Gosh, the title of this month’s Farm Note is probably far more jarring to me than it is to you and I’m the one living it and writing about it!

Before Chris and I dove into trying to conceive our first baby, we’d had a lot of talks about what the future might look like if we were to have a kid/kids.

One of the things we landed on in those many discussions is that we’d end up, at some point in the near future, selling the farm.

It’s no secret that we’ve been looking for places for the last few years…I’ve detailed those adventures to you here in previous weekly Farm Note issues.

A few years ago we looked at a home and farm stand and garden center in New Hampshire that we seriously considered going for. We put an offer on a house and horse property in Rhode Island but didn’t accept the seller’s counter terms. We went under contract for a 310-year-old house with land in Connecticut but backed out when we were unsuccessful with our counter offer to the seller as a result of the inspections.

So I’ve carried this sadness about me the past few years about leaving the Little Dream Farm as we’ve considered other opportunities. Often, I look out the windows from inside the house or stand on the back patio or walk the gardens or look out at the view or look over our farm as I’m coming down the road from my daily morning walks and think, What the hell are we thinking ever leaving this place?

When we found this farm in 2021 and we were still living in Philadelphia, I had these pretty little daydreams that we’d build a house on this land once we got here. There’s a spot up on our western hills where David planted a Great White Oak that levels off just below it and has the most picturesque views of the Green Mountains. My vision was to build a brand new house there, and to leave this current home right where it is to have guests and family and friends or a rental property or a house for a farm hand if we’d gone in that direction. This was at the height of when building materials were most expensive, and when we looked for and talked to some builders in the area we learned it’d likely be a few years before we could pursue that possibility due to builder availability.

But back then the options were seemingly wide open for what we might do with/on this farm. While we were living in a big city and I was learning about Regenerative Agriculture and longing for more space to breathe and the chance to try my hand at growing things and stewarding land, I thought we might try raising a small herd cattle or have a few milking cows. Maybe we’d grow a nice big market garden or flowers or have a variety of farm animals and potentially some rescue animals, too.

After all, this little dream of wanting a farm started with our old cat Boonce. After adopting her from a Philly animal rescue, we originally just thought we might like some more space to rescue more animals…that’s what got this whole thing started in the first place!

I tell people whenever it comes up in conversation that most people know what they want to do with a farm and then go looking for land that helps them be able to execute that vision or goal. For us, we did the opposite. We found this farm, said, That’s the one! and then let ourselves explore and try to uncover what it could become (and what/who we might like to become in the process).

In the years we’ve lived here, we’ve pursued every single one of those dreams in earnest. I am very proud of us for that. We learned about how hard the rescue path would be given our access to surrounding available and affordable vet care. The year we moved here there were virtually no vets taking new patients in our area for our (at the time) six cats. It’s why we ended up at a vet clinic 1.5 hours away from here in Vermont, because a friend of ours takes their cats there and we ended up liking the vet enough to make that journey for our cats to routinely receive his care.

I learned we could stand to reliably have about 25 head of cattle on this farm…maybe closer to 40 if we were smart about how we grazed them. I was in talks with our local Soil & Water office about getting grants for permanent perimeter fencing for our farm, a ~$50,000 investment that we just weren’t sure was going to pay off under the current arrangement we have with the farmer who grazes his own cows on our land and hays our fields each year. That same farmer, who for two years now has just decided not to show up with cows or hay the fields without so much as a call or a text to let us know.

I went a step further in working with our Soil & Water office to have our entire farm’s soil profile tested and plotted on maps to show the fertility and soil makeup of our farm. This helped me get a baseline to understand whether our pastures needed any inputs and also gave me an understanding of what we could grow if we were going to turn this into a full-scale operation of some sort. I cycled through researching the possibility of becoming a speciality peony farm, a perennials-based farm, a berry farm and orchard, a seed and breeding farm for annual cut flowers, or even a conservation habitat.

When you own land you also (regrettably) end up on all kinds of lists where you get contacted about “opportunities” for your land. We’ve said no to a solar array, no to logging, and no to selling off parcels of our land to random land-buying companies that aren’t even local to us.

Every time I added up the costs for getting started down any of these paths, the math would always leave me scratching my head. Even with veteran and women-owned grants for equipment and business grants, the costs to start felt so prohibitive for the uncertainty of the revenue. I have nothing but deep, deep respect for farmers who live by hard work and a whole lotta faith, as we’ve watched entire operations around us these last few years come up empty handed on a year’s worth of crop from one late frosty night at the end of May.

A trip I had planned to work on a peony farm in Alaska during bloom harvesting cancelled itself due to virtually no blooms that year. I’d ordered (and spent a pretty penny on) 60 peony varieties from a farm near Lake Champlain whose fields flooded that same year and could’t fulfill the order. The year Chris and I were planning to buy the home, farm stand and garden center, we visited a nearby orchard that the man who was selling the place got his apples from who wasn’t going to have one apple to sell that year.

Not only does this make me deeply concerned about the state of farming both in this country and around the world, but it also made us very weary about what we might pursue here on our farm, understanding that not only would we need tractors and heavy machinery, but also refrigeration systems and a processing and storage building and a whole-farm generator for anything we might like to pursue.

The reality is that we could have pursued any one or combination of these endeavors and made them successful—there’s no doubt about that. When you want something badly enough, you just figure it out. That’s true about anything in life. Chris and I know about ourselves that we don’t shy away from things just because they are hard or difficult…as we both believe that the hard work makes things so worthwhile, and that we know from years of battle testing that we can do really, really hard stuff.

So then it really came down to this…do we really want to pursue any of these paths? Heck, I grew production-style cut flowers and dahlias to test that very question—can I see myself three to five or even 10 years into this still enjoying it?

With both of us working full-time jobs, what was even possible or sustainable, understanding Chris wouldn’t be walking away from his work and I’d only partly be stepping back from mine.

We learned about, explored, pursued, tested, and talked about all of it…all the years we’ve lived here. I’ve shared all of it in bits and pieces in this Farm Note through the years. And somewhere along the way we landed on and steadied ourselves in the idea that we’d simply hobby farm…that we’d enjoy living on this gorgeous farm with its beautiful bucolic rolling hills and varied wildlife and endless summer rainbows and postcard fall colors and the most majestic fog you’ve ever seen.

We landed on me growing dahlias for the fun of it, on growing fruit and veggie gardens for the ability to pop outside and pick a bunch of fresh produce for a summertime meal, and on taking good care of the chickens and donkeys we have without adding more animals and more cost and more time and tasks to our to do list. We chose each other and space for downtime, weekend adventures, and the ability to get away from the farm if we wanted to. We picked presence over expansion and we chose stewarding what we have over the constant and unending pursuit of more.

And last year, we chose the pursuit of starting and building a family together. It’s four in the morning as I’m writing this and I just took a break to nurse our son and settle him back to sleep in bed beside me. He’s laying on his back in his little sleep suit with his arms stretched above his head and I can hear each of his little breaths and my God he looks just like his daddy when he sleeps. I am the happiest I’ve ever been in my entire life and I can’t help but think that he wouldn’t even be possible were it not for this farm. I’m so glad Chris and I didn’t have a baby even just one second sooner, because the people we are now have made us the best possible parents for this precious baby boy.

It’s hard to look at any of what I’ve detailed above and call it a loss. Not only have we learned so much in the process, but we’ve become better versions of ourselves in the pursuit of all of it and this journey has molded and softened our hearts into these two people—who thought they were totally content without ever having kids—into two people who now can’t even comprehend life without our son. He is the ultimate gift of every path we’ve ever walked down and he’s an answered prayer that I’m not entirely quite sure I even had.

And so that brings us to the selling of the farm. This land is truly the ideal place to raise children. On our quiet country road with so much to see and discover and learn and experience—what a total dream for a little person! But this house in its current configuration (with our seven cats!) and the proximity and access to things around us has us starting to look for what’s next for our little family.

I guess I’ve really buried the lead here to finally say that we’re not selling the farm yet and may not for even the next couple of years. But we are looking in earnest for where we’re headed next and learning about new towns and different school districts and seeing if we can’t find some combination of land for some space to breathe and better/different opportunities for us and for our son.

I have this new little dream in my head that we could somehow keep this farm and find (and afford!) what we’re looking for next. My ultimate little dream is that we’d continue to own this land and serve as the landowners and rent or lease this farm, possibly to a young farmer or farmers who have a vision that aligns with our values for how to steward this land. I love the idea of helping to finance someone’s dream of farming by making it possible for them to have the space they need for their operation without the financial burden of the taxes and ownership. If something like that were to come along, it’d be a pretty little dream come true for me.

I also like the idea of keeping the farm as a future place for our son—that maybe he’d want to visit here in the summers or spend time here a few weekends a year or even live here down the road. It’s hard to make sense of this option for us financially given the taxes and the annual expenses of this farm, but it is called the little dream farm for a reason…so daydream we will!

I really wrestle with all of this and have for a number of years without any real peace about it. Sometimes I wonder if I’m just being greedy and can’t let go of this farm in order to make way for the next person’s dream and vision for what this place could become. Other times I worry that down the road I’ll regret leaving this place if we do in fact sell it. But I also think about what we might possibly be holding ourselves back from by staying or by holding onto it.

I’m incredibly blessed that we have something in our life to think this deeply and thoughtfully about…this farm has been a balm for my soul for the years we’ve lived here. In thinking about leaving it, I’ve wondered if I’ve been present enough. Did I truly and fully pursue the things I wanted to here? Have I lived my days intentionally?

And then I close my eyes and I can feel the way the mist lifts off the pasture just behind the Dahlia Patch and in front of the pond. I’ve memorized the way the sun hits the kitchen cabinets and walls and floors so many times that it feels tattooed in my mind’s eye. I take a deep breath and I can smell the air on a cool summer morning. I only have to think just for a second and the finest little details are so focused in my memory that they feel real. I know that I have soaked up every ounce of this farm and fully let it grow and change me through the years. And knowing myself, you could give me another 100 years here on this farm and still somehow at the end of it I’d mention some way it was not enough. I don’t know if that’s the human in me or if it’s a personality trait specific to me, but I imagine for some it’s quite relatable. I’d venture a guess these were many of the things David wrestled with in the years he’d waffled on selling the farm before finally doing so when we bought it.

I actually have a phone date with him in the coming days to talk about this very topic. While he can’t make the decision about what we do with this farm, he can recount to me the feeling of what he was going through, and I find that might be comforting to me to spend time talking with someone who really truly gets what it’s like to love this place and to choose to let it go.

So in the meantime, for however short or long that is for us, I’ll be savoring our days spent here on this farm. We walk our baby boy around and show him what we’ve built, we talk to him in detail about what we’ve learned, we surround him with the animals we have here, and we thank this farm for being the place that made it possible for us to conceive of having a family, and the actual place where that family began. One day, whether this farm is still “ours” or not, we’ll sit and tell our son the stories of how mommy and daddy dreamed about owning a farm of their own and when that dream was finally realized, it was the place where his life began. I know he won’t ever remember any of these days, but my gosh, I will…these last months have been the very best days of my whole life.

