Garden Update

The past several weekends have been rainy, cold, windy, or some combination of all three. Because of this, it took almost a month longer to build the last section of our garden beds and fill them than we would have liked. However, this past Saturday dawned sunny and warm, so we grabbed some breakfast, got dressed, and headed off to the local Lowe's to get the chicken wire, topsoil, and compost we needed.

Within an hour, we were back home and getting to work. We guesstimated we would need 20 cubic feet of soil to fill the bean bed, so that's what we got. You can see it there beside the bed materials in the heaps of bags.

Implementing Quarterly Goals

I've spent the last several years looking for a way to increase focus and productivity in my everyday and work life. I've tried daily, weekly, or monthly goals and gotten overwhelmed. On the other side of things, I tried making yearly goals and forgot about them. I'm going to shoot for a "happy medium" and try implementing quarterly goals.

I mean. I get some stuff done, but I need to do more!

Starting now, since April is the beginning of the second sales quarter of the year, I will post several goals to be met over the following three months. Then I'll come back at the start of the next quarter, reveal how I did, and list my goals for the following quarter. Y'all will keep me accountable, right?

Pied Piper iPad

It's no secret we've allowed the girls to use what electronics we have over the years. I've talked about "tech schooling" and the girls' computerized lessons off an on. I think I even might have mentioned vintage video game family nights a time or two. We've always tried to place limits, but still, the electronics call to them like the Pied Piper of the modern day, and we'd occasionally let them have "just a little" longer because a few moments of peace seemed worth it for days when work was particularly trying.

Sneak "teaching" a friend how to play a game when she was 3.

Hubby and I decided to implement more strict rules regarding screen time toward the end of spring break. With the distraction of illness and just trying to keep things running with one of us out of commission, we let them have way more time than usual. Being kids who still believe in "more is more," they took full advantage. Within a couple of days they began snapping at one another and fighting over games or movie picks and just showing a general lack of regard for one another as they got lost in an endless stream of entertainment. They were like addicts looking for their next hit, and we knew we had to put a stop to it right away.

Getting Back on Schedule

Between a two day cold following the Expo on the 19th, a migraine that set in Tuesday afternoon and lasted into Wednesday, and just a lot of fatigue and pain the rest of the week, not much got done during our spring break. I'd planned to take care of the post event inventory and write last week's Flash Fiction Friday on Sunday. I was going to inventory my supplies and place a restock order as well as catch up on housework and write on Icarus Monday. I was supposed to write a blog post and another few hundred on Icarus come Tuesday and Wednesday. Thursday was slated to be our gardening day, and then Friday and Saturday were supposed to be the same as usual. Instead I was in bed much of the week.

Building a Raised Garden Bed

If you were around last year, you might remember we spent several days building a patio garden only to have an unusually wet year drown everything. You see, Alabama summers are notoriously hot and dry. So when we picked out pots for a patio garden, we thought having ones with solid bottoms and putting drainage rock in the bottom would be our best bet. Things didn't turn out so well, and this year is shaping up to be just as soggy. So having a patio garden for vegetables for the next few years doesn't look like it will work.

This was the garden about a week after planting and few days before the downpours began.

According to the schedule, this year was supposed to be the chamomile bed, a fire pit and attached patio, and the old patio garden. Then next year, we'd build a pergola with built in planters and benches for grape vines and blackberry bushes to climb over. And in 2018, we'd look into raised beds for other fruits and vegetables. Hubby and I decided to change up the plan's schedule. 

What a "Little Guy" Can Learn from Forbes

This past week I saw a Forbes articles from last May going around Facebook. It's titled "11 Things Ultra-Productive People Do Differently." Feeling like I've been nowhere near as productive as I need to be of late, I decided to click on the link.

Judging by the website where it was published, I wasn't sure how many of the "things" would be applicable to my life and small business. I was surprised to find I was already doing a few of those things, and I did take away a few good ideas.

So what can a "little guy" learn from Forbes?

New Year Frustration

So, I wrote about how I wanted to increase focus in 2016 at the first of the year. Here I am just three weeks later writing about my frustration in keeping that goal.

Okay, so it's not like I've given up. I haven't. I'm still trying, but the new schedule is proving harder to keep to than I'd like. When it's working, it runs like a dream. However, if you get even the slightest bit behind on one of the chores, everything starts falling apart.

This would be the schedule in question.

Of course, that may just be my personality. I enjoy schedules and routines, and I abhor when they get out of sync. It just ruins my day, and I feel like I'm playing catch up all day if not all week.

