← Simple Farmhouse Life
Loading summary
Transcript5 lines
- [00:00]
Lisa
The overwhelm that your house caused causes you to not do other things. Like I would learn how to do that thing, or I would go to that event, or I would start taking the kids to this thing. But I've got to get stuff straightened out at home first. You have this constant mental thing like if I could just get my home in order, I probably could do that. And you imagine that someday you're going to have enough time, but somehow that time never comes. My name is Lisa, mother of eight and creator of the blog and YouTube channel Farmhouse on Boom. On this podcast I like to talk about simplifying your life so you can live out your priorities. I help you learn how to cook from scratch and decorate on a budget through this podcast and my courses Simple Sourdough in the Simple Sewing series. I also help people reach their goals from home through my business courses, Create your blog Dream and YouTube Success Academy. I will leave links to these resources in the show notes and description box below. Now let's get into the show. Welcome back to the Simple Farmhouse Life podcast. Today I'm going to be answering more of your questions like we've been doing this year. So I already pulled a few. That way I could make this a bit more smooth. So let's dive into them. Okay, the first one says hi, I'm a newish mom. I have two kids, one 2 year old and one 1 year old. I've been following in your footsteps in order to cultivate an orderly home where I can be cooking from scratch in the kitchen. I'm really overwhelmed by the tasks I have in order to keep my home in order. Basically we have too much stuff. My littles make a giant mess constantly and I'm getting my 2 year old to help more, but it's still work to have her help. My overall question is what do you keep for toys for my littles, do they need toys? Do you recommend just having them be creative with what I have, I'm constantly cleaning up toys and all the lower shelves that they end up taking things off of to play with and mess with. Lastly, where do you keep the toys? We have some in their bedroom, some in the living room and some in the kitchen to keep them entertained while I'm cooking. And I just feel like my whole house is kids toys. Thanks in advance. So I did experience this when my first couple of kids were babies because I I had a lot of toys. People give you a lot of toys and I felt like they were making my life easier. I think we just sort of have that Belief about toys until proven otherwise. And I think it clicked somewhere around the time my daughter, my oldest, was four. I'm just making that up. It was somewhere in there that I was spending way more time putting the toys back where they belonged than she was even playing with them. And she was actually a kid that did a little bit better with toys and with not just throwing things, constantly making the huge mess. I would say the seven that came after her were all very normal toddlers and destroyed everything, you know, pulled everything out like a typical toddler does, where she was more of an organized, keep things where they go kind of kid. And still I noticed that I was spending probably an hour a day at the end of the day or all throughout the day, like you said, There were days where I felt like all I'm doing is picking back up, or at the end of the day, I'm spending all the time that I could be relaxing putting things back together. And since then, you know, that's been 12 years ago. Since she was age 4, we have radically minimized our toys. And it does not make my kids more clingy, more needy. They still find plenty of things to play with. There are still messes, but my house feels very manageable. So I remember she had several toys that had lots of pieces, and I would go throughout the house and I'd put them back where they go. So, you know, this certain puzzle needed these pieces, and there was like a toy kitchen set, and I had to put all of the food from around the house into the toy kitchen set or maybe some wooden dolls and put them all back in the wooden doll or, you know, wooden magnet doll box. And these days, to answer your question on what, we keep, very, very, very few. So when I think about toys in my house, pretty much we have Legos, which, if you count them piece by piece, we have a ton of toys because there's so many pieces, but there's very few categories. Duplos, Legos. And honestly, that's it. I do have random remote control cars and remotes laying around. But typically the way that we do with that is the boys will get a remote control car from somewhere. And we do a lot of thrift shop toys. We have a thrift shop in our area that we visit somewhat regularly where the kids will get something. And that's the perfect speed for kids because they get excited, they play with it, and then they completely ignore it. After about a week, it's lost all of its charm. Now, I will say some kids seem to be more toy playing Kind of kids. So if that's your kid, this might look different. But for me, my kids get a toy, play with it, forget it. So I try to get us into those toys at the price point where they can go right back where they came from, the thrift shop. So it's not uncommon to see things coming in and out of this house when it comes to toys. But the only ones that we keep regularly that actually stay here are the Legos in the Duplos. And it's so, so manageable. I'm actually filming. I'm in the process right now of filming a video where I am showing you cleaning up my house from top to bottom and what amount of time that takes when you have radically simplified the house. I know that this will, for some people, rub them the wrong way because, you know, whether you're