If you’re still here than I’ve taken up far too much of your time on a Sunday morning but I do so appreciate your reading the Farm Note and keeping up with us. I’ve done a terrible job of being on Instagram lately…my heart just really isn’t into making content for social media at the moment, and I’m not forcing that one way or the other. I might start posting on our account again, and I may shut it down entirely. I haven’t decided what feels best for me in this season quite yet.

Be sure to come on back here next month on Sunday September 27 for our next monthly Farm Note and we can’t wait to catch you up on all-things LDF. Be well until next time!!

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Just a few lil’ things on the faves list this month!

1. Picked up two pairs of these for the garden this season and will be using them daily once it’s time to break down the Dahlia Patch!

2. Our son has the most perfect, clear, soft, kissable skin and hasn’t had any blemishes or baby acne from the very beginning. I attribute that MOSTLY to what I eat and how well I take care of myself because he’s getting all that goodness through my milk. But…this micellar water goes a long way in keeping his skin clean and clear, too. Every night during his bath I use reusable cotton rounds, get it wet, squirt this on, wipe his whole face and neck, and that’s it! It’s great for the whole fam so if I use it the same way on my own face, too!

3. I’ve been baking A LOT…like a few times every week. These are a new staple in my kitchen!

4. Been having a bit of postpartum hair loss and so I’ve been finding simple and inexpensive ways to baby my hair through it as my hormones level out. Swapped to these hair ties and wish I’d done this years ago—I love them and they’re so much gentler on my hair!

5. Speaking of hair, my sister swears by this spritz for better growth and fullness of her hair from when she was losing hers due to some medical stuff. Been using it the last few weeks and love how easy it is to spray in, work through the scalp and get a move on with my day!

Hello hello from the summertime Little Dream Farm!

Writing this to you on a fully blue-skyed Friday afternoon with the windows and patio doors open in the house while the wind chime on the porch plays its beautiful song, our son is fast asleep in his swing and Chris is finally sitting down and taking a load off and relaxing. I’m telling you that man is always go go go!

We spent the morning bopping around our village running some postpartum labs for me, stopping at the hardware store, popping into the cafe for coffee and a slice of cake, then onto the library to get our baby boy his library card and a bunch of books to read to him, and finally a stop at the village co-op for a loaf of my favorite sourdough cinnamon raisin bread.

On the way down to the village and on the way home we took the long way and turned down a bunch of country roads we’d never been on. We love that getting baby to get a solid nap means we get to explore more of where we live and places and things we’ve never seen before while we’ve lived here!

Last you hung out with us I was recounting the woes of our broken down zero turn, broken down truck, fridge on the fritz and a big hospital bill from our son’s birth.

Let’s go ahead and add onto that the washing machine completely crapped out and needed to be replaced with a new one.

Chris came down with a really crappy cold, and then he got a crazy case of cellulitis on his calf…we think it was from a tick he picked up while hiking even though he ended up thankfully testing negative for Lyme.

When the farmer we work with didn’t show up this year with cows or haying equipment, we reached out but got ghosted. That means all of our land will have to be mowed (instead of it being grazed and hayed) and that hefty bill will come due in October. That also means we have to buy in hay for the donkeys and pay to have it delivered right around that time, too.

We had to cancel our family beach vacation because there was nothing but rain in the forecast for the entire time we’d be there.

And the other day I was using the plunger on one of our toilets that has seemed a little slow lately and the plunger broke in my hand. The plunger! I LAUGHED so hard at the ridulousness of it.

Sometimes when it rains, it pours, but in our case we’re currently in a bit of a monsoon.

The upside (because there’s always an upside) is that everyone here on the farm is safe and healthy and we’ve got the funds to take care of the crazy mashup of inconveniences these last two months. My mom calls things like these “luxury problems” and so while it’s been wildly uncool for our wallets, we’re hoping we’re on the upswing from the woes and we fully recognize that these are in fact luxury problems.

Chris is now about halfway through his paternity leave and he has been quite busy being the man of the house! He starts his day before the sun comes up and heads off to the gym a few days a week while baby boy sleeps on my chest for those sweet morning hours. When he gets back, his days have been filled with caring for the donkeys, our one remaining chicken, Rosie, and all the cats. He’s been tending the garden, mowing the lawn, fixing little stuff around the house, and keeps our schedule going day to day.

Before our son was born, he started a little project that we call, “What can dad make?” that we’ve been having so much fun with. Chris really wanted to start cooking both for me and for our son when he starts eating solids (which is in about two to three months!), so he’s been looking up recipes and finding inspiration and putting his skills to the test in the kitchen and coming up with fun new stuff for us to try (this week he made us meatballs, some protein bars, and he’s planning to grill wings later this afternoon). It’s been fun watching him in the kitchen and seeing the joy on his face when I genuinely love what he makes for us.

It was Chris’ idea to take his paternity leave later than most would because he works from home. He felt like it was more helpful to me if he was off once I was healed from birth and ready to move again, that way I could get out of the house on my own or go do things I wanted or needed to do and that we would have time to go do lots of things together as a family.

Most mornings these last few weeks we’ve gotten out for a nice long family walk on our quiet country roads. Our son loves to coo at the trees and it’s been the perfect way to start our day. We’re going to keep doing it for as long as we can together since it’s good for the whole fam and we think it’s one of the reasons why baby sleeps so well for us!

This week, Chris drove me to the gym and then took the baby for a walk while I worked out. I’m calling this season, “Operation Mom Gets Strong” and it felt so good to get back in the gym and start strength training again. I’m back to my pre-pregnancy size and in complete awe of how incredible my body is and the entire experience of conception, pregnancy, birth, and postpartum. I’ve never felt more convicted about the ways I eat and train and teach my clients to do the same because the proof of how well it works and how important it is for your health is seen in how well I’m doing postpartum and how healthy our son is. It’s had me thinking I’d like to work with pregnant and postpartum women in some capacity.

For our Saturday adventure this weekend we’re planning to head back to the blueberry patch at a nearby farm to pick one more round of blueberries for the season and then over to one of the most incredible cafes in the area for some coffee and lunch. The owners are American and Japanese and a lot of their baked goods we’ve tried have Japanese-inspired elements—it’s such a gem for this area. Next we’ll stop at our favorite local woman-owned farm stand for some freshly harvested veggies for the week and for another quart of this lemon yogurt that Chris has been obsessed with. It is made by a dairy farm up near Lake Champlain and Chris is going to get to visit the farm for the very first time on Sunday when he drives up to Montreal to meet a friend for a night.

So while you’re reading this Chris will be zooming up to Canada for a night and baby boy and I are going to have a lovely Sunday together taking care of the animals and the daily chores on the farm. I’m thinking I’ll take us out for a little mom an baby coffee date together and pop into a garden center and a few antique stores I haven’t been to in a while.

I keep saying that the silliest thing I’ve ever thought was that I didn’t want kids. Our son turned 100 days old today as I’m writing this and Chris and I were super sentimental about it. I told him how much I love being a parent with him and that this experience has been so amazing for me thus far, and he responded that he’s so thankful we were open to allowing ourselves to start a family and that we are going through all the highs and lows together as a team. He said it’s a life experience he’s glad we aren’t missing out on, and I couldn’t agree more. I love the ways that being a mom is stretching and growing and changing me, and I am so looking forward to having a front row seat to watching our beautiful boy grow up through the years, even if I’d really love to freeze time and keep him as my sweet little baby forever.

On one of our recent just keep driving to let the baby nap drives, we were coming down a hill that has the most incredible view looking down into the valley of where we live and I said to Chris from the backseat sitting next to our sleepy son that I’m so glad we took a chance on the farm. It has paid off in ways that have multiplied through the years in a way we never could have planned, imagined, or dreamed of.

I think that about does it from ol’ Sappy Sarah for this month. We’ll catch you back here on Sunday, August 30, if you can even believe it’ll be August in just a few days!

Take care of yourself until then…we’re sending you love from all of us here on the LDF!

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Some faves for ya this month!

1. My absolute favorite protein and electrolytes are on mega sale until the 27th with our code DREAMFARM! You can save 25% by processing a current subscription if you already use their products, or you can set up a new subscription and get 20% off for the lifetime of your subscription. Be sure to use the code DREAMFARM at checkout to snag the sale. Our subscription has the French Vanilla, Strawberries n’ Cream, and Peanut Butter Chocolate protein, 2 bags of grape electrolytes, and 2 bottles of Vitamin D + K2. We’ve been using this brand for years and love everything we’ve ever ordered. My sister likes their skincare products and uses the hyaluronic acid serum and their toothpaste.

2. I am reading this book for August’s book club and enjoying it so far! The ladies at book club mailed me a card and put a gift card in it for books for our son. How sweet is that?! I highly recommend finding and joining a book club in your area. It has been such a fun addition to life!

3. We’ve been going to the lake and parking ourselves in the sand for an hour or two and getting our son used to being in the water. We like this non-toxic sunscreen for any time we’re out in the sun and have been using it for years!

4. Speaking of being out in the sun, I just ordered these clamp-on umbrellas for our beach chairs and really love the way they give some shade when you need it but don’t want to pack a big tent. They pack up like a large handled umbrella and has a little storage bag to put it in. We’ll be using these all summer long!

5. I’ve shared this swimsuit before but it deserves another share because I feel so good in it with my postpartum mom bod and I just think it’s the most flattering suit and would look good on every size and shape.

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Hey there old friend!

How has it been a month since we last gathered here together?

Surely I was just writing May’s Farm Note to you and now here we are saying goodbye to June in just a few days.

I’m fully prepared that the rest of my life will likely feel like it’s on hyper speed.

Just last week I was taking photos of our baby boy to mark his second month! We also just had his two month doctor’s appointment and we’re so happy with how he’s been doing.

Still mostly sleeping through the night. Breastfeeding is going incredibly well. I started pumping enough for Chris to be able to give him a bottle when I jet off to book club once a month or Mahjong with my girlfriends or head to pelvic floor therapy or when we have a long day out on the go.

Last week Chris began his paternity leave—the longest stretch he’ll go without working since he was 15 years old. He’s earned the rest and the time off…he’s been grinding away so hard for our little family and this farm for so long now—as far back as the start of last year when my back was bad and then all throughout my pregnancy and now that our son is here.

We are so lucky to have this long stretch of time together and last week we spent it getting some things organized here on the farm, this week we’ll spend knocking out a bunch of errands off the farm.

Just a few weeks ago we got hit with a not-so-awesome trifecta of stuff going wrong.

First the zero turn broke down way back out in the donkey pasture. We had to rent a utility trailer to hitch it to our truck and drop the zero turn off at a mechanic almost an hour south of us. Once I got down there, just me and the baby to drop the zero turn off for service, our truck wouldn’t start. We needed the help of a tow truck and a friend with a truck to tow both our truck and the utility trailer back to town. We woke up the next morning to the fridge being on the fritz and then just a few days later we got hit with a ridiculous hospital bill from our birth.

They say bad things come in three’s and that was four things so we’re hoping our bases are covered for the next little bit because that was an expensive week!

Here on the farm the fruit and veggie garden is coming in great! We’re growing snow peas, edamame, cucumbers, sweet corn, popcorn, watermelon, cantaloupe, kale, broccoli, cauliflower, spinach, beets, celery, leeks, onions, potatoes, mixed salad greens, romaine lettuce, pumpkins, tomatoes, and peppers this year and we’re having a lot of great successes so far! Chris and I have surely gotten a hang of this gardening thing in the last few years!

