Good morning Fam,

Oh how we have missed you all!! I feel kinda bad that we wrote a blog, made a post and then ghosted you all for a month. Honestly it got a bit crazy in there and thats where we are coming back to update y’all!

In the chronic illness world, a lot of people know about the October slide. It’s a moment where for some reason, a lot of us we were on the path of feeling good and then out of no where, we feel horrible for a bit in the month of October. Sadly for myself, I have been participating in this trend for the last two years. Well I should say, that I remember. It may have been for more years but I personally can only remember last year and this year. It was a bit of a struggle both years but I would say last years was more difficult to handle.

Due to this October slide, it took a bit of time to get back to normal and in addition to that, we took a trip up to PA to visit family and friends. So a bit of a battle so to speak to balance feeling sick and a trip. One thing though, I told myself I would be going for morning walks every morning while at the campground. I did just that and I am not sure if that helped any but it definitely felt like to start the morning off that way.

Once we got back home, Jeremy and I had another one of our classic deep discussions and realized that we need to change our view point of when we will be doing outdoor projects. It is becoming apparent that being outside during the summer heat is not going to work for myself. Yes the mornings are a time frame where we absolutely love being able to be outside but thats about all my body has been able to handle. To which during those times, we have been taking the time to mow and harvest the garden. Well now with how things are going, we have made a space to cook outside and under the shade. So I am hoping this will also cut down on the heat in the house but also help give the ability to be outside more than I currently am.

We ended up deciding that maybe we do the mowing and harvesting only during the summer and all major projects we will do during the winter and spring time. That led into us taking the time to do a massive clean up. Some of our old animal spaces were over grown and a lot of junk from the animals were left where they were. So we took the time to clean up all of the junk, clear out the weeds, and taking down some fencing we no longer need. We also sold a few different enclosures that we will no longer be needing. A massive leaf clean up, moving our outdoor kitchen items, and cleaning up the wood we need to chop up for indoor fires.

All in all, it took us about 3-4 days to clean up and organize everything in the yard. We actually cleaned up the kids play area as well as they haven’t played with a lot of their toys for a long time. There are plans for the kids to have a nice mud kitchen but currently that is a later day project. In the meantime we got all of their space cleaned up!

Then after all of that outdoor work, we still have a few things left to do to clean up but this was, about 75% of the work that needed to get done. Meaning we can really take the winter to work on projects, clean up the garden, finish woodchipping the garden, and anything else we need to do outside. But I do also have some plans for indoors as well!

Starting with a deep clean. I have been needing to do a nice reset for the entire space and I am so ready to get that going! We have one last item to freeze dry before we close that up for the winter. But I am planning to deep clean each room. The goal is to finish that before Christmas. As I personally absolutely love being able to just relax and enjoy the holiday instead of trying to balance cooking and cleaning while enjoying my time. So a deep clean and making sure everything is set, its going to make it easier on myself to relax. I do plan to have the family help me out but I know I will also most likely do a lot of this on my own. That is just how I function.

Now once Christmas is over, I do plan to do a sourdough bread restock for the freezer because that turned out to be one of the biggest helps to me this year. There were so many times that bread was the only thing I could stomach and it was nice being able to just pull it out of the freezer and have it ready for the next day. Then add in the cookies, we restock those on Christmas Eve but I may go lower on the types and higher on the quantities for each cookie. We ran through those so much and I had to restock the freezer with cookies so often. I am noticing though, that the cakes and cupcakes were not a big hit with the family. To which that is completely fine. But the muffins have been the biggest help for road trips. I love using those for breakfast!!! So I will be changing it up a bit for this winter!!

That leads me to this weekend! I am not on a trip to just be with a friend and relax. We have so many fun plans in place but now I am going to sign off and go enjoy my time!! Hopefully my brain worked with me on this recap and I remembered everything. We truly have been busting butt since we have gotten home!!