worried about the. The monetary investment of things that you're getting rid of or it seems wasteful, I can just tell you that from a sanity perspective, which to me is worth so much more than something that my kids literally don't play with. That only causes me stress. Trying to make sure that it's all together and you're not missing any pieces is so, so worth it. Like, I'm thinking of another example of this certain toy we got a few years ago. And I know that I do better with less things in my house. My kids do better. We all are more creative without it. We know what to actually do with the things that we have when we have less of it, instead of it just getting lost in the shuffle and feeling overwhelming. But even still, I sometimes forget. And a few years ago, we had this certain toy tool set where I think it was like a tool thing, where the kid could put together the car trying to remember. It had, like, bolts, and it had little plastic, you know, wrench and screwdriver. And I kept worrying whenever we didn't have all the right pieces because, like, oh, shoot, it's missing a wheel again. Where's that wheel? I want to make sure that, you know, they have the wheel to put on that car. And it took me about a month to realize that it was causing me a bunch of stress worrying about this little $10 toy that my kid had mostly just forgotten about. But I felt like if we are going to have that thing in our house, then it should have all the pieces together at the same time. Those kind of things weigh on my mind, and I feel like I am constantly picking them up. And ultimately, when we get rid of things like that, my kids don't care at all. So it's overall very, very worth it to minimize something like Legos and Duplos. The reason that they stay around one, because my kids continuously stay interested in them, because you can interpret those toys in so many different ways. But also if you lose a piece, it's not a useless toy. So, you know, I can find a Lego here and there and I don't feel like I have to go run to where the set is to replace, to put it back there. We just have these baskets and zones throughout the house where toys roughly go and I return toys and people, kids, whoever it is, returns toys to those baskets. I don't feel the need to have one basket in my house be the Lego basket or the Duplo basket. At some point, maybe, you know, there's actually literally today. It's funny because I want to say I never ever worry about categorizing and putting things exactly back where they go. Because Legos and Duplos don't really have a particular set they go with. I mean, they first come with sets, but that, that goes out the window pretty quickly after we get them. And it's just a bin. But today I took all the baskets throughout the house and I put all of the Duplos in one basket because one of my kids wanted to play Duplo specifically. And so I did actually put all the Duplos together. But usually I don't even worry about it as long as the toys that we have are contained in the baskets in order to do a quick tidy up, I'm good with it. I think it really, really pays to majorly simplify your life. I think it'll help you so much more than you know. And I even hesitate sometimes to just share how little and how few toys due to fear of judgment because people have their opinions about toys. But if I were just hanging out with you right now, newish mom with a two year old and a one year old, I would tell you get rid of literally nearly all of it and your kids will have things to play with. Like my one year old, he gets into drawers that have our water bottles, our sippy cups into the pots and pans. But I don't feel like I am constantly putting back together toy sets that don't mean a whole lot to them. So my kids still play, they spend a ton of time outside. And it is a little different when your kids are so small because it's not like, you know, they can go outside by themselves. But even still, just keeping some favorites that they enjoy and getting the rest out of circulation. Even if that means making a bin down in the basement that you keep it in and then rotate things out of maybe once a week. I have a lot of people I know who do that. But getting it out of the main circulation will transform your life. It really will. If you feel like you're home, you're constantly going around picking things up, it's always a mess. It cannot be overstated how much that would help you. Okay. On a different note, enjoy watching you how often do you shop for groceries? And do you have an inventory of what you keep on hand? So I recently saw this comment on my YouTube channel and then I saw it here in the simple farmhouse life question pool and thought that it was a good one to answer. Somebody asked me, how often do you grocery shop? Do you have time? Or how do you have time to grocery shop? And again, I honestly, the Internet, I feel like there's nothing I could say that wouldn't make somebody angry. I don't know, like literally anything. But I am a huge proponent of the grocery pickup, so I don't go into a grocery store very, very often. Now, again, like, I'm contradicting everything I said today. But literally today I did send my two oldest kids into the store because there was something that we needed right away and we are already in town. So I'll do stuff like that. Having older kids, I can send them in. But to answer your question on how often, usually about once a week. And then we have the big Azure Standard haul. I probably place an order for Azure Standard once every three months. I usually just get tons of stuff so I don't have to go back every single month. And then a once a month Walmart either delivery or pickup order. Now lately, the way we've been getting