Back out in the Dahlia Patch there are a couple hundred plants coming up that’ll be ready to pinch this week. I’ve already strung up the first rung of corralling and this year we used our push mower to bag grass clippings from the lawn to spread as mulch over each row—that was a bit of extra work up front but will keep us from having to weed at all the rest of the growing season. The Dahlia Patch is looking so good this year—certainly the best we’ve ever done it so far and we’ve really taken all our lessons learned and applied it to make this an awesome year. I can’t wait for blooms and I’m hoping to get some family photos out in the patch this year…I know those will be so beautiful.

Our farrier was here last week for the donkeys and said that Molly-Max is looking as good as he’s ever been—we always love hearing that. Him and Dominic are in the middle of their summer shed and will be sleek and shiny before we know it! I know you always like to hear how the donkeys are doing and we’re happy to report they’re both great.

We’re about to get a super hot week coming up here so we’re glad we’re mostly caught up on taking care of the farm chores outside so we can spend our time heading to the lake, swimming in our friend’s pool, and getting out for early morning walks with our baby boy!

With Chris having all this time off it feels like we have an endless summer ahead of us and we’re going to be spending the days stopping at the local library for books to read to our boy, heading to our favorite bakeries and coffee shops and farm stores where we can sit and take our time and enjoy being out during the week, and lots of little day trips to all our favorite places with our baby in tow.

Exactly one year ago Chris and I were making the decision to begin trying to start a family. Now here we are with our two month old planning summer adventures, we’ve booked our first family beach vacation for this summer, and we’re in the process of planning an international trip for later this year.

I’ve loved every bit of becoming a mom, and watching Chris become a dad has been beyond special. He’s the sweetest daddy to our boy, always kissing him and telling him how beautiful and sweet he is, making up songs and reading to him every day and creating such special little early experiences and memories for him. They’re sitting on the recliner together next to me as I write this while Chris is watching a World Cup game. Our son is a spitting image of Chris…it’s the most amazing thing.

Now and then I miss the way I used to share things on our farm’s Instagram account and writing this as a weekly Farm Note as opposed to a monthly newsletter. Those were such fun years for me, capturing so many precious moments, sitting in the morning with my coffee and writing captions for videos and photos and telling all kinds of stories about our life here on the farm, and connecting with so many of you on a regular or daily basis. Those were some of the most fun and creative moments for me and I’ve been toying around with how to maybe get back to that in a way that feels good to me in this new season of our life?

For now, I’m just fine being completely intoxicated by our sweet sunny son and fully enjoying being a new mommy. These last few months have been the very best days of my life.

Can’t wait to catch up with you again next month when we’re freshly back from our family beach vacation. We’ll look forward to spending time with you here on Sunday July 26th!

Take good care of yourself until then and if you have a second and would like to, leave a comment and catch me up on how things are going in your world. I always read every comment and I do miss hearing from many of you, too!

Until next time, big hugs from all of us here on the Little Dream Farm!

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Got a couple of faves to share with you this month!

1. I am reading this book right now before I watch the movie and I’m absolutely loving it so far!

2. I just re-ordered two more big bottles of this hyaluronic acid serum. I’ve been using it for years now on a freshly clean face followed by this moisturizer, which I’ve also been using for several years now. These are the only two skincare products I use day and night and my skin has never felt or looked better…even postpartum!

3. I have this oversized t-shirt in several colors and right now it’s my favorite thing to throw on with a pair of jeans and these Birkenstocks.

4. I got this pair of earrings and this pair of earrings and I have been SO pleasantly surprised at how much I love them!

5. When you want to get grime out of clothing—blowouts in onesies, the smell of milk out of burp cloths, the stink in gym clothes even after washing them…you need this enzymatic detergent. Hands down, it’s the best. I like to do a small load of the dirtiest stuff, put a scoop in the wash, run a hot cycle, and once the water fills I turn off the washer to let the items soak for about an hour. Then I just resume the cycle and let it wash. It saves everything from stains and stink!! Use it on smelly bath towels or sheets that could use a really good deep clean. Thank me later!

Dear one…how are you? Here we meet at the very end of May.

Writing this month’s Farm Note to you in bed with one hand while our little one sleeps soundly scrunched up on my chest. I can’t stop smelling his hair!

For me, the newborn bubble has been complete bliss—I’ve been loving and soaking up and trying to savor every single moment. It is absolute pure joy in the most wonderful and even unexpected ways.

Our baby boy is seven weeks old this week and yet it feels like he was just born. Happy to report that we’re doing great—he’s amazing, I’m feeling great, and Chris and I are enjoying being brand new and first time parents and our little family of three.

If you’ve hung around with us a long time you likely know we were happy with our decision not to have kids and I’d really made peace with that choice, even though Chris and I had always kept the conversation on the table and we checked in and talked about it constantly and left our choice open ended between the two of us. To everyone else we kept saying we were not planning on having kids and we found that helped us be left alone about the topic as the years went on.

Being on the other side of our decision and now that our son is in my arms, all I keep saying and thinking is I’m so glad we didn’t miss this. I was wildly happy with my life and I’m so grateful Chris and I had about a decade together just the two of us. Now, I’m wildly happy in a completely different way, and it is far better and deeper and sweeter and more meaningful and impactful than anything I’ve ever felt before.

I’ve got to tell you—the only thing on my mind and the only thing I care about right now is this precious baby and being his mommy. But I imagine you know this. In thinking about this Farm Note earlier in the week I wondered…do I have anything or care to share anything else?!

In May there’s a million things to tell you about because there’s just so much happening and coming to life.

Of course, this year’s farm endeavors are looking a bit different for us as we navigate having a newborn at the start of the growing season and wanting to shift the way we do things around here to prioritize our time and attention on him.

We’ve scaled back as much as we could—anything that we don’t need to be doing, we’re not, and anything that we can offload, make easier or more efficient, outsource or ask for help with, we are.

I’m feeling well and recovered enough these last two weeks to have gotten out to the Dahlia Patch to get all the tubers planted. Thankfully, Chris tagged in for that big task and we got it done in just a few hours. My sister was in town visiting recently and she put in several hours of help with the setup of the patch—laying landscape fabric and getting the patch ready for planting. We were so fortunate to have her extra set of hands and effort.

The only two things we’ve got left to do with the dahlias is lay some drip irrigation and hang some solar festoon lights in the next day or two. Then we wait for them to bloom!

In the Big Garden, this week Chris and I planted our fruits and veggies for the year after taking our baby boy to our favorite farm for fruit and vegetable starts. We managed to get everything planted in between naps and we’re looking forward to watching this year’s garden flourish and spending time with him in the garden out in the sunshine.

I’ve slowly returned to taking on more of my regular farm chores like feeding the donkeys and changing their water buckets and scooping their poop. I’m also back to mowing and weed whacking and weeding and planting. The recovery feels fast and slow all at the same time.

I’ve given my body time to completely rest and heal these last seven weeks and plan to get back to some slow and easy workouts and more deliberate and intentional movement in the week ahead. I’m coming out of this pregnancy feeling really well nourished, and while my body feels soft and different, I feel so much stronger in different ways now. I’ve genuinely enjoyed this time off to rest and recover while enjoying snuggling my sweet little boy, and now I’m also ready to begin moving again.

The donkeys are doing great and they’re eager to get out onto their pasture. This year we got grazing muzzles for both of them so that Molly-Max doesn’t eat too much grass and go lame, and so that Dominic doesn’t eat too much grass in general since he always tends to be on the heavier side.

The donkeys have met the baby and they’re both very curious about him and very sweet and gentle with him! It’s the absolute best!

Our one remaining hen, Rosie, stays close to us and hangs out on the porch and around the house most the day. We find her hanging out with the donkeys, too.

And all seven cats have decided they’re totally cool with a baby in the house. They just don’t much care about him at all and have been keeping on in their normal Furmers fashion.

All in all, we’re doing much of the same things as we have in the past here on the farm, just at a smaller and different and more spread out scale.

Chris delayed his paternity leave so that he could take it once I was fully recovered and able to start doing more day to day. So in a few weeks he’ll have some extended time off and we’re really looking forward to some small and simple adventure days as a family of three. I’m just now sitting down these last few days to dream up some possibilities for us and can’t wait to have uninterrupted time together.

I’ve loved and am cherishing these newborn days filled with so much snuggling and so much sweetness. I so badly wish I could pause time and live in this moment forever. Every day I feel so intensely that this is the happiest I’ve ever been and I’m also sad that this phase and these days are so fleeting. I know, though, that I’ll look back on this time and forever be grateful that I was fully present in this moment and that I’ve been soaking up absolutely every bit of being a new mom with a newborn.

I’m in heaven.

We are living inside of the life of our dreams and these are the good old days.

That about does it from me for now.

Come back next month so I can tell you about all the adventures we get into in these coming weeks!

Until next time…I’m sending you love and hugs from all of us here on the Little Dream Farm and reminding you that one of the coolest things about life is that when you look for the good in your life you tend to find lots more of it.

Happy good hunting!

We’ll catch you back here on Sunday, June 28th.

What do you say we check out a few recent favorites??

1. I’m finishing reading this book for book club this week and liking it so far.

2. Just ordered this matching set for summer.

3. Drinking this decaf mixed with about 25% of this regular coffee. We’ve weaned ourselves away from caffeine the last four years and it was one of the better things I’ve done for my health.

4. Using this clean ingredient detangler spray out of the shower when I comb through my hair and find I have far less loss as I brush through my long hair.

5. Ordered this swimsuit top and these swimsuit bottoms as my first mom bathing suit and love how flattering it is and how beautiful my body feels in this!

Good morning sweet friend.

It was another lifetime ago that I last wrote to you…or at least it feels that way for me. And I was a different person then.

That Sarah isn’t gone…but she’s certainly different now. Changed…and evolved…in the very best ways.

On Thursday April 16, 2026, in the wee hours of a brand new day at 3:42am, Chris and I welcomed our son(!!!) into our arms.

This precious, perfect, bright boy measured 8 pounds, 1.2 ounces, 21.5 inches long, with a full head of the most soft and luscious black hair and the brightest, most piercing gray eyes.

He’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen in my life.

He came into this world fully alert…gulping in a big first breath that startled him into his first cry with his eyes immediately open.

At 41 weeks and 2 days…nine days past our due date, he was finally fully ready to make his entrance into the world and into our lives and we’d been so eagerly (and sometimes not so patiently!) waiting for his arrival.

Chris leaned down to me just moments after he was born and said, “Sarah look at him. You did this. You took such good care of yourself and you worked so hard for so long and this is the result. He is so awake and so alert and so healthy and it’s all because of you.”

I’ll never forget the tears in his eyes and on his face and the way his voice quivered in a pitch I’ve not heard since I met Chris 14 years ago. His reaction to seeing and meeting his son will live in my heart until my very last breath.

Our boy is currently in just a diaper, laid across my chest and belly, fast asleep with his hand on his face and his head close to my heart.

Typing that sentence immediately sent me into tears…because I’ve been trying these last days to think of a time when I’ve ever been happier in my whole life and I still have yet to come up with even one.

