QUICK WINS In SLOW LIVING — Finding My NEW NORMAL With BIGGER KIDS

When I was younger, I had grand ambitions and wild plans. Nothing felt impossible, no matter how big, and my energy, my time, and the span ahead felt limitless. I remember this feeling well. Pure grit, fueled by ambition and desire. Even when we began our family and our homestead, it felt like every opportunity was open to us. Originally, it started when we bought some sheep and chickens, then a dairy cow, then eventually pigs, guineas, geese, ducks, and a lot more sheep. Every open piece of land felt like an opportunity for a new garden, a new pathway, a new pond, anything my little heart could dream up and my hands could execute. This is perhaps one of my many problems. I'm willing to do the hard work so my dreams find a way of coming out, so long as my hands are willing to match my heart and effort. I feel grateful to have experienced this surge of opportunity and effort. Though at the time I saw it as difficult, gardening and building a homestead with four children under five years old in tow, I now look back on these days with a sense of ease. Yes, it was hard to milk a cow at 5am while pregnant and sick, and it was challenging to move pigs anywhere, but our family felt more contained in that season. If there was work to do, I would just gather the little ones into a wagon and distract them with snacks and dance music and we'd get on with our work. Nowadays, finding a large piece of time for anything feels almost impossible. I fought it for years, wanting so badly to cling to the way that it was. When life with our children was a bit more controllable, and they were a bit more under my wing. Now there's driver's ed, friends, gatherings, and full homeschool schedules to contend with. While our days with the littles are most certainly full, nowadays they feel doubly so. Unless this sounds like a complaint, I think about this new season as a bit more of a submission. Unless I'm going to live in constant angst and frustration, I must learn to be content with these little pieces of time. Back in the day, I could rearrange, paint, or detail a room at any given moment, and now I must settle for a quick sweep through and a general tidying. When I first started managing our home, I would often sit down with a monthly schedule to plan out our meals, and I felt so proud in these moments to have worked ahead. I felt prepared and delighted, complete with a grocery list and grocery shopping times planned. These days, I tell myself to focus on three days at a time. I sit down with my cooking community app for less than five minutes, scratch together recipes that will work for us given the schedule, and shop in small fragments of time when the kids are taking piano lessons or are at jujitsu. There's no longer any big grocery hauls with double carts like I had back in the day, and instead, I must be content with smaller trips more often. If you're looking for high quality meats, I'm so excited to introduce you to Porter Road. This is the company that we use to stock our freezer with all kinds of different cuts of meat like dry aged steaks, or like I'm going to be using in today's video, their incredible brats. Porter Road is a wonderful company based out of Tennessee and founded by chefs and butchers who really care about the quality of meat that they source. I stock a bunch of their products in my freezer, from marrow bones to Italian sausage to these beautiful brats and specialty cuts of beef like flank steak and brisket. Porter Road checks all of my quality standards with zero compromises. What founders Chris and James are doing here, from animal husbandry standards to culinary standards, is absolutely top of the line. I love this company, what they stand for, and the products that they make. You can visit PorterRoad.com forward slash the Elliot Homestead, there's going to be a link right below the video, and save 15% off your first order. Even with this smaller schedule, it's still not always possible to plan ahead. So instead, I often tell myself that one meal is enough. If I can think ahead and plan for just one meal, that's sufficient. Sometimes it's just about cooking a bit of extra to account for lunch the next day, or in this case, some soaked and cooked beans so that I can whip up a quick dinner. There's no longer gigantic food prep days or massive pantry overhauls in this season of life. I remember that when I was pregnant with Will, I spent days and days filling our freezer with all sorts of freezer meals, but those days of being able to devote large pieces of time to any given task, they're gone. Pleasurable tasks like reading, learning Italian, even working out, these are all done in the smallest pockets of time. Gone are the days of curling up for an entire Saturday afternoon with a good book, because after all, they're separate to be made. Home projects, gardening, and seasonal turnover of the farm likewise must all be done in small pieces, little pieces of effort. I used to thrive on these gigantic 8, 9, or 10 hour gardening days when I would just come in exhausted. Huge swaths of time were taken to devote to these pieces of our life and our home that brought us and still bring us so much delight. There were many days when I would randomly begin building a fence or putting in a new garden, planting new fruit trees, ripping out old landscaping, without giving any thought to how much time such a task would take. But now, Stuart and I have to take the time to get on the same page, plan pockets of time, and set priorities. Sometimes, to be honest, it feels quite lame. I love having a vision for something and having an idea of what I want to create and just diving in instantly, without too much care or forethought. If this sounds like it can get a little bit off track and messy, you're absolutely right. I suppose it was a lesson that I needed to learn in one way or another. For now, even though the desire to tear into beautiful pieces of life is still there, I do try to practice some restraint and a lot of contentment, being grateful that each day I can give a little bit to all of the pieces of life that need me or that I love. Even if I can't do them all, exactly when and how much I want to, I am grateful for this little-by-little motion that I'm learning. Small pieces of things are growing me in contentment, and perhaps this is a more sustainable way forward for us in the long run anyway. Cheers.