our milk from a local farm, we've been meeting once a week. And so I will schedule my Walmart order to pick up the same night because I'm like one parking lot over from where the Walmart pickup is to where I get milk. So basically I'll start placing that order. I'll place that order sometime over the weekend and then you can keep adding to it all the way until about, I don't know, 12 hours before the pickup time. And so we'll just keep adding to it. Instead of doing a list, we'll just say, even my kids, I'll say, hey, they'll say they want something, like, just go add it to the Walmart order. It's like an ongoing thing. And then finally, at some point there's that cutoff and I go pick it up. And it's just really simple because people ask like, how do you have time to grocery? When do you have time? I just don't do that. This is one of those modern convenience things that I take advantage of and replace with other things that I like to do in my home. Now for some people, going to the grocery store is something that you really enjoy. You enjoy, you know, choosing things, picking things out, being inspired by what you see on the shelves. I have the same list that I get over and over and over again. And it is so easy to just put all that stuff in my cart, place that order and then spend time doing other things like caring for my home, cooking, baking, homeschooling. There's plenty to do and I do not feel guilty about not going and picking out my own items at the grocery store. To me, that is like one modern thing that makes such a difference in my life. Don't have to take little kids into the grocery store. I think it just makes so much sense. But do I keep an inventory or have an inventory? I have a running inventory in my head. There are certain things that we use just ridiculous quantities of. Just today I realized, oh, we're out of cocoa powders. That's one of the things I sent my daughters in to get because we use so much. We have a jar about, I think it's a half gallon jar and we will get it filled and then within less than probably like three months, I don't know, we will need it again. We just, we put it in, we make a lot of chocolate milk for the kids with the raw milk. That's something that's a nice like afternoon snack. I don't even know. We just use so much cocoa powder. And then I use tons of wheat berries that I use to make our baked goods. A lot of all purpose flour as well. I've been trying, trying to transition more into all whole grains, but I also usually stock quite a bit of organic all purpose flour. I really stock meat. So I order a half a cow and a whole pig. I just had a major restock which was great because we were completely out of meat. So with being able to stock up in bulk on meat grains, canned goods, I put those in our basement pantry, trying to think. I. I've assembled a list at one point and I will leave a link down in the show notes for you to grab that list where I literally went into my pantry and made a list of all the things that I have because really it's just kind of something in my head because I have been operating from that for so long that it's not a physical list that I have. But I ended up making a physical list because newer homemakers want to know. Know what to keep a large quantity of oils, salt, like avocado oil, lard, coconut oil. I keep lots of fat, lots of butter. Those are foundational for us. Cheese, eggs, those are just to name a few. I know I'm missing large categories. I have five gallon buckets down in the basement with a lot of the dried goods that I buy in bulk like 25 pound bags or 50 pound bags. That makes it to where I always have an option to choose from whenever we're in a pinch because there's always, there's always something to cook here.
- [15:36]
Unknown
It's that time of year again. The holidays are quickly approaching and you might be stressing about gift shopping because even if your kids have had their list ready all year, chances are good there are at least a few items on those lists that you know they'd love but that give you pause. And one of these might be a smartphone. It seems like kids are asking for these at a younger and younger age these days and like many parents, you probably have concerns about handing them the same kind of smartphone you use. With good reason. My oldest two kids are teenagers now, 16 and 14, and there are plenty of occasions where they have their own plans and I'd love to reach them, but I have zero desire for them to get fully addicted to a smartphone at this very formative time. And all the things that they could come across that they're just frankly not ready for. That's why I want to tell you about Gab's holiday sale. Gab is the leader in safe phones and watches for kids, teens and tweens. With no social media apps, no Internet browser and GPS tracking, Gab devices were built from the ground up specifically for kids and teens and are the way to keep your kids safely connected. And Gab phones and watches are still tech kids actually want, like the Gab Music app which lets kids stream clean music. For older kids, there's the Gab Phone 4 Pro with hundreds of vetted third party apps that can only be installed at parents discretion. That's why I really think Gab is a must have this year and I can't recommend enough that you and your family give them a try and do it now because right now Gab is offering huge discounts on their phones and watches. The best part, there's no contract required. Just go to gab.comsfl to get started. That's gab gabb.comsfl gab.comsfl terms and conditions apply. Creating a really great retail experience is tough, especially with multiple stores, teams of staff, fulfillment centers, separate workflows.
- [17:23]
Lisa
It's a lot.