All the times someone has ever said to me, “You’ll never know a love like that of your child…” they really totally undersold how it actually feels.

If I could put it into words—it’s the happiest and saddest I’ve ever been at the same time. Happy because of the euphoric feeling I get from staring at this sweet little being constantly and wondering how the heck Chris and I made something so absolutely perfect. Sad, because every moment feels so fleeting now.

He’s growing and changing daily, and while I am present and savoring every single moment, I know I can’t capture them or bottle them or store them in a way where I could come back and live in his little smiles or nestling or nursing or sleeping or looking around a room taking it all in for the first time forever if I wanted to.

So I’ve lived in this state of the in-between, fully knowing that I am just going to be a very emotional mama who is more grounded and present than ever right now but wishes she could pause these moments and make them last a little longer.

Our birth plan did not at all go to plan. It’s funny to even call it a “birth plan” because the very nature of labor and birth is so wildly unpredictable. I think I did a good job throughout my pregnancy of mentally preparing myself for every outcome, but I won’t say that I didn’t grieve while in labor that things we’re not going the way I’d envisioned and trained and practiced and visualized for almost ten months.

We’d planned to deliver and meet our baby right here at home on the Little Dream Farm. And I labored at home for as long as I possibly could before it was very clear we needed to head to the hospital…something Chris and I had also practiced during pregnancy, driving to the hospital like it was an emergency situation, so that if we ended up needing to transfer we’d be fully prepared for it. And thankfully we were.

Someday I may share the story of our son’s birth…but I’m not quite ready for that now.

I’ve also been conflicted as to whether or not I feel comfortable sharing photos online. On one hand, I want to tell and show the entire world this being we made that we are so wildly proud of and who has filled our lives with so much joy in these first days of his life. On the other hand, this pregnancy and the journey to becoming a mom has made me crave so much more privacy than I’ve had since I logged online for the first time in middle school back in 1999. I just want to document my life for me and for us now, not for the rest of the world to consume as they scroll.

Someday I may change my mind and share photos of him…but that won’t be today.

Today we’re taking a second set of newborn photos here at home on the farm. We did a first session at the hospital the day after he was born, and today I’d love to capture all his little newborn features and some sweet snaps of Chris and I with our baby boy. I am so excited to do that session and can’t wait to see the end result.

As for us here on the farm, it’s business as usual. If you’ve been around long enough and have read the Farm Note for any length of time, then you know this time of year is packed to the brim with stuff for us to do!

We’ve asked for lots of help this year and won’t be taking it all on ourselves.

Our neighbor came down a few weeks back and spread all the donkey manure on the Dahlia Patch. He’ll be back again in the next couple of weeks to till the patch and get it ready for planting.

Our other neighbor is mowing the lawn for us for the next month or so while I recover from birth. The grass is already greened up here and growing like crazy and I’m reminded every year that I always forget how green and lush and beautiful it is here.

I’ve got friends at the ready who can come over and help us plant out the Dahlia Patch in May.

And my mom will be here for a week in mid-May while Chris is out of town on a work trip, then my sister will be here at the end of the month for a long weekend and Chris and I plan to take her to our favorite farm and garden center and have her help us plant out our fruit and veggie garden for the year.

As for the animals—Molly-Max has made a comeback from the long, cold, tough winter and he’s doing so good right now. We were holding our breath for a few weeks a little while back, wondering if he could make it long enough to meet our son. Thankfully he held on like the warrior he is, and we’ll take our baby boy out to the corral in the coming days so the donkeys can finally meet their baby.

Our two hens, Callie and Rosie, both spend their days sitting on our front porch staying nice and close to us. They’re such sweet girls and they seem to be the very best of friends.

And the Furmers are all doing fabulous. You might be wondering how they’re getting on with the baby finally here—and I’m happy to report it’s all going just fine. We were worried about how they’d react to having a baby in the house, and it’s almost as if he’s not even here to them! Micro stays close by me and is curious about him, and Dodger and Black Kitty have slept with me every night and get the closest to him. Buist is interested but hasn’t opted to be very close to him just yet, and Black and White Kitty, Little Lady, and Oliver don’t seem to care all that much about him. We are so pleased with how that’s going and think it’ll only continue to get better over time.

Finally, Chris and I are wildly happy. Our boy nurses like a champ, is bright and cheery for periods during the day, has been minimally and very normally fussy, and sleeps beautifully, We’ve gotten 5-7 hours of sleep a night since the day he was born. Being on the other end of it, I’m so glad my pregnancy went into 41 weeks because he’s such a settled, well adjusted baby—fully cooked!

He’s napped beautifully on me the entire time I wrote this Farm Note to you…and this skin to skin time is something I’ll cherish for the rest of my life.

So I’m going to get back to my baby boy now but it was such a joy to be able to drop in here and catch you up on how things are going.

We are safe. We are healthy. We are happy. And I couldn’t ask for anything more.

You’ll hear from us again for next month’s Farm Note on Sunday, May 31, and we’re already looking forward to catching up with you then!

You know I always ask because I always love to know…catch me up in the comments below if you’d like! What are you up to? How are things going? What’s something on your mind? What’s something good (or bad or sad or hard) that you’ve got going on right now? How’s life?? Fill me in if you’d like…I always read every comment.

Until next month…hugs from all of us here on the farm!

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Got a few faves for you today:

1. Hands down this is my new favorite lip balm and I’m ordering one in every flavor/scent.

2. I’ve been taking a long soothing shower every night since our son was born and I added this daily water cream to my night skin routine. It is heaven in a bottle. Highly highly recommend. This is going to be one of my staples going forward.

3. I had a pair of foldable RayBan sunglasses that were stolen a few years back. I replaced them with these and I love them just as much and love the price point even more! Foldable sunglasses are SO convenient to fit right into a pocket or small purse.

4. I’ve had one pair of Birkenstocks for 11 years now but recently ordered this off-brand and am really pleasantly surprised at the quality and style. I think I may order another pair in a different style and color!

5. I have these sneakers and I absolutely love the way they make my legs look longer and leaner.

Share this little dream life

Hello old friend.

It is my hope that this monthly Farm Note finds you well and in good spirits.

Will you do me a favor and catch me up with how life is going in your neck of the woods? You can do that right at the bottom of this post in the comments—truly, I would love to hear from you and to hear about how you’re doing and what’s new.

Unless something changes after I close my laptop on this Saturday evening as I write this, by the time you read this on Sunday, March 29, Chris and I are now just days away from the due date of our little one and living in our pre-baby bubble of bliss.

So basically…any time now.

We’ve covered all our bases with our midwife and her nurse.

We’ve attended the breastfeeding class.

We’ve taken the labor and delivery class series with several other lovely couples.

We’ve read the books.

I’ve done all the walking, strength training, mobility stretching, nourishing, and supplementing.

Everything we need for baby and for us is in the house and set aside ready for us to put it all to good use.

The house is cleaned.

Meals are made and stored to keep us well fed in the weeks to come.

Our family and closest friends are checking their phones and checking in awaiting any news.

At our most recent appointment this week both mom and baby are doing great and baby is measuring perfectly and is perfectly positioned.

And Chris and I are savoring these last days of it being just the two of us and our gaggle of animals…before our life changes in quite possibly the most significant way it ever has or will.

We feel proud of the learning and preparation and work we’ve done together and now we’re ready to tune out all the noise of the rest of the world and wait patiently for this baby to make his or her way into the world…whenever that may be.

Just a few days back we marked and welcomed with wide open arms the start of spring. After the winter we had here in Upstate New York we were so looking forward to these longer days and more mild temps.

The geese are making their way back to their summer home.

The birds are out en masse.

The peepers are peeping in the pond just down the hill from the house. The other night before we fell asleep they were singing their song while a steady rain fell and I was reminded yet again how much I look forward to hearing them each year.

Buds are forming or beginning to swell on many of the trees and shrubs around the farm.

I’ve checked on the dahlia tubers cozied in their winter storage and can’t wait to pick them up and plant them all out into the patch for a third season.

We’re swapping back and forth between heavy coats and light jackets depending on the day, and still catching a flurry or two between rain showers.

The transition from winter to spring is my absolute favorite time of year here on the farm.

This year, also marked by our transition to parenthood…my transition from maiden to mother.

It would take a whole other Farm Note to delve into the feelings and emotions about the anticipation of birth and this new little life we’re welcoming into ours…but I’m far too pregnant and far too emotional in all the best of ways to write those words now.

While I am writing those things down for me, maybe someday soon I’ll share some of it as a reflection in a later Farm Note.

Certainly this journey has cracked me wide open. With that has come a greater need for more privacy and more space and more peace and more quiet. The midwife and doula who taught our labor and delivery classes—a woman with five children of her own who has been assisting women and families in delivering their babies for the better part of almost four decades—referred to it as a porousness that takes place over time during pregnancy in order to be open and prepared not only for birth but for motherhood, too.

I could relate to that…and I’ve been keenly aware of what I’ve allowed to seep in throughout these last nine months.

So if you’re reading this—thank you. Thanks for coming back and for checking in and for keeping up with this monthly format. It’s been radio silence on our Instagram account and the off weeks of not writing a Farm Note have been the welcome change I was wanting and needing.

More quiet. A turning inward.

I’d love to give you an idea of what next month’s Farm Note will look like but I’ve got to be honest with you—I haven’t the faintest idea! We’re solely focused on healthy mom and healthy baby right now, and everything else can and will wait. Certainly we’ve got lots of ideas of what we think we’ll be up to here on the farm, but we’re leaving plenty of room for all of that to shift and change as needed.

So! Come on back here next month on the last Sunday in April and we’ll all see what’s new here with us on the Little Dream Farm together. Trust me, I’m quite eager to know myself!!

Until then, we’re wishing you all the very best and sending love and joy and peace and light your way. Don’t forget to look and listen for all the good happening to you, for you, and around you.

The best part is…the more you look, the more you’ll find.

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Share this little dream life

I’ve only got one favorite for you this month. It’s this book. Just get it and start reading it straight away. You’ll be so glad you did.

Hey there, friend!

From all of us here on the LDF, we hope this February Farm Note finds you well and in good spirits.

We’re over here surviving one of the coldest, snowiest winters we’ve had since Chris and I moved to the farm in October 2021, with snowfall inches above average for the year and record-setting days below freezing.

The hens have taken to hanging out in their coop most the day and have only had a few days here and there where they’ve ventured outside to come hang out on the porch. We love those days, as we can hear their little chattering outside the front door and it gives us hope that warmer, more light-filled days are ahead of us.

The donkeys have also hunkered down in their run-in shed for most of the winter. Molly-Max, the warrior miracle donkey, is doing his best to get by in the cold but we can tell the winter is wearing on him. His coat and orthotic shoes are helping for sure, and we keep a steady rhythm of pain medication going for him on the days when we can tell he’s really feeling it. We just keep dreaming of warmer days in the sunshine out in the pasture for him, and we really hope his poor wonky legs can hold out for him to get there. As always, his spirit is high and his determination is fierce. If only we could get him a new set of legs he’d be good as new.

The cats have no idea these are the very last days of their quiet life before a baby takes over their space and our attention, but we’ve certainly been savoring our time with our seven original babies and soaking up the preciousness of our last days of life before kid(s).

