I’ve known for awhile that my monthly goals posts needed a refresh. I still believe in the power of setting monthly goals, but in this season of life, I don’t have the bandwidth to have a very wide spread of goals; instead, I have much more success when I hone in on just a few very specific things for the month and call it good.
With this in mind, I’m going to be shifting how I post my monthly goals. Instead of a long laundry list of to-do’s, I’m just going to include the three top priorities I have for that month. For this month, they fall under the categories of home, flower farm, and financial, but those might not always be the three categories I focus on.
Doing the goals posts in this way will not only keep me more motivated since my focus isn’t all over the place, but I’m also hoping that when I report back, I’ll be able to include more details and progress updates since I don’t have a lot of different goals competing for attention. I will still include general recaps in each monthly goals post as well, just because those are good for me to look back on so I can remember what’s going on month to month 🙂
I do want the recap to be a bit more focused though, so I’m going to include that more like a questionnaire/list.
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December 2024
Highlights (Personal + Family)
Our youngest boy Hyrum turned 5 in December, which we celebrated up north with grandparents. My mom and stepdad took him out to the small local aquarium for his birthday outing and topped it off with dinner at IHOP, where he ordered the mac and cheese even though he really should have ordered the pancakes since he ended up eating nearly all of my stepdad’s pancakes that he’d ordered. Ages 3 and 4 have always been tricky years to navigate for us with all of our kids just because it seems like it’s HUGE emotions, ALL the time, but by the time they’ve all turned 5, it seems like they mellow out a bit. It’s been the same with Hyrum, and he’s been especially sweet this last little while as it’s just him and Naomi at home again once the older kids returned back to school after the holiday break.
Matt got an offer for a winter job from the same friend I do some marketing for during the off season, and so in the middle of the month, Matt started traveling up north and staying with his folks from Monday to Thursday while he now works as a running and agility coach. While this came with its own hard things since he’s now away from us during the week, two things about it really help: 1) we need the winter income, and so that’s been a blessing that this was offered to us, and 2) Matt LOVES the job. Matt’s never really loved a job before (well, loved a job where he was working for an employer, that is), so this is a big deal. It helps that the job taps into a lot of his natural strengths, and it also helps that the environment is just really fun for him to be in. It’s brought me a lot of joy to see him really step into this new position. It even made him sign up for a triathlon this summer!!
The Christmas season was fun and busy, as it always is. Unlike last year, when we had to pass on a lot of the holiday gatherings because Naomi was still in such a vulnerable health state, we went to allll the parties this year. It was a lot of fun, a lot of getting spoiled, and a whole lotta chaos and craziness that took us awhile to come down from after it was all over.
Seriously, the whole month of December we were taking multiple long drives every week up north and back for either parties or medical appointments, and so by the end of the month, we were totally ready just to crash at home and do nothing.
We celebrated the Solstice with a special candlelight dinner, as we do every year. I’ve mentioned it before, but it’s my very favorite tradition in December, and easily the one where I feel the true “reason for the season” the most, as it’s entirely focused on Christ being the light of the world and not at all focused on gifts or games or any of it.
Our oldest finally learned the “secret” about the magic of Christmas this year, and thankfully, she took it pretty well. I wasn’t sure how she would handle it, but I think while a part of her was sad, she was also excited and felt grown up to be part of the fun of it for her younger siblings. It didn’t affect the fun of Christmas morning at all though, and I absolutely love how magical that morning still is with our kids being the ages they are. Boy, is it just so fun to have all the traditions with them that they’re still so excited about and see their glee and delight and gratitude Christmas morning! These are the memories I just want to bottle up and revisit over and over forever.
New Year’s was especially quiet (as well as the week leading up to it) because Matt had returned to his new job, so it was just me and the kids, recovering from the holidays. No complaints here, though! I needed a whole lot of time to do nothing but clean the house and recover.
Hard Things
We got hit with sickness hard right after Thanksgiving, and various illnesses were passed on and off through all members of the household for about three weeks after. Matt started his new winter job the week before Christmas, and that also happened to coincide with the week that the kids and I were dealing with stomach flu.
It was, in a word, horrendous. I was all on my own with all four kids, barely able to function (especially as I got hit with the bug TWICE). It was definitely one of the longest weeks of the year, and it was not a great start to an already tricky transition to Matt being away during the week.