- [17:23]
Unknown
But with Shopify Point of Sale you can do it all without complexity. Shopify's Point of Sale system is a unified command center for your retail business. It brings together in store and online operations even across 1000 locations. Imagine being able to guarantee that shopping is just always convenient. Endless aisle shipped to customer, buy online, pickup in store, all made simpler so customers can shop how and where they want and staff have the tools they need to close the sale every time. And let's face it, acquiring new customers customers is expensive. With Shopify pos you can keep existing shoppers coming back to your stores with consistent tailored experiences and first party data that give marketing teams a competitive edge. Want more? Check out shopify.com farmhouse all lowercase and learn how to create the best retail experiences without complexity.
- [18:14]
Lisa
Shopify.com farmhouse okay in the country I come from, it is common for mothers to go back to work in business as soon as their baby is one year old and the babies are settled into kindergarten. I feel a lot of pressure from everyone. People think I'm lazy, only at home with my children. In the end, being a housewife and mom feels so worthless. I don't want anything else right now yet isn't the time to start a business from home or anything like that. As a mom and a housewife, sometimes I feel really worthless. How do you deal thinking things like this? Honestly, I do remember that feeling when I had my first daughter. I felt like what am I doing with my time? But I quickly realized there were so many ways that you could really hone in on and skill build homemaking tasks to actually save your family money in a way that it would be a monetary detriment if you did go back to work. Things like learning how to cook from scratch, obviously managing your home so that you do have the groceries stocked, you're not wasting anything and you're not constantly having to rely on takeout or going out to eat because you know what you're doing. I mean, I hesitate to even say like that's the value in it is that actually it would cost a lot of money for you to go to work because then you wouldn't be able to do those things. But there's so much value beyond that. I Think it just takes time to see all the potential that is there. You can learn how to make your home beautiful, how to sew, how to keep it orderly. There's plenty to do and there's plenty of expansion and growth that can happen as a homemaker. So I of course think it's a very valuable thing to do. Now I know some of you are like, wait a minute, but you started a home business. I did. But you have to remember that for 10 years I did not. So I had four kids already when I started my online business and I was a stay at home mom learning how to make bread, learning how to stock my pantry, how to sew. I sold things here and there on Etsy, but definitely not my focus whatsoever. It was just, or I say just, but I was a stay at home mom. That is what I did with my time, primarily for at least the first 10 years. And I saw a lot of value in it. It took me a while. I remember at first thinking there was just, you know, you're just cleaning and cooking. But I learned there was an art to it and it was actually something worthwhile to pursue. Hi Lisa, I know you have spoken recently about how you get your baby to sleep through the night using some sort of sleep training method, but I was wondering, what do you do for your older children while your youngest is crying? We have a 3 year old girl and a 14 month old boy. We co slept with our baby boy until he was about 10 months. Then we tried to sleep train him but he cried so loudly that he would consistently wake up our daughter. We sleep trained her as a baby but she didn't have siblings yet to wake up with loud crying. We're getting desperate. He isn't a good co sleeper anymore, but he wakes up to nurse at least three times a night. He screams and my husband picks him up to soothe him until I take him and nurse him. Thank you so much. Usually it's one night and the first stretch is at like 7pm so the thing is about the sleep training and I talked about this pretty extensively in my last Q and A, you really have to wait to sleep train until your baby is ready and you're confident, more importantly that your baby is ready because it sounds to me like you are sort of going back and forth like you did it one night but then it woke up the three year old so you started getting him up again. And I made this mistake once trying to sleep train at 10 months. I usually wait till a year and it was a whole lot more of a rodeo than just waiting till one. Because yes, they do cry, but it usually is one night and most of that crying happens when I put the baby to bed because they're trying to figure out like, oh, now mom's not getting me up every single second that I cry. So that crying happens. But you know, from 7pm and to the latest, maybe 10 and at that point they've already kind of figured out what's going on and don't wake up a ton more. Now if they did and if my 3 year old was waking up because of it, honestly I would just stick it out and let that be a hard couple days or so for the three year old just to gain some normalcy. I also do utilize noisemakers, so in a time like this I would have a noise machine with the three year old and the one year old just so we could minimize some of that. I know, I don't know if you said here that your house is small or if there's some way to get the child to sleep. He's 14 months old, but she tried it 10 months. So I think that now I would confidently feel that that baby was ready if there was some way to get him as far away from possible during this learning process from your older daughter, I would, even if it wasn't going to be their permanent sleeping situation, but say there's a, you know, a room way over here, that's the