A Month in The Life: April 8th-May 3rd

So much for a week in the life haha. Here I was thinking I was at around 2 1/2 weeks or 3 weeks at most since our last update. Turns out its been four weeks! Woops.

I’m so grateful that God doesn’t expect us to be perfect all the time and that he only works on us in one or two areas at a time! I am happy to report that I have been trying my best to keep my new perspective on this blogging gig. And in light of that, this last month has been a lot of just staying on top of maintaining our home and massive amounts of garden work which hasn’t left much time for writing at the end of the day. Not to mention that baking this little baby is sucking lots of my energy:

Oh and don’t forget this little tyke:

Who. Never. Stops. Moving.

(This is him borrowing little brothers carseat for the last time when we had to switch cars suddenly).

My previous writing time during his naps have been disappearing into tasks I can’t do while he’s following me around and lately a lot of my own need to nap in the course of the day. Early morning writing sessions have been replaced with sleeping more and by the time the evening hits spending a few precious minutes with Kevin….even if it is just watching a movie, is often more important to me than sneaking in writing time.

It’s such a balancing act this life stuff. Slowly but surely little habits and routines make a few extra minutes, but each change and each project can throw a new and unexpected twist. Not to mention friends stopping by, or an unexpected phone call. Which for me has so much more eternal significance and worth than stressing out that I didn’t get twenty posts out this week or make a bazillion dollars from this blog.

But I do love this little blog and I do want to see it succeed so I am working on new ways to try to carve out little pockets of time in life to work on it. This week I’m going to work on practicing writing in tiny amounts of time and see what I can accomplish.

How do you find time to blog or work on your hobbies with all your other responsibilities?

If you have been following along on our Facebook page you’ve probably seen a lot of these but here’s a peak at what our month has looked like:

We surprised Daddy with his birthday/Father’s Day present early as both of those dates fall right into the weeks after I am due to deliver. His old grill was so badly broken down that parts of it were catching on fire while we grilled so he was absolutely thrilled with his new tool!

We’ve already been treated to many tasty meals on this great little grill!

April 1st was our technical last date of frost but we were still scrambling to get more woodchips and manure here for the garden beds so we delayed planting for another week.

We weren’t able to get more manure here in a timely manner so we went ahead and planted the second bed regardless with just the woodchips. We will top dress with the manure when we get it.

We got the electric fence installed all around the beds. It actually turns out that the ducks rarely get shocked from our fancy little fence as their feathers seem to insulate them pretty well. But they have gotten snapped a few times and have for the most part learned to stay out of the garden so that is a huge improvement.

The cat and dog have been properly introduced to the fence as well so we should have much fewer pooping and digging in the garden problems this year!

Our good friend Bridget has been coming out once a week to help with whatever we need help with in the garden. It has been such a blessing! It is so hard not having family close and she has made this month a total joy with her presence and motivation!

All the plants are planted in the back beds and we row covered all the squash and eggplants.

I tried my hand at growing strawberries from seed this year and it was a pretty good success! The bigger ones are from roots but the tiny ones are doing their best to play catch up with them.

After spending two years looking for rhubarb unsuccessfully in all the grocery stores here for Kevin’s favorite Strawberry Rhubarb pie, we discovered that Tractor Supply was selling the roots!

They supposedly will not survive here in the heat so we are trying them out in a very large pot that we can move to the shade when the heat kicks up.

After much research and uncertainty we finally bit the bullet and got the watering system ordered.

We went with a pre packaged kit so we would be certain to have everything we needed and it is working great!

I actually was able to get pretty much all of it installed by myself in several sessions. We decided to splurge on a facet post to keep the filter system raised off the ground and give us easy access to our four way hose splitter for watering the rabbits and ducks. Kevin made quick work of pounding it into the ground for me:

And set up a brace system to help support the filter weight:

It is so nice to have everything just work instead of fighting with hoses all day long!

We had 3 butchering days this month….whew! It was a lot of work since we were doing it for the first time and trying to get in the groove. We put 9 chickens and 7 rabbits in our freezer though so that was extremely satisfying!

We found the chickens to be far more time consuming and dirty to process than the rabbits. We have one last rabbit litter that is growing out that will need to be processed end of next month sometime and then we will be finished up until fall.

We are still living in the living room haha. It’s only been mmmm six weeks of being displaced from our room. It hasn’t actually been too bad and we have been so swamped with outside time sensitive stuff that it has gotten back burnered frequently to more pressing tasks.

But this week we got it cleaned up in there and it is now primed and ready for tile! We are planning on being back in there by midweek so I can start setting up for baby.

Speaking of baby we snagged a bedroom set complete with two side tables with drawers, a headboard and a dresser for a great deal this week. Yahoo for a place to put his/our clothes in our bedroom and room for a changing pad!

I’ve also been fixing up my old bassinet for him which should look quite cute when it’s finished!

Whew. Crazy month here it has been! Will try to keep the updates more frequent friends, thanks for reading!