreams, and financial needs.

I try to review and update this goal plan every few months, depending on how busy I am and whether I need the added boost in my life of visualizing my family's future. I just keep a digital copy on my computer, although a paper copy on the fridge (where I keep lists of that sort - most people likely would put it in a homemaking binder) would make good sense if there were particular goals that I wanted to make sure I looked at everyday.

When I go through my goal plan, I update the date so that my file shows the last time I made changes change the goals as my goals change. Its encouraging to be able to go through and delete items that we have accomplished, and its also neat to look back at my older files, and see how my plans as changed (for example how they changed when I met my now husband, how they changed after I gave birth to our daughter, etc). I encourage anyone who doesn't write down their dreams, goals, and plans, to do so - it keeps you on track to meet them!

Our family's purpose statement

Well I'm a bit behind schedule, but I'll be following along with Simple Mom as Tsh simplifies 5 home hot spots in the next 5 weeks. This past weekend I should have sat down with my husband (and 3 dogs & 1 year old, but they don't usually have much constructive to say!) and we should have decided on our family's purpose statement, that describes our family's purpose so that things like cleaning and organizing can be prioritized and done based on what will help us as a family.

Well, with my husband working Friday's through Monday's, the amount of face time we get over the weekend isn't very high. That being said, I'm just now getting to writing about our purpose statement :)

After a busy evening visiting friends last night, we scheduled some time tonight to go over some ideas that I have come up with that might express both of our feelings on the topic. I figure we will spend a little bit of time composing our family purpose statement, and then I will pretty it up a bit and print it off for our fridge!

Tomorrow or Friday I will post about my progress on my wardrobe/closet hot spot (the first hot spot), and then I'll link up to Tsh's party on Friday! Hope to see you all there and we can celebrate our organizing and cleaning together!

Redesigning our old coop

I'm joining in on the homestead barn hop today to share the plans we've been working on for our chicken coop. The last week has been mostly warm and sunny during the day, although we did get about 4-6" of new fluffy snow that melted quickly from the south facing slopes. I've written about the coop before, here, so I won't go into detail about its history with us, but I will share what we have planned for its future!

One sunny afternoon last week my husband cut down the 2 dead willows that were standing beside the coop, and cut the nicely dried trunk up for firewood. When I got home from work one day to find Little M supervising from the porch as my husband cleaned up the last of the trunk, I was motivated to grab my tape measure and head on over to the coop.

He still has some work to do out there once the snow melts to clean up all the dead branches and sticks, but in the meantime the dogs have been enjoying chasing each other around and playing with the sticks. Remi (ever the bird dog) loved keeping an eye on what I was doing in the coop.

That was the first of several trips back and forth this past week from the house to the coop. Since my husband really enjoyed having the pheasants for the past 2 years, we decided this fall to split the coop into 2 areas - one for chickens, and one for pheasants. Initially I was worried that the coop wasn't big enough for both, but after my first measurements put the coop at just over 50 square feet, I wasn't worried any more. To make my life easier, I decided to have a little entry area as well so I didn't have to worry about the birds getting out when I went to water or feed them, and so there was a space for storing their food and other associated items. The coop is filthy and really needs some TLC; my husband still needs to clean it out from the past 2 summers of pheasants before I will start doing any building in there, and there are several wall roosts that he constructed for pigeons when he had some of them housed in there last spring that will have to come down.

I've got my chick order ready, but we still haven't decided whether we want them soon or after our late spring family vacation (so that we don't have to have a house-sitter while we are gone). I have a list of several breeds, totaling 25 chicks so that they don't get too cold en route.  I know I won't be keeping 25 laying chickens, and in fact several of the breeds I will order as straight run, even though we aren't interested in any roosters (my late-shift-working husband said he doesn't want to be woken up at dawn, thanks very much!). We plan to use some of the chickens as meat chickens, which is why I am mostly ordering breeds that are good for meat and laying.

What I've read suggests that chickens need about 1 square foot each, so if I managed to have a chicken area that was about 20-25 sf there would be enough room for the 25 meat & laying chickens during the summertime when they will be able to go outdoors, and plenty of room in the wintertime when I will drop down to about a dozen laying hens. I expect in the summer the birds will spend a lot of their time outside in their fully enclosed run (more details to come on the outdoor space!).

I won't bore you with all the measurements and lumber amounts, but here is a pic I took of the finalized plan I worked out this past weekend in my trusty notebook to give you an idea of what things are shaping up like. I've got separate sheets with the new wall dimensions worked out as well so I know how much wood & chicken wire mesh I need, but I still have to work out the laying boxes and exit door & ramp for the chickens.