living room and the three year old's way over here. Just while you're training, just while you're training them to keep them as far apart as possible is what I would try, but I would have to stick it out because there's nothing more desperate than a child who won't sleep when you're holding them but also won't sleep when they're laying down. It becomes this, where do I put you? And when they're 14 months old, in my opinion, you don't really have to deal with that anymore. I, I understand, I mean completely. Six months through one, it's such a thing. But I usually after a certain point I'm just like, eh, we, I can, I can reassure you, I can comfort you, but we're not going to nurse all night long. Okay. Since you are self employed, what do you do for health insurance? My husband and I own our own business and are struggling to find affordable good insurance. What do you do? So we use Samaritans. It is not health insurance, it is health sharing. So the way that it works, it's a Christian program and each month I Send my. What would be like an insurance premium, but it's not. It's a share to an individual who had some kind of medical need. And when I have a medical need, people send their monthly share to me is essentially how it works. So each month you send it to a different person. And of course, Samaritans organizes all of that. So it's a little different than insurance. It's not exactly super cheap. I'll be completely transparent. We pay a little over $800 a month, but we do have a family of 10. And honestly, I should probably revisit what all our different benefits are. I think I just signed up a long time ago and it has gone up as we've had more kids. I have not recently compared that to the regular insurance coverage, but I'm sure it's a lot more. Right? It's probably a lot more. I don't totally know, but yeah, it's what we have done for about six years since my husband came home from his job. We've had broken bones, we've had ER visits, we've had births. And it has worked out really well. I mean, honestly, we do. We don't do too many medical things. So I'm not sure if you add it all up, like what we've paid for our shares versus what we have taken in. I'm sure what we've paid out has been a lot more, but I think that's what you hope for in general with insurance. So, yeah, we're. We have no plans of switching. What brand slash type of protein powder do you add to your smoothies? Currently it is a bone broth protein that I get from Thrive Market. I'm trying to think of what it's actually called. Okay. It is ancient nutrition bone broth protein. I go through it fast, though. I will say, how do you deal with sickness in a large family? We only have two kids and I feel like someone's always bringing something home to share with the whole household. I was having a conversation with somebody recently about this in sort of like a I surrender type of attitude that I have taken on over the years. So I remember when I had a couple kids, it was just like with everything, like you feel like you can just control everything. And so you, you know, you sanitize things, you make sure that no germs come their way, that way like they won't get sick. And over time you realize that when they get exposed to something like I. I find myself in a lot of nurseries because I work in nursery at Co Op, I work in nursery at our church, and there's. There's a lot of rules that are, you know, sanitizer, sanitize that. Make sure if the kid touches this, you sanitize that. And I have found that pretty much no amount of following kids around with term X is going to keep something from spreading when they're in a nursery together all day. And so I kind of rely more on the will just like strengthen their immune systems by not getting worried about things like that. Because ultimately, if a kid is in a nursery with another kid or they are in a shopping cart that another kid was in, now, that, of course, I guess you could actually sanitize the handle and then they wouldn't get it. But when they're in close quarters with any kid who has something, at some point that kid's gonna sneeze on them or they're going to put something in their mouth and then pass it on to the other kid. You're not going to keep an illness from spreading. But I do find that our immune systems are really strong and we aren't sick all the time. Like, I think you kind of, when you have two kids, you think, okay, if I had eight, then we'd be sick four times as long. But that's not actually what we find. And also, I think I'm just more comfortable with bugs happening and not getting too worked up about them. Like, they don't totally change everything about our lives. My sister and I, we used to try to, like, if one of our kids got something, we would try to, you know, not see each other and make sure that all the kids didn't get it anymore. If the child is feeling fine, we still get together because what happens is one of your kids is sick, therefore, really probably they're all carrying it. It's just one is actually presenting with it. So it becomes a bit, like, impossible. Because if by the time one of your kids is presenting with an illness, usually they were already contagious in the days leading up to that. And so my sister and I, we hang out so often that by the time one of the kids has a sickness, we realize it would have already spread to each other. And ultimately we just. We do not worry pretty much about passing anything back and forth anymore because we feel like we'd never see each other because one kid has this feeling, maybe they have a stomach bug, we don't know. But we find that their immune systems are very strong and they get through them really quickly. And it just hasn't been a huge issue. Or something that I worry about near to the extent that I, that I used to. So all that to say, how do you deal with sickness? I don't even feel like I do deal with it. I just kind of