We’re later than usual this year at thinking about this and making a plan, but Chris and I are in the process of coming up with our 2026 Annual Farm Plan and what we’d like to do and accomplish here on the farm this year.

Here’s a sneak peek of what we’ve chatted about so far and what we know will be on the docket this year.

On the list is all the usual projects of staining the deck, re-staining the wood siding of the house (we do this each year to cut down on wasps and hornets), ordering cords of wood to stack in the wood shed for next winter, having the donkey manure spread over the dahlia patch and sharing it with our neighbor up the road who spreads it and tills the dahlia patch for us, and all the general upkeep of the growing spaces around the house.

As for the Big Garden, this year we’ve got to tackle re-fencing the garden to keep the critters out. The bunnies and woodchucks have been the worst offenders in the last two years, and this year we’re determined to keep them out for good.

Ideally, we’d be growing far more fruits and veggies from seed, but this year we’ll rely on our favorite local organic farm for plant starts so that we can enjoy the bounty of a big, full garden without the hassle of having to start seeds indoors as baby is about to be due.

We’ve jotted down our list of all the things we’d like to grow this year, and we’ll plan to share some of those plant starts with another couple who also recently had a baby last year and have become great friends of ours.

Now onto the Dahlia Patch. Assuming my tubers have survived the winter in storage as they have the last four years (I’ve yet to go and check on them as I generally trust they’ll be just fine like they have been each year) I’ll plant them into the patch whenever I have the physical recovery and strength following the birth of our little one.

Typically I plant the tubers in late-May and depending on when baby decides to make their appearance into the world, the timing may line up perfectly for me to be able to get out there and get planting. Regardless, this year I’ll ask for help from some local girlfriends to lighten the load and help me get everything in the ground without me overdoing it.

Depending on how I’m feeling, I’d like to put some extra effort into making the patch look pretty enough to be a backdrop for photo sessions. I’ve met a few local photographers recently and would love to be able to offer the space for photo sessions once the patch is in bloom. The sun comes up over the east side of the patch each dewey morning and sets behind the barn to the west each evening—both are phenomenal opportunities to capture some truly magical photos for couples or families.

I’m thinking I’ll add some more aesthetic staking and corralling of each of the rows, do a little neater and more tidy job of laying the landscape fabric and spacing out the rows, I’ll organize the planting scheme a little bit more methodically for color, and possibly even hang some solar festoon lighting and get up a pretty arbor or two with some fast-growing vines. With any luck, it’ll look a little more like a sweet secret garden and can be a place we make some special memories happen for others this year.

One other project we’ve got on our list this year is to do a hard pruning of the apple orchard just behind the Lower Barn. We’ve got a neighbor up the road who is into apples and started his own little orchard on their land with the hopes of breaking into cider in the coming years. He’s offered to come down and help us tackle our trees which have been overdue for a good pruning for years but was never a priority for us as we’ve settled into the farm. We’ll be getting to that likely in the next month or two, and I’m eager to get the hands-on learning outside of the reading and video watching we’ve done regarding pruning fruit trees.

One final thing we’ll tackle this year is getting our composting pile under control. We inherited a pile with some pretty beat up old pallets and fencing that’s in a spot we’ve never loved. A few years back we got all new pallets but then never got around to setting up the new system. So this year we’ll put together a 3-bin system using pallets that’ll help us rotate the new pile to get the most out of composting our food scraps, garden clippings, and chicken bedding and manure.

We have yet to hear from the farmer this year as to whether or when we’ll see cattle here on the LDF—so when we know, you’ll know! As always, we’re desperately hoping to have them here, as we love more than anything to see this land being put to use and having a herd here all summer long adds a really special feeling to this place. So we’ll see what he (the farmer) decides.

I’m very strictly not adding any new plants or trees this year, as our focus will remain on taking good care of what we already have and allowing for space to enjoy this new chapter of being first-time parents.

We’ve got day trips and little family vacations and lots of adventures planned, and we’re looking forward to all the ways our life is about to change. Just a few more weeks to go now before we greet our precious nugget, and we’ve been busying ourselves with the final bits of nesting in our sweet little home.

Our registry items are organized and inventoried and stacked in the Milk House so we can bring things in and use them as needed. In the next few weeks we’ll start setting things up inside the house. Until then, we’ve been doing our typical annual clean out and organization of the house that we generally do this time of year, except this year with more gusto and a keener eye for things we no longer want or need in order to make space for our newest family member.

In another week or so we’ll get to shopping and prepping some meals for the freezer so we’ve got our nourishment well in hand for the first few months. I’m making things like stews and soups, easy go-to breakfast items, marinated mains that we can easily thaw and throw in the crockpot or the oven, and lots of bone broth and baked goods and things we can quickly and easily grab and enjoy.

I feel really fortunate to have had the easiest and most enjoyable pregnancy, but I know that none of that is luck. I’ve deliberately taken such good care of myself and my body these last eight months, moving daily, eating only the best foods, prioritizing sleep, and preparing myself mentally and physically for labor. I’m planning to treat postpartum exactly the same way, prioritizing taking care of myself so that I can be at my best for my little family.

We’ve got some breastfeeding and labor and delivery classes on our radar in the next few weeks alongside our regularly scheduled appointments with our midwife. And Chris has been reading to baby every single day for the last month while they kick and respond to him with each story. These days have been so precious…I never want to forget them and the sweetness and closeness we’ve enjoyed.

Who knows, by the time we meet here again for the next Farm Note, we could have a baby in our midst! We shall see!!

Until then, take care of yourself, lean on those you love and let them know how much they mean to you, and be sure to look around and count all your blessings. There’s far more good in our lives should we choose to see it, and when we’re focused on seeing the good, we generally find far more of it.

We’re sending you love and laughter and light and so much joy, and we’ll see you right back here on March 29 for another monthly Farm Note.

Be well until then and we’ll catch you so so soon!

Before you go, if you want to, catch me up and tell me how YOU are doing. I always want to know, and I read every word.

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Share this little dream life

I’ve got a few favorites for ya this month!

1. I read this book in January for book club and loved it…especially because it takes place just south of where we live.
   

2. I’m reading this book for book club this month and enjoying it so far!
   

3. Been wearing this top to the gym constantly and love the fabric and quality.
   

4. I use this face wash, then this hyaluronic acid serum, then this moisturizer and that is my only AM and PM skincare routine…my skin is flawless right now and I am loving it! Bonus…all of it clean beauty.
   

5. These pajamas are so good I got them in a few colors.
   

6. I was influenced by this deodorant, got it, and have been so obsessed with it I’ll be ordering it again for sure. Another clean beauty find.
   

7. While we’re deep cleaning the house, I’m always reminded this is the best tool I’ve ever purchased for cat hair removal.
   

8. Winter is no joke on our skin. I wanted a clean beauty deep moisturizing lotion I could put all over my body, especially on my growing belly, dry heels, knees, elbows, and my poor dry hands. This one fits the bill and I just bought another big bottle it’s so good. Get the big bottle. You won’t regret it.
   

9. I’ve been using this clean beauty mascara now for six years or longer and I just don’t think I’ll ever change…they better never stop making it! I always buy the 3-pack.
   

10. My signature wellness program is ready and up and running! Want to completely transform your health and wellness for the rest of your life? Then you need The Reprogram. Get it here today.
    

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Well howdy, friend!

From all of us here on the LDF, we sure do hope your 2026 is off to a great beginning!!

If it’s been a bit since you’ve read a weekly Farm Note, I should mention we’ve changed the format from a weekly newsletter to a monthly publication schedule. There’s nothing you need to do on your end—just don’t forget about us the other few Sunday’s of the month and we’ll catch you here on the last Sunday of each month in 2026 for a monthly Note!

At the start of January, Chris and I left the farm and all our critters in our trusty sitter’s hands so we could sneak away for a weekend Baby Moon in Boston.

Some of you might be like, Wait, what?! Baby Moon??! and if that’s the case you’ll want to go back and read the Week 48 Farm Note from back in November to get caught up!!

We were really chancing it to try and do a weekend away in Boston in early January and told our sitter we’d keep an eye on the weather beforehand in case we needed to cancel for bad weather either here in New York or in Massachusetts. But we lucked out and got one of the most mild weekends with decent temps and great weather for leaving the care of the farm and animals to someone else and spending a weekend outside walking all over our favorite city.

We got a nice hotel. We wore our nice clothes. We somehow managed to walk 55,000 steps in a weekend headed into the third trimester. We drank the best coffee. We stopped at the most incredible bakeries. We stopped by all our favorite parts of the city, went candlepin bowling, ate at some of the best restaurants for dinner, and thoroughly soaked up the quality time together…just us.

We basked in the sweetness of this being our last little vacation together just the two of us…Sarah and Chris…before we’re mom and dad.

It’s wild to think we’re in the final stretch here before our little love arrives!

We’re slowly nesting and getting the house just the way we want it. We’re preparing and stocking the freezer well ahead of time with nourishing meals. Soon, we’ll be unboxing all our registry gifts from our amazing village that spans far and wide to make way for the newest and tiniest member of our family in our cozy little home.

This winter has been keeping Chris quite busy here on the farm! It’s been consistently very cold and consistently very snowy thus far this season, which means more trips back and forth to the chicken coop and donkey corral to make sure everyone is warm and well fed and has warm water and is happy. It means lots of de-icing and clearing paths and keeping an eye out for slip risks for yours truly. It means lots of shoveling and scraping car windows and warming up vehicles and trips back and forth to the wood shed to keep a constant pile of logs coming into the house to keep our cozy fire going all winter long.

Last night before bed I found myself scrolling back through photos and videos during the summertime here on the farm. When we’re in the depths of winter, and it feels like there’s no end in sight to these bitter cold, dark days, it helps me to remind myself that these chill hours in winter are required for us to be able to enjoy picking an apple off our apple tree, biting into a fresh tree-ripened peach, watching the first dahlia bloom, or sitting in the kitchen with the windows open with a coffee in hand while the cats watch the birds out the window while the sun comes up.

I’m wildly grateful to be the most pregnant in the deepest part of winter. Though I wish I was able to give Chris more of a hand with the day-to-day tasks outside, I’m glad to be cozied up in comfy lounge clothes and enjoying hearty meals and not being pulled by all the demands of a farm in full bloom. Our timing just so happened to be impeccable for life here on the farm. I still can’t believe we get to welcome a baby into the world in spring—how special.

Now, I know you’re wanting to know how everyone is doing and what’s on our minds, so let me quit jabbering on and give the people what they want!

I know your first question—how’s Molly-Max?

For a very old, very wonky, very poorly-footed donkey, he’s taking this winter like a true champion. Our farrier, Matt, was just here a few days ago, and said this is the best his hooves have looked since he started working on him. I think we can attribute that both to the quality of the trimmings he’s been doing for Max in collaboration with our vet, and that we’ve consistently kept his orthotic shoes on for the better part of the last four months. We’re really proud of Maxy—he’s just such a trooper, our old boy!

I mentioned at the end of last year that we’d picked up some coats for both Molly-Max and Dominic and we’re really happy with how that’s been going for them. We sure have been glad to have them this week when the temps dipped well into the negatives with “feels like” minus 21 degrees being the worst of it just this morning!