Drooling over Wall Decorations

I wanted to share this cool etsy shop that I found through a recent post over at NewlyWoodwards. I checked out the link there to Lindsay and her husband Aubrey's blog which I am really enjoying, but Lindsay also makes the most adorable prints at her etsy shop. Check her out! Aren't the alphabet name prints so cute?! I want one for Little M! I also love that she is Canadian, just like me :) (can you tell I've been living in the US for long enough that I think Canadians are scarce?) I may just have to try to recreate one of those prints at home, since there isn't any room in the budget to buy one in the near future (darn those budget priorities!).

In other wall hanging news, I've been doing a lot of drooling over all the art & photo gallery walls that are so popular around the blogging world, and I've been dreaming of putting one up on our long, bare wall. (Please ignore the 2 sad lonely frames currently occupying that space!) I think a wall of art & photos could make this space really great.

Oh, and check this out. While I was writing this I realized that I didn't have any great pictures of just that portion of wall, and this pic below was the closest I could find. I snapped this pic the day before Valentine's Day, that's Little M scooting down the hallway getting ready for her photo shoot for Grammy. What stunned me was how different the hallway looks compared to before (most of) the black trim went up! Wow. I love how crisp the new look is!

2011 seed starting schedule & garden planning

I've started seeds indoors for my veggie garden for the past 2 summers, but never made a schedule, I just would decide, hmm, seems like about time to start my seeds, and that would be it. I started them all at the same time regardless of what type of plant they were, and never thought much more of it than that. Last year I even had to restart all of my seeds since they accidentally froze on the sunporch (courtesy of our old leaky sliding glass doors).

Spring 2010 - Little M supervising me re-planting my seeds

This year, since I've been blogging and seeing everyone else talk about their seed starting schedule, I decided to give it a go. First I looked at when the last frost was last year, which was unusually late and hard - May 21st. At that point I had corn and beans just peeking above the ground, and the pile of towels I spread over the sprouts didn't do a very adequate job at keeping the sprouts frost-free. That frost also killed most of our orchard flowers, so we had a very spotty fruit crop last fall!

May 21 2010 - towels protecting sprouts from a late & hard frost

I did some looking at the calendar, and turns out I still have 13 weeks until what I will consider our last frost date, so I guess I still have a bit of time before I need to start planting. I sat down and looked over the seeds that I bought this year and those that I have leftover and saved from the past couple years. I was surprised at how many different types I have! I planned out my garden layout, although there are some herbs and flower mixes leftover from last year that I really want to grow somewhere - hopefully I can get some sort of garden set up by the chicken coop as I have mentioned previously, so that I can have a bit more space.

Planning for my 2011 garden!

Now that I know I have 13 weeks or more until I start planting my start outdoors, I can relax a couple weeks and wait until at least next month to start planting my first seed starts.  I may start my peppers and some flowers earlier than that though, because last weekend I was working on cutting some trim boards in the garage when I realized that past owners had left a shop light in there that would be a perfect seed starting light! Yippee!! Sometime in the next week I will wrestle it out of the garage and put it up on the sunporch somewhere, and maybe I'll even be able to find an old heating pad somewhere to keep under my plants so they stay nice and warm. I figure with that light, I will be able to grow things like peppers and some flowers to a bigger stage than I would without that extra light, which will be perfect since last year my peppers were pitifully small at the time when I would have planted them out. I say 'would have' since a little mouse got into the sunporch while we were gone for a couple days, and when I came back the peppers were just little snipped off stalks... darn rodents!

5 tips to improve next years garden

1 - Create a garden map of your last garden and draw in your crops at planting, updating as things fail/are replanted/replaced/changed/etc

2 - Make a list of what seeds/plants you grew in your last garden, including things like exact type, source, etc, in as much detail as you can remember

Next year my tomatoes need supports!

3 - After the season, if you made your garden map in the spring make sure your map is accurate, and make notes about what plants worked, which didn't, whether your bean spacing was too tight (as I have now done 2 years in a row because I didn't record the spacing!), whether growing 2 crops side by side didn't work very well, and just generally any suggestions you have for next year.

4 - Before ordering or buying any seeds, sit down and think about what you want to get out of your garden this coming year. Do you want to grow an assortment of fresh herbs for cooking, or lots of basil for pesto, or tomatoes for pasta sauce, or a variety of vegetables to freeze to feed your family over the winter? By thinking in advance about what your priorities are, you can ensure that you pick seeds (and thus grow plants), that will give you the produce you want!

5 - After deciding on your garden priorities, look back at the plants you grew last year and decide on which plants you want to continue growing, which don't fit into your current priorities, which plants need to be replaced with different varieties depending on how they grew last year (keeping in mind whether your weather was normal or not), and which plants you want to add to your selection this year. This will let you pick a good assortment of plants based on your past experience in your garden, for your particular goals!

Keeping these tips in mind helps me focus my energies while planning and avoid overspending while flipping through seed catalogs. I hope they help you get more out of your gardening this summer!