let it, let it be. We haven't had anything, thankfully that has been life altering or you know, anything more than just something that they have for 24 hours they get over and it ends up, yeah, it happens. Like I feel like always we have something like, oh, last week this kid's stomach hurt one day or this kid had a runny nose. But I have known moms that have tried within their own families to keep something from spreading. So one kid will get something, they'll put that kid upstairs in quarantine and they'll throw away all the toothbrushes, wash everything with boiling water, all the sheets. And then they'll go around with bleach and Lysol and really feel like they're doing something. They're going to keep this sickness from spreading. I just feel like it's a lost cause at that point. And I personally feel that sanitizing everything will do more harm for the immune system. That would actually help the children to, if they get it, which they will just get over it. And so I think it's a net benefit to just let it happen. And it's also less stressful and less work and it feels like ultimately it all works out. Any tips on sleep training a toddler? 2 going on 3, won't stay in bed all night. So I don't, I hesitate to say this, I hesitate to, or I guess I'll say it like this, do this at your own risk. Because I know there have been people who have been very against this, but there is a little, it's a mesh thing that you can put in your crib that zips. It's like a little tent that goes into a crib so that the 2 year old can't get out. Now I actually have used this on I think two or three kids at this point. But the one who most recently struggles with wanting to get out of his crib figured out how to take that little zipper from the back and open it up. So at some point, you know, they just have to, they have to know what they're allowed to do and what they're not allowed to do. But it is a pretty simple solution when they're in, you know, the 18 month old age two time frame to just kind of set that boundary very visually. I've also tried sleep sacks. I have tried Backwards sleep sacks. I have had kids figure, you know, like a two year old figure out how to unzip it from the back. So yeah, age two going on three might be a bit more of a struggle. It might just be more of like a disciplinary type of issue. But younger than that, I find the, those other methods to be quite effective. Okay. Hi, Lisa. You may have already talked about this in a past episode. I know decluttering is a common topic, but here's my question. How do you decide what kid items to keep? Toys, clothing, etc as your children age out of them, while knowing that the next child may be able to use those items? For example, in my life, I only have one child right now, but I feel overwhelmed with stuff because we've been gifted with lots of clothing and toys. I'm so grateful to have all the love and support through gifts. But our smaller home cannot hold as much as we currently have. We want to have more children, but I don't know how to decide what to keep and what to let go of. Especially if involved family members will ask about the items given in the past. So this, this is a common struggle. All the things that you mentioned, like being worried that the person who got it for you is going to notice, wondering if you're going to need something down the road. That fear that ties us to a home that we literally cannot manage is so rampant among women. People have. We have these homes that can't possibly be brought back together in a reasonable amount of time with all of the other tasks that we are required to do to sustain our family's lives. Laundry, cleaning, dishes, cooking. And yet we still worry so much that someday we might need it to the detriment of basically everything else in everything else in our lives. Not to act like this. Is that serious. All right, no. But for real, there's some kind of clutter rule. And I can't remember exactly who said it and what exactly the parameters are, but it's something about like 20, 20, 20. Could you replace it in 20 minutes for less than $20? And maybe there's not a third 20, something along those lines. And I think that just really, even if the number is not exactly right, but whatever number that is for you, depending on your budget, depending on where you live, how close to town you live, is it something that if you needed it, you could replace in 20 minutes for under $20? How much is your sanity worth taking that risk? So many items can be procured from a thrift shop. We have lots of great thrift shops in Our area where they keep things really nicely organized. Toys, baby accessories, clothing. And to me, it is more worth having to go find that item when it is time to need it than having to constantly manage that item over the course of several years. What that cost me mentally and all the opportunity costs. There are people who will not have people over to their homes. They will not host some kind of event. And then sometimes it's not about who you can invite over to your home. It's the overwhelm. And the overwhelm that your house cause causes you to not do other things. Like, well, I would learn how to do that thing, or I would go to that event, or I would start taking the kids to this thing, whatever it might be. But I've got to get stuff straightened out at home first. Like I. You have this constant mental thing like if I could just get my home in order, I probably could do that. And you imagine that someday you're going to have enough time to do it justice, you know, put it all in the proper totes and bins and categories and labels. But somehow that time never comes for me. I kind of realized that I'm not a very good organizer. And all the all that's lost by me holding on to things is way greater than what those things are worth now. There are certain value of things that are worth that effort. So just looking around