The first week of the month (while we were all still a bit sick from the first illness we’d gotten), Naomi had to go in for her sedated echocardiogram to determine what we were going to do about closing the hole in her heart. We were pretty nervous about the appointment because it could have gone any which way — we could be told she’d need open heart surgery by the end of the year, or we could be told we might have a year or two to wait to do the simpler, less invasive catheter procedure.
There was largely positive news from the echo, though — it seemed that the tissues around her heart were mostly all good for trying the catheter procedure, with the exception of one small section. So basically the plan now is that she’s going to go in again around April when she turns two, and then they’ll schedule the catheter procedure then. If the procedure is unsuccessful due to that one spot of deteriorated tissue, then they’ll have to go back in and do open heart surgery. Obviously we’re hoping that the catheter procedure goes off without a hitch, but it’s a really good specialty children’s hospital that’s going to be doing the procedure, so we’re pressing on with the hope that either way, everything will turn out okay.
December held a lot of other medical appointments, too (multiple times a week usually, and almost always at least 90 minutes to two hours north of us). We were trying to figure out why Naomi isn’t really gaining weight as expected, so we’ve been meeting with feeding specialists and doing a swallow study and doing consults with dieticians…we did find out that we needed to thicken her liquids (which has helped a lot), but her feeding schedule has gotten a bit intense–we’re feeding her even more frequently now than we did when she was a younger baby.
Naomi’s medical issues have definitely been a recurring source of stress this year, but we think we’ve gotten a lot of things figured out, which helps.
Mathias and I were also getting cluster immunotherapy shots for our seasonal allergies at a clinic up north once a week, which meant Mathias was sometimes getting up to six shots a week (!), and I was getting up to 3. Both of us finally had a negative reaction to the accelerated schedule and had to cut it back a bit by the end of the month, but we did save ourselves a couple of months by trying out the cluster shots for as long as we did.
December was also a month for pretty intense financial stress. Not only were we making very little on the flower farm (as would be expected since we’re in our off season), but we were hit with an unexpected $1,000 car repair right before Christmas (on our way to a family party, coincidentally) AND a $1700 bill to replace our water heater, which went out right before New Year’s. Thank goodness for angels in many forms who were generous in many ways with our family this year, because we would have been in a very sketchy financial situation otherwise.
Flower Farm
December is the only month of the year where we really put in pretty minimal work on flower farming. I even take a break on doing my weekly farm newsletter. I did sell some bouquet subscriptions so people could gift them for Christmas and I kept up on my social media posting, but that was about it. And hallelujah for it! I sorely needed the break.
Overall Thoughts
December was a lot of wonderful, a little bit of hard and intense, and just a LOT of driving and busy-ness in general. We were definitely ready for a much slower pace come January!
January 2025
I used to go all out on New Year’s resolutions every January, but I’ve since pulled back a ton in that regard and instead just try to focus on a few major things all the time so that I’m constantly reaching for goals throughout the year.
The three main things I want to focus on in January are as follows:
Home: Rent dumpster and clear out garage, basement, and other storage places of all large trash items
We’re so close to reaching more of a “true” minimalist state, but one of the main things holding us back are larger items in our storage areas that just need to be trashed. We’re going to use some of the Christmas money we got to do this. I can’t think of any gift better than a streamlined, clutter-free home!
Flower Farm: Create curriculum for new intermediate cut flower course (+ teach both courses) and finalize planting plan for season
I’m offering a brand new course this year through the winter class I teach at the local college, which has taken up a lot of my work/free time as I’ve needed to come up with all new curriculum for it. This will be a relief when it’s all done, although I will miss teaching the class since I only do it once per year!
The other major flower farm thing that has to happen in January is that all planting plans need to be finalized, basically down to the exact number so I’ll know exactly how much to plant and how much we’ve already ordered and actually have spaces for everything.
Every year, we’ve expanded our planting ground, and every year, I’ve run out of space 🙂
Financial: Do all tax preparation so we can file beginning of February
This is a perennial goal every January, and it’s even more important this year because of our current financial situation due to all the unexpected bills we just got hit with. We should be getting a nice tax return, which will definitely help a lot. My plan is to file the first week of February, but that means that everything on my end has to be 100% organized and ready to go before then.
How’s 2025 been going for you so far? Did you enjoy your Christmas?
