Day in the Life: Summer Edition

I love me a good day in the life! Normally I find that when I document a day for day in the life, I am super productive and really my “best self”. There is something about knowing that everyone will see that makes me spend my time well.

This time I completely forgot about the Day in the Life prompt and I’m actually recapping my day after the fact, and hoping that I can cobble together enough pictures to make it work! However, now that I look back, I realize that I had a very productive day! Not all days are like this, I assure you!

I am recapping a random summer Saturday. It was the first day in a long, long time that we did not go ANYWHERE, which was glorious and extremely productive! Theo works on Saturdays, so it was me and the kids at home.

I got up at 6am and did my devotions.

Headed to the kitchen to get some chai tea and a breakfast egg sandwich. I made my bed and got dressed, then threw on an apron since I knew I would be in the kitchen for most of the morning.

I started right away on my kitchen chores, since I knew I had a ton of stuff I wanted to get done. I chopped up two packs of strawberries and put them in the dehydrator. I also preheated the oven and my dutch oven to get started on backing a loaf of sourdough. Meanwhile, I mixed up another loaf of sourdough from my starter and fed my starter. Somewhere in there, I also washed the dishes since I had not gone to bed the night before with a clean kitchen.

Saturday is cereal day for the kids, so they all got up by 8 and got themselves some breakfast, then went and started playing in the front room. They played in the front room almost all morning and afternoon, which is unusual for them! There were a couple of fights that needed to be broken up and quite a few redirections to share things. I even had to help them work out a plan to “rent” a boat since one kid “had” the boat, but wasn’t using it, and one kid wanted the boat SO BADLY.

Ori proceeded to unload all of the cabinets that he can reach, climb all over the couch, and practice his walking. I honestly just leave him to his own destructive devices and clean it all up when he goes down for a nap. He’s been taking primarily one nap a day, but by 9:30 the kid was melting down about EVERYTHING, so he went down for a nap and slept for about an hour!

I kept working in the kitchen- I made some yeast bread as well as started two more loaves of sourdough. I had to wash the dishes a second time as well! I was in the kitchen working from 8am-11:30am.

At 11:30, we got some lunch and then I set a timer to go out and hang some laundry and do some work in my sunflower field. It is getting SO CLOSE to bloom time and we just made an arrangement for a photographer to do lots of mini sessions in the field, so I need to get the field and the surrounding area spruced up quite a bit.

At 12:30, I laid Ori down for his second nap and made the kids come outside. We played a few minutes of basketball together and them I made them help me move a big pile of brush. They were SO MAD at me that I made them do that, and complained and cried at least 80% of the time. What’s funny is that they are very good, hard workers and since there was a payment incentive, I figured they would be thrilled to work with me…not so much. But either way, the job got done!

The kids went back to play in the front room (I think they played so well in there all day because I said I had a long list of chores for anyone who was bored…boredom immediately cured!) and I grabbed some of my lesson planning things and to do some Professional Development. I also finished Hard Is Not the Same Thing As Bad, which was a really great book!

Once I finished some of my planning I came back in and started working on making a raspberry apple crisp with Ezra. He really wanted to bake with me, so I got most of the ingredients set up and then he did most of the dumping and stirring. Meanwhile, Ori dumped an entire can of cayenne pepper on himself and all over the floor, so we had to stop and throw him immediately in the bath. I washed the dishes again, and cleaned up the huge mess of my kitchen, and mixed up the meat for the mini meatloaves I was planning on making for dinner.

While the crisp baked, I headed out and got the animal chores done. This usually takes me around 40-50 minutes, and my goal is to head out at 4pm every day to work on the animal chores. I did the pigs, the chicks, collected eggs and then asked Tera to do the rabbits and Kiah to do the sheep while Ezra swept the kitchen floor (and Ori stuck with me).

I took the crisp out of the oven around 4:30 and got the muffin meat loaves ready to pop in the oven. Around 5, I stuck them in the oven and then changed into my running clothes so that I could leave for a run as soon as Theo got home around 5:40. If you are wondering how it took me an hour and ten minutes to pop some meatloaves in the oven and change my clothes, you have never been a home with small children at “witching hour”. There was a LOTTA feelings. In the end, I sent everyone outside to play before someone lost a life or a limb to sibling rivalry.

Theo got home, and I left for a run. I’m one month away from a half marathon so I don’t like to miss any runs. This was a quick 3 mile run and the weather was just gorgeous!

I got home and we got dinner on the table right away and sat outside to eat. After dinner we all work together on chores – each of the kids has a week on dishes, laundry, and floors. We try to tidy up the house, put away leftovers, feed the cats, and manage the mayhem of six people living together 🙂

During dinner we talked about making a family “time capsule” and burying it outside. We each selected one object that represents us currently and we stuck it all in a mason jar and then buried it under our willow tree. This was SO FUN and after a tough day of emotions and not being sure anyone in our family even liked one another, it was the perfect note to end the day on.

We headed in for the bedtime routine, Theo went out and locked up the chickens, and he watched a couple minutes of his Netflix show while I read my book in bed. The kids were down and out by 9:00, Theo was out by 9:30, and I turned my light off by 10.