I had a few days last week where I was just exhausted after doing way too much the day before, and some of the housework piled up. Because of trying to get caught up on that, no writing at all was done last week aside from one lonely little blog post. But, we took advantage of the holiday Monday to get all caught up and reset ourselves. Here's hoping we can keep chugging along and being more productive in the weeks to come.

Homeschooling Chat: Cross Curricular Projects

Now that the girls are approaching ten and have the attention spans to match, we've decided to swap from doing a whole slew of small projects throughout the year to one big, cross curricular project. This isn't to say they won't still do some small, short single subject projects. They'll always have short essays, papers, and experiments going on. No, we're talking about a group of smaller projects grouped together covering a range of skills and subjects, all under the same theme.

Here's the girls' finished food pyramid poster.

We decided to start with one of the five basic needs as the basis of our first cross curricular project: food. No matter who you are, you have to eat. Shouldn't you know something about what you're putting in your body well before you're out of elementary school? We think so.

The Amazing Time We Live In

Nothing will make you feel old faster than sharing a childhood memory and have a teenager or child laugh thinking your joking because it seems impossible to them someone lived so long ago. Yet, considering how quickly technology has changed and is continuing to change, is it so surprising? Advancements that used to take decades or centuries are happening in just years, months, or even weeks these days as technologies compound exponentially.

Think about it. In your lifetime, what changes have you witnessed?

Starting Fresh with the New Year

Hello again. I hope you and yours had a merry holiday season and are having a happy new year thus far.

It's a time for new beginnings, and I thought I'd bring up a few of our fresh start goals for 2016. Some we technically started at the end of 2015, because why wait? Others we only started today, the first Monday of the year. Some may become new habits. Many are likely to morph or fall by the wayside. There's really no way to tell this early in the game, but still we try.

I have a horrible track record at keeping up with resolutions, so this year I'm trying picking a word keep at the forefront of my mind throughout the year. It's no secret I'm more than a bit scatterbrained, so I figure "focus" is a word I can use more of anytime. Therefore, it is my 2016 word of the year, and I intend to implement it in multiple areas of my life and the girls.

Sharing is Caring

No, this isn't an article on teaching your children to share their toys, but it is about how sharing can and is a form of caring for one another. What I'm talking about here is work and responsibility sharing. Perhaps not the most fun form of sharing, at least at first, but it's one of the most important ones we as parents have to teach our children.

I've made no secret about the fact we expect our girls to help out around the house. They've been putting their toys away since they were two, and they've learned how to do a couple of new things each year. It's my job as their mother and Hubby's as their father to teach them how to take care of themselves spiritually, physically, financially, and domestically. If we didn't teach them how to cook and clean for themselves along with how to read, handle mathematics in all its applications, and think critically, we'd be failing them as parents. But that in and of itself isn't what I'm getting at.

It's something I've come to realize as my "bad" joints have started getting worse and even my "good" hip and knee have started giving me trouble. Sharing the work and responsibilities involved in tending hearth and home is a powerful way to show one another how much we love and trust them.

End of Season Garden Recap

I've been fairly quiet this summer, and there are a couple of reasons for that. They also played a role in how our garden went this year, so I'll just get into that story.

We made root salad with the few radishes we got out of the garden. Mmmm...

We had a couple of really good weeks with the garden. Then Hubby and I both became horribly ill right as our late spring took a surprisingly wet turn. We'd picked solid bottomed pots because North Alabama summers tend to be hot and dry, so imagine our chagrin when this year turned out to be one of the wettest in recent memory. By the time we'd recovered enough to do anything meaningful with the garden three weeks later, half the garden had drowned. Our stakes and cages refused to stay upright, and we ended up fighting black spot and blossom end rot as a result.

Long Term Plans... Well, Maybe Goals is More Accurate

Last week I told you about the patio garden we started after a couple of years slowly building up the supplies. It wasn't completely finished, but we made a decent start on it. It still isn't done, but we're a couple steps closer to finishing our establishing goal for this year.

Here's our patio garden as of Sunday morning.

We found some Italian oregano, lavender, more rosemary and basil, lemon balm, marigolds, alliums, and geraniums this past Saturday, and those got planted super early Sunday morning. Our seed packets arrived on Friday, but we're still working on digging out and edging the chamomile garden. I'm hoping I can get it done today, so the seeds can be scattered before rain blows in tomorrow and sets in for the next week.

Patio Vegetable Garden: Getting Started

We've been talking about starting a patio garden for two or three years. It's one of those things that can be a bit pricy to get going. So, we've been accumulating pots, tools, and bags of drainage rock here and there over the last few years. While irritating, it's been for the best since it gave the girls time to grow into being able to take active roles in tending the garden with us.