Like many of you across the US experiencing this upcoming storm, we’re expecting 12-18 inches of snow in the coming two days. We did our preparations as best we could and we’re as ready as we ever are for another big dump of snow in this already very snowy winter.

Next up, our three little hens are all keeping on just fine. We recently decided we won’t be adding any additional hens this year. We’ve been having issues with far more birds in our coop than in previous years and we’re worn out trying to resolve the chicken coop issue. When it’s not birds it’s rats, which thankfully we’ve not had a recurring issue with. But if it’s not rats it’s the birds giving the chickens mites. So, for this first year of parenthood, we’re going to eliminate the headache that comes with adding more hens and just enjoy the three we have until we no longer have hens for the timebeing. Our focus is surely changing.

And finally the Furmers—our seven crazy cats!

Black Kitty has turned into a total diva this winter and never wants to go outside anymore. When we open the door for her, she first steps forward, smells and feels the air, and then either decides to hop outside or retreats from the door if she doesn’t feel like going out in the cold. It’s hilarious!

Black and White Kitty and Buist have become the best of friends and you can find them at all times of the day and night snuggled up on one of the chairs together in front of the fire. They groom each other and rest their heads on each other’s belly and sleep all tangled up in the cutest ways. I’ve always had a soft spot for how loving and caring Buist is and how he takes to every animal and person he’s ever come across, but I’m especially happy for Black and White Kitty that she was scooped up off the streets of Philadelphia and found a home and a best friend here on the Little Dream Farm. We can’t get enough of the two of them. Here’s a photo of them just last night!

Dodger, Oliver, Micro, and Little Lady are all great, too. Our cats have their daily routine dialed to the most predictable science and we love the way they add so much color and silliness to our life. We’re very eager to see how they all react to having to share their mom and dad with a tiny human! We’ll have to report back on that!

We’re pleased to relay to you that alls well here on the Little Dream Farm as we anticipate this to be a year of a lot of change for us.

Next month, I’ll walk you though what’s on our mind for our Annual Farm Plan and the little dreams and visions and projects we have in store for this coming growing season and life here on the LDF.

This next month we’ll sit down and start talking about what we want to fill our farm life with for the year ahead, and while we both know it’ll be far less than what we’ve had on our docket in previous years, we’re still looking forward to another year of growing—in all the ways—here on the LDF.

Be on the lookout for the next monthly Farm Note to hit your inbox on Sunday, February 22.

Be easy on yourself and may life be good to you in the meantime until we meet here again!

Before you go…

Leave a comment

I’d love to hear from you! How’ve you been? How’s life? How’s the new year? What’s new? What’s something you’re dreaming about this year? Working on? Working toward? Letting go of? What’s on your mind or in your heart? What’s something you’d like to share? What’s your world for this year or what are some thing stirring in your heart?

I happen to think this Farm Note is far better when it’s a two-way street, so I’d love to hear from you and will be reading all your comments as we watch the snow fall outside.

Until February, my friend.

Share this little dream life

Wait…is this a Sarah’s Favorites…back again?! YES!

I have just a few things I have to share with you!

Ok first, our friends at Darwin’s have TOTALLY outdone themselves and they’re offering 60% (yes, SIXTY!) off your first order of up to $100. You guys know how much we RAVE about Darwin’s and have been feeding it religiously to our cats since 2021. This deal is an absolute steal if you’ve been wanting to try raw food for your cat or dog. I always tell people, even if just 25-50% of your pet’s diet was Darwin’s, that would still make a massive improvement in their health. Give it a try using this link OR by entering SARAHBERGSTEIN at checkout to apply the savings. When you place your order, Darwin’s will also donate funds to Project MEOW in Philadelphia, the rescue we did the bulk of our foster work with when we lived in the city. We LOVE that!

I’ve had my nutrition dialed in while I’ve been pregnant and I think it’s the leading reason I’ve been having such a smooth, uncomplicated, enjoyable pregnancy. I recently got my hands on some of the best dang protein on the market and now every morning I can’t wait to rush home from the gym to make myself a shake to start the day. You have to try this protein—doesn’t make you bloat, doesn’t make you feel overly full, only made from good-for-you ingredients. I blend it up with a little milk, some ice, and some water and I’ve been having it every morning on repeat for the last few months now. Save $$ on your purchase using this link or enter code SARAHBERGSTEIN at checkout.

If you’re not currently taking a multivitamin may I sway you to start? It honestly made such a big difference in my Hashimoto’s remission and healing my bulging discs last year. The prenatals during pregnancy have also been a huge game changer in my overall health, and I’ve been receiving near-perfect labs at every check in. Now, nutrition plays the biggest part in this, but a quality multivitamin goes a long way too. This is the brand I recommend and you can use this link to save money on your purchase.

The BEST investment I made in my health in 2025 was doing this comprehensive panel of labs twice in the year. You pay one time for an annual membership and then you get more than 110 biomarkers tested at a six month interval. It allowed me to see all the things that were off—about 14 different markers at the start of the year, mostly associated with my thyroid. The platform recommends what foods to eliminate, what foods to add more of, and specific supplements to take. It was far more helpful than any doctor I’ve ever gone to, and by the second set of labs my numbers were all normalizing. I’ve already signed up again this year and can’t wait to monitor my postpartum health using this resource. Sign up today using this link and gift yourself the best investment you can make in your health in 2026!

One other incredible investment I made for my health last year is to begin using red light therapy. Both on my face for my skin health (this happens to be the best my skin has ever looked in all my life, even through pregnancy!) and for my thyroid. I simply sit in front of this panel for one session daily or every other day. If you’ve been thinking about getting a red light therapy device, do it…seriously, it’s actually worth it. And if you want the best one, use this link on February 5-8 to save $248(!!!) on your device during their Valentine’s Day sale—that’s huge!

The very first weekly Farm Note I wrote was on the first Sunday in January of 2023.

It feels fitting for this week’s to be the last of the weekly Notes, this first week of January 2026.

Happy New Year, friends.

Story Time

If you’ve not been following along with story time, you can go on back and catch up with the previous three installments:

Story Time - The Early Years... (part 1 of 4)

Story Time - The Call... (part 2 of 4)

Story Time - The Call, The Detour, The Lessons… (part 3 of 4)

Going Forward

The next time we’ll see you back here in on January 25th…the final Sunday of the month and then the final Sunday of each month going forward!

Now For Today’s Story Time and the Final Installment

So Sarah…how does it feel to be spilling your guts week after week on the Internet?

Haha! I’ve got to tell you, it’s horrifying! I get wicked vulnerability hangovers and basically need to avoid my email and social media for the remainder of the day.

But that’s all ego. I can’t go back and change my story. You know how they say, “If you could go back would you change anything?”

I always say…I mean, yes, I would have liked to suffer less through the years when I was growing up—even through any of it that was my own doing.

But I didn’t know then what I know now…and may never have learned it if it hadn’t been for every experience along the way. So I’ve never tried to erase the past—only to learn from it and share the lessons along the way when and where I can.

Which conveniently brings me to Our Growth Era!

I’ve been hinting to you this project I’ve been working on since the summer. It’s now called The Reprogram, and I’ll tell you about it below.

For me, there was a first trimester in there, so I’d begun with an idea in early summer and then taken a complete step back from it until I could give it my full attention once I was feeling more like myself again.

Ideally I’d have been done with this and ready to go by the fall…but rarely does life ever go exactly as we think it should.

Now I have to tell you. What I really wanted to do was disappear from this Farm Note and from our farm’s Instagram account entirely. To create a new account without telling anyone, go forward with this new endeavor, and do it without the pressure of watchful eyes of anyone that knows me. Sometimes that undue pressure can kill a dream entirely.

Instead, I worked on this one single project in silence without talking or sharing much about it, because I don’t know if it was even fully formed in my own mind before I set out to create the thing it has now become.

I was worried that if I talked about it too much, that it couldn’t be whatever it was trying to be. That if I’d given away too much of myself or my ideas in the process, that it’d be too easy to convince myself not to pursue it.

What emerged from that singular idea and that one project, in the last several weeks has now bloomed into three separate resources and a new place to share them.

These are things I’ve been thinking about, learning about, talking about, talking with others about, and hearing about the struggles and frustrations and overwhelm from so many people through the years.

So finally, with the unflinching love, help and support from Chris, who has never once wavered in his belief that I can do absolutely anything I set my mind to, and who has championed and selflessly supported every goal or dream I’ve ever had; and because I found myself in this little window in life where I had the free headspace and the free time to devote my focus entirely to this one thing, I’m excited to share with you the following resources I’ll be offering beginning this week over on my new Instagram account: “@ourgrowthera.”

The Reprogram workshop
The Reprogram is a self-paced, virtual, all-in-one workshop designed for anyone who wants to lose weight; improve nagging symptoms, illness, or disease; wants to work themselves off medications; is wanting now or in the future or perhaps struggling to conceive; is wanting to learn how to eat better, move more intentionally and build better day-to-day wellness habits; or just generally wants to feel better and be well.

This workshop is the opposite of a diet, and based entirely on the fact that our body is designed and built to be well—that homeostasis is our innate factory setting. The Reprogram provides the information, education, tools, and resources to essentially reboot or reprogram ourselves back to that innate wellness we were designed for. It includes teaching on mindset, environmental impacts, sleep, hydration, nourishment, movement, detoxing, healing and prevention, complete with workouts, recipes, information on creating a nutrition plan, a list of pesky ingredients to be on the lookout for in foods, a list of more than 300 food items and brands who use better-for-you ingredients and leave the bad stuff out, and a comprehensive resources section for further learning and my favorite wellness products and services.

If I’ve done my job well, I’ve not only wildly underpriced this resource, but also the Reprogram will help people remember and more readily tune inward to their body first for answers when looking to make any change or improve in any way.

Plus Private Consulting
In addition to this workshop, I’ll be offering 1:1 personalized video consulting sessions to assist people with their specific situation, needs, and goals. You can think of this call like the answers you’ve been needing from both a nutritionist, a trainer, and a doctor, combined, to assess your current state of health and for me to make recommended courses of action so that you achieve what you want by working with your body instead of against it, and that you feel better and begin to see results within the first week of following those recommendations.

The Life Design guide
Chris and I had no idea when we set out to structure, organize, simplify, and streamline our life here on the farm, that it would completely transform our life and how we live it for the better…that it would provide us so much freedom, joy and ease. I’ll never forget the first time I shared one of our initial tracking spreadsheets with you. It was the second Farm Note back in 2023, actually, and I thought people would think we’re neurotic and nuts, but we’ve gone on to share lots of our tracking and planning tools and organization strategies with you here as we’ve developed them through the years.

You can imagine our surprise that we continually get asked how the heck we do it. That people would ask if we could come and do the same in their lives, or that we’d literally be invited to dinner to show others how we built what we’ve created. So, we turned this simple system we designed and have practiced for the last three years into a guide so that anyone who wants to simplify their life, organize all the day-to-day stuff there is to manage, and add greater freedom and ease into their own life can copy what we’ve done and design their own ideal way of doing daily life. It took us several years and lots of trial and error to figure out this system, but we built it so that anyone can adopt it into their own life and build their own Life Design system in just a few hours over a weekend. Our life today essentially runs on autopilot and not only are we just not stressed out and overwhelmed by everything we do and manage, but its also freed us up for our hobbies, for rest, for more dates, and for me to be able to create things like these resources. We’re proud this guide can now help others do the same.