my room right now and kind of brainstorming the things that I've kept. There are baby wraps right now that I'm not using all that often, but what if someday we have another child? That wrap is a very nice wrap and you know, it would be $200 to replace. It's my favorite. You know, I'm going to keep that item even though it's taking up space. And I don't use it all that much right now. Actually, I do still wrap victim. He does take rap naps, so probably a bad example. But even after he doesn't, I'm still keeping that wrap on the off chance that we have another baby. There is a certain type of baby swing that a few of my kids have liked. And I actually did keep it this time, but I passed it to a friend and then she gave it back to me. So I was planning to not keep it, but usually what I do is I will donate it and then when that time comes around again, I will purchase it from Facebook Marketplace or from a thrift shop. It's not worth keeping. Like I said, it's literally sitting in my basement right now. But usually I have Gotten rid of and repurchase that thing many times just because it's pretty easy to come by. It's not something that's rare. It's not always super expensive. I can usually find it pretty easily when that time comes. And it takes up a lot of space and it loses its value, too, because it's sitting in a dusty old basement just like, collecting stuff on it. So to me, that's not an example of something that I'd keep. Kids clothes, only the nicest things. Things like denim that will really last from kid to kid. Like, we have some overalls that Victor is currently in. They're size 12 months. They're key denim overalls. Those I've had for so many boys, because they're thick and they hold up and they're cute and I keep that. But then most of the little, like, knit items, they don't look good enough anyway. And I just don't want to store a whole lot of stuff. I have one boy bin down to the basement, so I can only keep enough to fit in that one bin. And I've traded that space in my basement for pantry storage, where I keep all of these canned goods I was telling you about and bulk herbs and bulk grains. I have shelves in my basement nicely organized with those food items, which means that we're probably not going out to eat as much. We're probably not doing takeout. So I. I probably have literally saved way more money than that item, like keeping extra clothes would have ever gained me. Saved me by. By discarding them. I don't know. I try to think really practically about clutter, and it just doesn't make any sense. It doesn't. There are a few items that actually makes sense, but for the most part, you are estimating higher for the items, what they're worth and what they really are and how hard they'd be to come by. And I think taking a real honest look at how hard it'd be to replace, how expensive it would be to replace, and then what you're gaining by having a more simplified home is just so important. I always tell people if your house feels like you can't bring it back in order in less than. I'm gonna say, I want to say 30 minutes, maybe an hour, but, like, the whole place looking pretty good. That's probably too much stuff. I've been watching through to older videos. When you lived on Boone street, living in the uk, that size of house is more similar to the houses here. That being said, how would you have organized that home? If you had stayed and your family continued to grow and continue to cook from scratch and may maybe bulk buy some things as well. And how would you create an entrance area for coming in with a bunch of little kids? Dirty in the winter, but no porch. Ooh, this is a really, really fun question. And what's funny is I actually thought about this recently. I was picturing our old house and how upstairs it had three bedrooms, but we never used that middle room as a bedroom because we didn't need it at that time. My baby was still co sleeping with me in our bedroom. And then the boys, two boys had a room and the two girls had a room. And so we just use that middle one as like sewing space, storage stuff. I'd probably just get rid of now to actually use an additional bedroom. But how I would organize it, honestly, with how much I have simplified my home, I really don't think it'd be that big of a problem because that house had closets in all four bedrooms. This house has zero closets. So there isn't a space to shove things, which has actually been really, really nice. Like any space that there actually is to shove things. I definitely have that tendency to do that. But I have faced that and kind of gone through and radically reduced it all. Was honest about the things that I'm actually using. So to answer your question about the entryway, one thing that you might have sort of not realized about that house is we wouldn't use that front door as the entry because the back door is where we would have done like mudroom type of stuff. Because through the back door you entered into where there was a laundry room and a bathroom. So that's a really good place for us to put like boots and coats. Didn't have a great place to hang coats there. So probably we would have built in right when you walk in the back door to the left. We would have built in some kind of cabinetry like we have at our current home that we also put in. Even though this home does have a mud room, it was not set up with any kind of cabinetry or built ins. We actually put that in. So we would have put that in there for coats and shoes and it would have been about the same size as the one that we currently have. So it probably looked just about exactly like our current house as far as bulk buying. We would have done the basement pantry thing just like we do here. So here we do have a pretty decent pantry, but it's still not enough to keep five gallon buckets of grains or, you know, any, like, significant bulk of anything. So I would have set