The girls learned how to transplant seedlings. They were so gentle with their beans!

Thus far, 2015 seems to be the year to get started as things finally fell into place with only bags of high quality potting soil and seedlings left to go. So with the girls' bean plants outgrowing our kitchen table, we devoted Friday afternoon and just about all day Saturday to setting up our first patio vegetable garden.

Summer Science, Math, and Home Ec.

As those who have small children in school probably already know, kindergarten through third grade pretty much all cover the same lessons with each year just being a bit more involved than the year before. This helps lay a foundation of the fundamentals in a way that really "sticks" since we all learn through repetition. Now that Boo Bear is in third grade, we've had our hands full with projects and in depth explanations more than we have in the past three years.

She's so incredibly proud of her baby bean plants!

Both girls have always had a strong interest in science, with the biological sciences being of particular interest. So, we're going all out in our life science studies this year, which is one reason we put off the subject throughout the winter in favor of making it a spring and summer subject. Our biggest project of the year started a couple of weeks ago when we did the usual sprout beans in a plastic baggie experiment, and it will end this fall when we're harvesting the fruits of our family's labor.

Finding Balance Yet Again

There's been a lot of chatter in women's blogs and magazines about establishing a work/life balance over the past several years. Funny how most of those articles and discussions make it seem like something you set up and that just keeps on going on its own. Yet it always seems I'm having to take stock of what's going on in our lives and striving to find a way to "balance" it out every few months. Am I alone in this?

We've come a long way since 2012!

Perhaps it's simply a matter of the type of jobs Hubby and I have. Upheaval's to be expected for a teacher without tenure, owning a small business, and a failed attempt at career change. Somehow I doubt that's it though. Even when Hubby stuck with the same school for several years in a row and I was simply staying home and schooling our then preschoolers, this was going on.

Random Thoughts from the First of the Year

2015 has been another year started miserably sick, so I've had a lot of time to think while waiting in doctor's offices and curled up in bed waiting on medicines to kick in. Mostly I just kind of stared at the wall and fantasied about installing release valves in my sinuses, but I also found myself musing on a few things.

Of course, a lot of thinking on the world the Icarus trilogy was done. I won't go into much of it here, but tidbits might end up being mentioned in the world building lessons coming up on the other blog. I'm not sure though as I haven't starting writing Monday's lesson just yet.

Front Garden Makeover

So I've felt like death warmed over for the past six to eight weeks, but I've finally started feeling more like myself the last week or so. Maybe it's the weather slowly starting to even out. Maybe whatever tears up my sinuses at the turn of the year has passed. Maybe it's just a fluke. I don't know, but I'm taking full advantage.

I've been working on some long term projects throughout the last couple of weeks. I'll likely talk about those in a vlog later this week or next, when it's been finished and delivered, meaning I can finally show pictures. Right now, I want to talk about the project our family undertook and actually finished today!

Resolution Update 2

Okay, so this one is late, and there's no video. I've been down with a double ear infection with sinus troubles and the kind of deep down ache in my bones and joints you tend to get with a virus minus a fever and cold symptoms. So frankly, I just haven't felt like making an update, especially one where I have to "pretty myself up" first.

I missed a couple of workouts due to those aches, but I still managed five workouts last week. I also managed to avoid sweets and got a good chunk of the reorganizing done. I managed to get the girls closets cleared out, and we'd already gotten their toys done. Now it's mostly down to our closet, the office, and the kitchen.

I had hoped to manage all this in a week. I didn't give enough consideration to the weather and how it would affect my health. It's the yo-yoing temperatures and humidity behind my ailments in the fall and winter each year, yet I always seem to forget this until the weather can't seem to make up it's mind if it will be warm, frigid, or tepid; arid, humid, or just plain damp and drippy. So, with at best an hour before I curl up, exhausted and hurting, after arriving back home each evening, finishing with the reorganizing and clean up will take until the end of the month at least.

Thank goodness Hubby has taken over the homeschooling and daily household upkeep with gusto, or there wouldn't be an end in sight.

With any luck, I'll be able to get back to work editing Right of Succession and making progress on the paintings for our living room in February.

Resolution Update 1

I've decided to post weekly updates on what I'm doing to keep my resolution for 2014 as a way to hold myself accountable and a way to track progress throughout the year. They'll all be short and to the point. Perhaps they'll be good for teaching me to be more direct and brief.

Basically, this first week of the year, I'm focusing on getting our home back in order and taking baby steps toward improved health for years to come, namely trying to remove my sweet tooth and finding a way to work exercise back into my new schedule.