The Un-Tox Your Life guide
When I first ventured down the path of trying to clean up, detox, or “Un-Tox” my life, as I now like to say, it was straight overwhelming, dizzying, and frustrating. All I wanted was to be able to trust the products I was spending my hard-earned money on and to feel good about what we were putting onto and in our bodies and using in our home and around our pets. What I was met with was conflicting information, having to look high and low for trustworthy brands and sources, needing to read a million labels and learn about hundreds of ingredients, to cross-check that information with health studies and third-party data, and then come to discover all kinds of conflicting and counter information about what I’d just leaned. What a nightmare for something that should be so simple.

It hasn’t been an easy process, but I have absolutely loved the journey and learned a million things along the way. Now, I’ve taken all of that learning and experience, distilled it into a done-for-you guide, and created a useful resource that helps you completely Un-Tox your home, cleaning, personal care, beauty, pet, baby products and household items in order to lower your toxic burden and discover brands who are, bless them, just simply making better-for-you products that are safer for us to use and less detrimental to our health.

Remember the “Sarah’s Favorites” section of the Farm Note? It’s like one big guide of exactly that, specifically with trusted, tested, verified, better-for-you brands (and direct links to them!) and some accompanying information on how to “Un-Tox” your life. It’s essentially shopping that improves your health…and ohhh can I get behind that!!

So what is Our Growth Era?

A few weeks back I mentioned a new Instagram account I created. I’ve also been saying you can expect I’ll be posting and sharing far less on our farm’s Instagram account and turning this newsletter into a monthly versus weekly publication.

And this is why.

I want and need the space…the room…the freedom…the time…and the outlet for my own growth era.

I’ve spent all my life balancing a dozen things all at once, all the time.

I no longer want to do that anymore. Especially not with a baby on the way whose life I don’t want to miss a moment of.

The clever naming of Our Growth Era was Chris’ idea entirely. And the online shop where I’ll house these new resources I mentioned above? I’m calling it The Growth Greenhouse. Also Chris’ idea.

Brilliant. So incredibly brilliant and creative.

The naming has come to mean much more to me than I ever could have anticipated.

My life up to this point has been a series of growth eras. As I’m sure you can relate and has been true for you in your own life. And living on this farm and becoming a gardener and flower grower has brought the power of the growing process front and center for me these last few years.

From experience, I can say that it’s not easy becoming the person you most desire to be. But I can proudly say today that I never did give up on trying, and that today I’m really blessed and feel quite lucky to say that I genuinely love who I’ve become…who I’m becoming, and not in spite of my past, but because of it.

From my own path, I carry with me this innate knowing that we each have the power and potential to be the person we most want to be.

To cultivate a life of our wildest dreams.

Nothing has made this more clear to me than our life here on the Little Dream Farm.

Getting to be the ones to steward this farm has been one of the most profound growth eras of my life.

It is here on these sacred grounds where we’ve been given a chance to carry forward the legacy of this land. Where we get to be the next chapter and the latest edition of people who had dreams for how this land could help them realize their own little dreams.

For Ed the old farmer, that was running a traditional dairy farm.

For Jay and Linda, it was raising paint horses.

For David, it was having a farm of his own and raising Brown Swiss Cows.

For Chris and I, it was getting out of the city, having more animals, having more space, learning to grow our own food, and being closer to the farmers who work so hard who feed us.

It is here on this farm where I’ve had a front row seat to Mother Nature and her cycles. Where I’ve gotten to watch a handful of seed sprout from nothing but tiny little balls of potential into a massive sea of flowers.

Where we’ve planted little sprouts of hope into the soil and watched the rain and the sun turn them into an entire bounty of fresh food to feed us.

This farm has plugged me back in to nature. It’s reconnected me to myself and reprogrammed my perspective.

And I’m desiring a way to share all the lessons and somehow pay it forward. It would have been far easier and far more convenient to just share all these things directly from the farm’s Instagram account where more than 15,000 followers are currently gathered. But that felt like a disservice both to me and to our farm and to all of you to try to force this to fit together, so instead I’m digging up new ground and beginning anew…like a brand new flower patch.

There was a little voice nagging at me all throughout the creation of these resources.

What if this is nothing more than The Simply Fit Guide all over again?

What if I build these things and they go nowhere?

What if you’re just hanging on to a ship that has already sailed?

I like to recite the words of Hafiz when my mind wanders down that worrier’s path…

Even after all this time
The sun never says to the earth
“You owe me.”

Look what happens with a love like that.
It lights up the whole sky.

If someone were looking to me for advice as to how to begin the thing they can’t stop thinking about, I’d tell them to focus on shining their light, on sharing everything they know and learned and picked up along the way. That the combination of their personal story and their unique experiences and the way they view the world matters and has the power and will find and help those who need it most.

So instead of ghosting y’all here on the Farm Note and on our farm’s IG account, I decided instead to share with you parts of the backstory that led here. After all, it’s called “Our Growth Era,” and who would I be to encourage others to follow their dreams if I’m not willing to go boldly after my own from right here on the Little Dream Farm? I love that the “Our” is a constant nudge that I need to be responsible and accountable for my own growing, too.

There’s this African proverb I’ve loved since the very first time I ever came across it.

“If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”

Our Growth Era is simply this…a place for those who want to enjoy their journey, love their life, and cultivate a life of their dreams…to not have to go the journey alone.

You’re invited and welcome to follow the new account “@ourgrowthera” if you’d like. Here’s a link to it if you’d like to head there now.

And if you’re interested in any of the above offerings, they’ll be available in the online shop that will be connected to the account in coming few days. I have a few loose ends to tie up in each resource and I don’t want to burn myself out trying to rush to get it all done. This tiny 2ish-pound baby is growing like a weed now, and mama needs her naps!

The quote on the little paper string tab on my nightly cup of tea so often has the Lao Tzu quote as a steady reminder, “Nature never hurries, yet everything is accomplished.”

I’m always so grateful for that reminder.

All in due time.

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And that’s a wrap!

Umm you guys!

Here we are at the end of one road and the beginning of another. I really didn’t want to let this weekly Farm Note go. I love it as a creative outlet. I love it as a public journal of our life here on this farm. I love how it steadies me in time each week as I sit down and write the number of the week for the title. I love the connections it creates. And I love you for reading it.

As I said in the last Note, I’ll endeavor to bring the very same love and care to the monthly Note format.

We’re so looking forward to our precious little one expected in just a few months now, and another year of learning, loving, and growing together here on the Little Dream Farm.

We’ll catch you back here at the end of the month. I sure hope January is good to you in the meantime.

Be seeing you.

Share this little dream life

Hoping you had a very Merry Christmas if you celebrate and that you’re enjoying these finals days of 2025.

Chris and I were here on the farm together for Christmas as we have been for the last four years. We had a wonderful time making delicious food, enjoying the snow that fell two days prior giving us a white Christmas, staying cozied up by the fire, and soaking in our last Christmas just the two of us and our fuzzy crew before baby arrives come spring.

If you’ve not been following along with story time, you can go on back and catch up with the previous two installments:

Story Time - The Early Years (part 1 of 4)

Story Time - The Call (part 2 of 4)

Hard to believe this week is the final Farm Note of the year. I’ve got one more for you next week, and then the next time we’ll see you back here is on January 25th…the final Sunday of the month and then the final Sunday of each month going forward.

If you’ve been with us the last few weeks, then let’s go ahead and get into today’s story time…the call I meant to tell you about…and the detour…and the lessons.

The Call…

I kept feeling as if I was being called to this one thing…to guide people not to go on a diet, but to create a healthy lifestyle instead.

What I experienced in my first years of coaching clients, and what I see so often today, are countless people who seek out help in desperation to diet, to lose weight, to lose inches, to shrink, to be thin.

Many of the women I’ve worked with through the years were doing this for years or decades before they encountered and began working with me.

Thinness at any cost…except that for many it felt so hard to get there or stay there, and that in fact, it came with very real costs.

In my intake forms I was starting to notice some really disturbing patterns.

I ask people about their general wellness, their mood, their sleep, their happiness, their activity levels, their general habits, current practices, and a whole host of other questions.

But more and more I was seeing a pattern—higher instances of poor sleep, poor digestion, low mood, low libido, lists of medications for various issues, depression and anxiety, low energy, less cooking at home, lots more eating out, lack of movement, and a number of other concerning things.

It wasn’t just that so many of my clients were wanting to lose the weight and couldn’t…it was that they weren’t feeling good, either, and their health was shouting lots of big red flags.

I knew that my methods needed to change if I was to actually help people heal, be well, and reach their goals.

At the start of my coaching I was giving people calorie targets and macronutrient breakdowns and high-intensity exercise protocols and supplement regimens.

Weight loss was what they wanted, and it was my job as their coach to help them get it.

But this started to sit really poorly with me.

Because I knew from my own experience that I didn’t need another calorie-restriction protocol and more intense workouts.

What I needed—back when I was a teen and skipping meals and heading to cheer or track practice on an empty stomach and binging at night because I couldn’t stand the hunger and then throwing up and being mad at myself that I must have lacked the discipline to be as thin as most of my tiny waisted, perfectly flat-abs girlfriends were—was an understanding of how to eat to nourish my body.

When I enrolled in that master’s program to learn about wellness and fitness and become a personal trainer, it’s because I’d never learned how to eat to be well. The only thing I’d ever learned about food was how to consume as little of it as possible. The only thing I’d learned about exercise is that you were supposed to do it so you didn’t get fat.

But what I was seeing over and over and over and over again in practice with my clients, was that many of us were taught how to diet before ever learning how to eat to be well.

That many of us see ourselves as “good” when we eat a salad or a bland piece of chicken and vegetables but “bad” when we eat a burger or have some ice cream.

That many of us are working out to burn calories and blast fat and burn off the belly and the arms and the butt and the thighs and work off the pounds and the inches.

So I started down this new path…insisting that I was going to be the coach that helped people quit dieting for good and focus on a healthy lifestyle instead.

While I was stationed in Florida for six months and Chris was living in Philly at the time, I created a program that I called The Simply Fit Guide that was going to revolutionize the wellness space and finally help people see and understand that by focusing on eating well, hydrating, moving often, prioritizing sleep, and minimizing stress in their lives, that they could improve their health and make the changes in their physique they most desired.

This guide, after working on it for months, was met with crickets. On the day of the launch, I was with my parents in Florida and my dad snuck upstairs and quickly bought it so I’d have my first sale. My parents called my uncle and asked him to buy it, too. One good friend purchased it. I may have had a few other sales here and there.

I cried for days.

It was like the time I stood on the stage of that bodybuilding competition after nine months of training my ass off for that one day and didn’t even place.

It was like the time I took a three hour bus ride to New York City for a fitness modeling agency meeting and stood on the other side of the desk of two very heavyset middle aged men who looked me up and down and told me I’d need to lose 15-20 pounds to ever be taken seriously, but even then, my height wasn’t doing me any favors. I was about 125 pounds at the time and in incredibly good athletic condition from all my training.

