The Big White Farmhouse

This post contains affiliate links, which means I may receive a commission of any sale made at no extra cost to you.

Oh my goodness.  November feels like it has spun me around and around and then spit me out!  You know your life is too full when you have to make daily to-do lists on 4×6″ pieces of paper because there’s just not enough room to write in your weekly planner.  Yeesh.  The silly part is that it’s not even really farm tasks, it’s just life tasks!  To everything there is a season…I’m looking forward to a slower pace.  Soon!

There’s another new baby in our community!  When the world feels dark and cruel, man oh man do we need and appreciate new life!  Praise be to God for the light that comes from these babies.  Anyway, we brought over dinner and gifts for both the new baby and the big sisters.  And frugal accomplishment: I learned how to make a gift bag from wrapping paper to package up the itty bitty outfit!

In farm news, the two new piglets arrived on Wednesday!  We named them Millie and Sally, a la The Dick Van Dyke Show.  They are so sweet and are warming up to us already.  Max and Ruby, the “big kids” piglets, are obsessed with their new neighbors.

On my nightstand: Catch Me If You Can: The True Story of a Real Fake by Frank W. Abagnale and The Catholic Mass: Steps to Restore the Centrality of God in the Liturgy by Bishop Athanasius Schneider.  I seem to be reading at a snail’s pace this month.

The kids and I made a batch of vanilla granola.  It was gone in two days.

Even though this week was crazy, I somehow decided that it was just the right time to start intentionally creating new habits!  I turn 40 next year and have been thinking a lot about how I want to feel moving into this new decade.  I want to feel less stress and more peace.  I want to feel strong.  I want to be in good health.  I want to be a saint.  (That one’s the most difficult!)  Everything I do today is a gift I give myself in the future.  A few new habits I started this week:

• starting the morning with a big glass of water and electrolytes
• waiting one hour after waking before my first cup of coffee
• completing a low intensity but powerful workout 5x/wk (I started this beginner workout plan from Nourish Move Love)
• thinking of morning farm chores as an opportunity to get sunshine into my eyes
• finding creative ways to have protein in every meal I eat

This post contains affiliate links, which means I may receive a commission of any sale made at no extra cost to you.

I worked on a new junk journal for December!  One aspect of junk journaling that I love is the ability to use up crafty projects in a useful way.  For example, I enjoy cross-stitching but I’m always at a loss for what to do with them once I’m finished.  Anyway, I recently found a finished Santa piece that I made more than a decade ago!  I had attached it to mounting board but woo, it was a terrible job.  I pulled and warped the fabric and it was nowhere near straight.  (I’m assuming I had planned to frame it for decor but the end result was so bad, I must have tucked it away in my craft box to deal with later, ha!)  This week, I decided to pull it off the mounting board – sadly warping it even further – and used it as the cover of my December journal.  It’s wonky and imperfect, but it’s something I made with my own hands and it didn’t end up in the trash!  For the back, I whipped up a quick hand-stitched hexagon piece from red and green fabrics I already owned.  Voila!  A fabric cover for all of our December memories.

New recipe of the week: pumpkin scones!  Not too sweet and delicious.

A quote from Padre Pio: “…stay in the boat in which Our Lord has placed you, and let the storm come.  You will not perish.  It appears to you that Jesus is sleeping, but let it be so.  Don’t you know that if he sleeps, his heart vigilantly watches over you?  Let him sleep, but at the right time, he will awoken to restore your calm.”

My husband’s coworker and his wife just had their first baby!  She was full term, but he was itty bitty (6lbs!) and has had to spend the past two weeks in the NICU.  I picked up some adorable, tiny preemie outfits and had so much fun packaging it up.