up shelves in the basement, just like I have done here, to store a lot of that stuff. And I think having four bedrooms is pretty similar to what we have here. So I probably would have had two girls, four boys here. No, probably I would have put the five boys together because the baby having their own room is really important to me. I would rather put so many kids together that are in similar ages or similar stages with sleep and the baby having their own room. Kind of like the question earlier, the child waking up the other kids. The baby having their own room is a really nice thing. So that's probably what we would have done there. But I think it would have been. I really, I've brainstormed this and I really think it had been fine. We just would have had to reduce inventory, which we've already done. Even though we have a larger house. I don't mind drawers being empty. I don't mind not filling up everything to the brim, because I just simply cannot deal with that much inventory. I don't have the time to categorize it, to replace it when it's broken or fix it. There's just so much that goes into keeping a lot of things mentally. So I hope that answered your question. I really think we'd have been fine. For reference, that was about a 1600 square foot house. And I am thankful that we have a larger house. I'm super happy to have a larger house. I'm just saying I think we could have made it work. The biggest problem with that place was its proximity to the road and the outside space. We spend like the kids spend so much time outside that I would have been very nervous about that. So probably the thing that would have done the most to make it more functional for our family would have been putting in fencing. That would have been before any other type of, like cabinetry in the mudroom or anything like that. It would have been adding some kind of fencing. All right. How do you handle nausea in your pregnancies? Currently a few weeks pregnant with number two and really going through it. Also wondering if it gets better by baby number eight or if you just get used to it. So you don't really get used to it. It doesn't get better. Each pregnancy is a whole new thing. So, you know, if you. If you have nausea in your eighth pregnancy, it's going to feel just as debilitating, just as demotivating, if that's a word, as it would on your first or second or whatever pregnancy. Same with labor and delivery. It's all the same thing that has to happen. However, I will say I have gotten more comfortable with just knowing that there are certain things I probably won't add to my schedule during that. Now, I do continue making my do my bare minimum, like my one video, my one podcast, my blog post. But usually that's not a time that I'm going to decide to write a book or make a new course or something like that. But I also don't really worry about what I eat. I just try to do whatever works because it's a short phase. And for me, I'm always over it by 12 or 14 weeks. So I don't know that there's really any. I don't really have any special tricks, anything that really fixes it, but I will say that I expect it. I don't have bad nausea in pregnancy, but I do have something you definitely. I definitely know when I'm going through that. And there have been pregnancies where it's been a little bit worse, some that have been a little bit better, but it's just honestly a time to kind of get through and do whatever you can to do that. So if that means that the only thing you can eat is a Qdoba burrito, I have definitely driven to Qdoba to get that burrito in my pregnancies. And then I don't know what to say for people who are pregnant or who are not pregnant the whole time, but who are sick the whole time, that isn't me. And so it's not. It's something I can get through because it's not lasting that long for those people. I don't know. I don't know what to tell you. It's. That is so hard for. For everything. I feel like my biggest symptom when I'm pregnant is the lack of motivation. I just wake up and think I'm fine, but I don't want to do anything. And that's a real difference from how I usually feel. I usually feel like I have stuff to do, I want to do it, I'm excited. I mean, not every day, but most days. Pregnancy from six weeks to 14 weeks, I feel like there's just. I can't be bothered to do basically anything much more than just like, take care of the kids and the most basic things. So I always feel for. For people who say they have chronic low energy. When I am six to 14 weeks pregnant, I always think about those people and think, man, if you felt like this all the time. Yeah, I would get nothing done. So I, I always think about people like that during, during that, that time, but I think it's just kind of get through it however you can. It's always hard. I think most, most people struggle with some form of nausea during pregnancy. Some people completely escape it, but most do. So it's just very normal. All right. Well, I hope that you enjoyed this Q and A episode of the Simple Farmhouse Life podcast. If you'd like to submit your own questions, you can do that at bit ly. That's lowercase slash, capital S, capital F, capital L, lowercase questions. It is case sensitive. You all have been wonderful about submitting all of your questions to me. I went on there to just see if there were any new ones since the last episode, and there were so many, which helps me to talk about hopefully somewhat varied topics. I feel like there's a handful of topics that I cover over and over again, but maybe from a slightly different angle. So if you have anything you'd really like me to talk about, or any guests you'd like me to bring on in 2025, go ahead and submit that there. We'll also leave a link down in the show notes or the description box below. As always, thank you so much for listening and I will see you in the next episode of the Simple Farmhouse Life podcast.