Gardening with little ones!

I'll be the first to admit that my gardening style has changed dramatically since adding little ones to our family! While gardening with littles can take a lot of patience and time, it is so worth it! I love watching my girls tenderly (or not so tenderly, depending on the day) take care of their growing plants, and take a bite out of a freshly picked fruit or vegetable while dancing around the back yard. I firmly believe this experience makes them more adventurous with food, and we've been able to sprinkle learning in along the way - colors, counting, science and nature studies - as they grow the learning opportunities grow as well!


The weather here in Ohio this spring has been especially crazy - hot one day, cold the next, wind, rain, snow, etc...we've not been able to get the ground prepared to plant, so I'm starting some of my hardier plants in planters until we can transplant them in their final destinations.

The girls loved helping me dump dirt into the planters and dig around in it. Sweetpea went on a worm hunt and added a few night crawlers to our boxes, because we've been studying how worms improve the soil and help plants grow! I brought over an extra box to let the girls dig once the seeds had gone into the ground.
We now have two kinds of lettuce, cucumbers, kale and collard greens ready to go! A little extra dirt and plenty of "tools" for the girls helped this adventure be fun and successful - I can't wait until we see some little plants peeking out of the ground!

By mid May we will be ready to plant tomatoes, peppers, and eggplant seedlings. I also want to plant some sugar snap peas and beans in the ground in the coming week, and look into some potatoes. Last July we were able to reduce our grocery budget to $20/wk with the bounty from our garden. I'm hoping we can do that again this year!

For more gardening inspiration and ideas, stop by the Frugal Gardening 101 series!

Renewal

It has been a very long time since I've written in this space...and yet all along I was blogging in my mind - composing posts to myself in the car, while working on homework assignments or in between classes I was teaching. These past months have flown by as each day was jam packed with things that had to be done. Now I'm working on my final project of my last teaching certification program, and the teacher I was substituting for is back from materity leave. In the next month I need to refresh my memory on the details of physics and chemistry for two certification tests I take at the end of April, and then - whew! I'm sure there will be many other things taking up my time at that point, but I'm sure hoping that some of those things are items of my ever growing wish list of things to get to *at some point*.

With mother nature showing us peaks of spring here in the midwest, the flowers just starting to peek through the ground and the seed catalogs coming in earnest, this time of year always seems like the right time to do my yearly planning. I do some daydreaming about goals and the like at the start of the year, but this is when I do my serious editing and reworking. As usual, at the top of my list is being present and attending to my family before all else. In order to make the home management tasks less of a burden, I've been on a relentless quest to eliminate the unnecessary "things" in our house - little by little as I find pockets of time. We have made many a trip to the resale shop and to our local charity donation station. There is much more to do.

How do you organize your time and do your best to make time for what is most important? I've written before that what works best for me is being very clear as to what those *most important* things are...and with that, I'm going to try and share a link to my daily sheet planning page. It's a sheet I created from excel, based loosely off of SimpleMom's planner, but adjusted to meet my needs. If you're looking for a planner and can't quite find what you need, maybe you can create your personalized sheet from excel too! My next scheme for keeping everything in one place is to print a bunch of these off and have them bound at my local office supply store - a DIY planner with extra pages for all of those someday plans as well.

Anyway, it's great to see you all again - thanks for sticking with me through my "vacation" of sorts. What have you been up to?! :)

Feeling Buried? Why yes, I am!

At the beginning of last year, I had just transitioned to stay at home mom thanks to our plant closure. I absolutely loved those first few months of time off - the "career transition program" I wanted to enroll in wasn't available until March, and I was free to focus completely on my family and my home. What a blessing that truly was, even though in the back of my mind I was a bit frustrated by the uncertainty of where I was going.

Fast forward to the latter part of last year, as I'm substitute teaching somewhat regularly and preparing to begin my last quarter of the teaching licensure program I started in March. Things are busy but manageable, and our little family is thriving on our new "routine", which included frequent trips to the library and YMCA, as well as gymnastics class one morning a week for Sweetpea.

I took a sub job at the start of December that quickly turned long term - all of a sudden I was working full time again, yikes! It took some serious readjusting to get us all back on an early morning schedule, and to introduce Sugar Plum to the daycare routine she had never really had to get on board with. Then came my schedule for this final quarter...somehow I managed to overlook the fact that I'm taking five classes. So far I'm managing to keep my head above water, but I've gotten very protective of my free time.

I'm trying my best to soak in the bits of time we cobble together as a family, to remember that this is our reality but for a short time, and that this opportunity to teach is a blessing. And I really am enjoying it, which definitely helps. So I'll be pretty scarce around here until April or so, though I hope to get a chance to stop in and say hi now and then. If you'd like to chat, look me up on twitter, where I manage to type one handed while I'm nursing Sugar Plum most nights. ;)

What are you up to these days?