It was like the time my second bodybuilding coach told me in front of all her other athletes during posing practice in our bikinis and heels that I was looking too much like Spongebob Squarepants and needed more work in my midsection.

It was like the time those “friends” in high school told me I should quit my eating disorder because it obviously wasn’t working.

I’ve had to work my ass off to climb out from under all of that bullshit through the years.

The number of self-help books and personal development podcasts and journaling practices and fits and starts with meditation and the number of walks I’ve needed to go on and different therapists I’ve sought out and the medications I’d reluctantly go on…all just to desperately find some way of making sense of constantly wrestling with so badly wanting to feel like enough in my own skin and relentlessly fighting with a world and a society that perpetually tells you you’re not.

I was working so hard to try and accept myself and change for the better, and because it was actually helping and I was actually making progress and doing and feeling better, I was so excited and eager to help others do the same.

But the signals from the industry was that I wasn’t doing enough. The feedback from my audience was that it sounded nice, but that ultimately the diet was what the people really wanted.

So I quit.

I just gave up.

I wish at this point in the story I could say I dug my heels in and gave it my all and persisted, but I was so naive and far too fragile to handle the rejection in those years.

I pulled the guide down, I offloaded my clients, and I let myself believe I’d failed.

I told myself I just wasn’t meant to do this thing that I felt like I’d been called to.

The Detour…

At this point I’d given up an overseas assignment in Europe in order to get off active duty and pursue this dream of helping people heal and building this coaching practice to take the wellness industry by storm.

Except that now I was fresh off a steady, full-time job with no real business plan, a flopped program (at least that’s how I saw it back then), and a badge of embarrassment for diving headlong into this sure thing and finding myself so unsure about all of it.

Next came the deployment to the UAE, but before that my dad’s passing.

It felt like I just kept getting further and further away from this one thing.

When I got back to the states after my deployment, I rolled straight into the full-time, in-person MBA program I’d studied and taken the GMAT for while I was deployed and was accepted to this two-year program.

Then came COVID-19 in that first year of it. The program went virtual. Our business trips to China and Colombia as part of the program were cancelled indefinitely.

I had this really strange health scare at the start the pandemic…something totally unrelated but that really made me start to look at my surroundings and start asking, “What’s in this?” to just about everything in our home and in what we were eating.

I found myself down a totally new rabbit hole, learning everything I could about the food industry, the agricultural industry, the medical industry, Big Pharma, and government regulation of what goes into what we eat and interact with on a day-to-day basis.

I brought Chris along with me in this new obsession and had us both make a ton of changes…we started focusing on the ingredients in what we were eating. We started swapping out cleaning and personal care and beauty and pet products in our home.

And we started feeling a lot better in really profound and noticeable ways.

We each dropped ten pounds that year by making some simple adjustments to what we were eating.

My skin cleared up in a way it never had before.

Our one cat at the time lost a bunch of weight. Another one’s blood sugar and diabetes improved dramatically. Another improved her heart condition. The foster cats we were working with were making huge strides in improving serious health issues.

It became undeniable for me that what was contributing to all the weird health issues I was having through the years, despite being an active and healthy person, were the ingredients in our food and the chemicals in the things we were putting onto and into our body and using in our home.

I read dozens of books, watched every documentary I could get my hands on, sought out all kind of organizations working on these big complex issues to improve our food and Ag and medical systems. I spent countless hours in the grocery store flipping over thousands of products and reading labels and learning about food additives and food processing and transparency standards for labeling beauty and personal care and cleaning products, and devoured everything I could get my hands on about regenerative agriculture.

It wasn’t just that Chris and I had this little dream to one day live on a farm, it’s that now I also was becoming completely obsessed with learning about farming and Ag and wanting to be closer to it.

What I came away from all of that learning with was this:

We have more access to health care and more knowledge about human health than we’ve ever had before. But we’re far sicker and in far greater numbers than we’ve ever been.

It’s not just that we’re obsessed with dieting and thinness.

It’s that what’s in what we eat and what we spray on our soils and what we put into and on our bodies and what we cook and clean and live with and the medical care we receive via the system we receive it through are making us unwell.

I plodded along like this in my obsessive little bubble for years. Slowly I started taking on clients again while also fulfilling different Air Force Reserve roles and implementing the things I’d learned with my clients, still preaching to anyone who’d listen and stick with me long enough that cultivating a healthy lifestyle is the only sustainable way to meet our health and physique goals.

My clients were making some of the most incredible strides in their health, some of them swapping lifelong ingrained habits of dieting and deprivation for a more free and sustainable way of focusing on their lifelong wellbeing instead.

When my thyroid issues reared, my endocrinologist told me I’d need to go on medication that I’d stay on for the rest of my life. But I told her it didn’t make any sense to me why a young and otherwise totally healthy woman would be having this autoimmune issue in the first place.

She told me remission wasn’t possible…that this condition was now something I was going to have for the rest of my life. But my training told me otherwise. My instincts told me otherwise. What I know now told me there was more to the story.

So I politely told her I wouldn’t be taking the medication and that I would like to spend six months to a year working on resolving the issue on my own. She told me to come back in a few months to run labs again.

And my numbers got better. And then they got better. And then they got worse. But then they got even better.

And two weeks ago I got back a set of labs that show my Hashimoto’s now one point away from being considered in remission. All I did was adjust what I was eating and take a few supplements. My body did the rest, as it is built to.

When I went to see the specialist for my back after not being able to hardly stand or put on a bra or wash a dish at the start of this year, the doc wanted to send me off on my way, told me to take some anti-inflammatories and come back in a few weeks if I was still in pain.

I demanded the imaging and told him I wasn’t leaving until I had scans. My training told me otherwise. My instincts told me otherwise. I knew there was more to the story given the pain I was feeling.

When the results came back that I had four bulging discs in my thoracic spine…their suggested course of action for me was muscle relaxers, high-dose anti-inflammatory meds, and steroid injections.

I declined and asked for a referral to Physical Therapy, where in five months I was virtually pain-free and back to gardening and chores on the farm and have had virtually no issues with my back since.

These issues that came up for me and were so simply and easily resolved with just a few tweaks and some effort and time to heal highlighted for me something I had a hunch about back when I started coaching but couldn’t articulate the way I can now back then…

That our bodies are designed and built to be well.

The Lessons…

So much of what I’ve encountered from being exposed to diet culture from the time I was just a girl, to the way our medical system seeks to treat symptoms, illness, and disease, is all based in focusing on what’s wrong with the body instead of what’s right about it.

It’s taken me heaps of effort over three decades to learn to love and appreciate and respect and care for and nurture and honor my own body…this one singular vessel I’m going to get for all my days here on earth.

The one that’s now creating and building and growing and carrying and giving life to my and Chris’ very first child.

My mom has this saying, “Thank God I didn’t get everything I thought I wanted… because it turned out so much better.”

This year I’ve often wondered on my long walks up and back our winding, hilly, quiet country road, that it’s quite possible it all had to go exactly like this.

Just at the time that I was coming off my orders back in the summer and having this nudge to start again down a new (old) path, was the exact time we decided we wanted to and were finally ready to begin trying to start a family.

In those first few weeks of this pregnancy I was certain the door was going to close on this call for good.

I was going to be a mom now…surely there won’t be the time or space for my pretty little silly old dreams.

But the more I stared at that first set of sonogram photos it shifted my perspective entirely.

I’m going to be a mom now. Nothing has ever mattered more than my dreams.

One day my child might ask me whether they should give up on the thing they love for something more realistic or more practical.

I want to be able to tell them the story about that time their mom chose love.

I think it’s why Brianna Wiest’s words resonate somewhere so deep within me,

“The road you take to step away from the calling becomes the path that leads you to the calling.”

I’m letting this Farm Note go in the way that you’re used to it in order to make room for something I’ve tried to walk away from so many times through the years but just can’t quite yet.

My training tells me otherwise. My instincts tell me otherwise. What I know now has shown me there’s far more to the story.

And I finally feel like I’ve grown into and become someone who can tell it.

Next week, I’ll tell you all about what that’s shaping up to look like.

157 Notes later…

This Farm Note has been an outlet I didn’t know I needed.

Every Sunday for the last 157 Sundays I’ve shown up here to tell you a story. About this farm. About what we’re working on. About the friends we’re making, what we’re trying, what we’re learning, how it’s going, how we’re growing.

In the last three years, 1,500 people have subscribed to this little newsletter. Each week, somewhere between 1,600 and 3,500 people read it.

Sometimes I close my eyes and try to picture what that number of people would look like gathered all in one place. As a writer, it has profound meaning for me that I do not take for granted. All any writer truly wants is for someone to read and get some degree of value from what they’ve crafted from within them.

When I conceived of the weekly Farm Note, I didn’t have much more of a plan than, show up every week and write about something worth reading.

I do hope I’ve followed through on my end.

And I want to thank you, for subscribing, for allowing me precious space in your inbox, for clicking the link on Instagram each week, for reading, for interacting, for commenting, for sharing your stories and your heart with me, for reaching out and chatting on the side, and for sharing this with those you love.

Things will feel a little different going forward in the monthly format, but I do intend to bring the very same thing each month as I endeavored to each week…something worth reading.

We’ll see you back here next week for one final weekly Farm Note and the fourth and final installment of story time.

See you in 2026, my friend.

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It’s bittersweet, really…this being one of the final few weekly Farm Notes before we transition to a monthly newsletter and begin publishing from here on the LDF on the last Sunday morning of each month, beginning January 25th.

Until then, I’ll have two more Farm Notes for you—one next week and one at the start of the new year to wrap up our story time and talk about what’s next.

If you missed Part 1 of story time, might I suggest you go back and read that here before continuing on today.

I’ve got a slight shift in the plans for this week’s story time…so come along with me and we’ll get to that original plan in the following week. I said this week’s Farm Note would be titled, “The call…” Still about a call, in a way…just a different one.

I’ll never forget the way the fear consumed me and almost swallowed me whole laying there under the covers.

Instead, it hurled me out of bed and sent me running down the stairs.

I climbed into my dad’s lap on the recliner, tears streaming down my face, trying to catch my breath.

My mom rushed to my side as my parents tried to console me in the living room, not having any earthly idea what could have caused such distress after having gone to bed that night perfectly fine.

It was the simple knowing that one day my parents were going to die that had me in an absolute fit.

I can’t even say how old I was when this happened…young enough that my bedspread had Cabbage Patch Kids on it. Young enough that I fit snugly curled up in my daddy’s lap.

But even now as I type this, at even just the recollection of it, my heart is pounding and the tears are streaming down my face and my palms are sweating all over my laptop.

It was a deep, visceral, childhood fear that apparently hasn’t actually left my adult body.

I’ll never forget the way my parents laughed with relief and hugged me to them. “Oh, honey,” they consoled me over and over again as they tried to assure me they weren’t going anywhere, until I could be put back to bed.

Don’t ask me why or where it came from, but I developed and carried with me this fear of being called with bad news out of the blue or being woken up in the dead of night to something gone wrong.

I’d answer the phone in an absolute panic during the duty day on base thinking that something had gone horribly wrong, when it was only my mom phoning to see if I had a free moment just to say hi. My parents thought it was ridiculous that I’d get so worked up and they’d always ask me what the heck I was imagining had gone wrong.

So when my phone rang in the actual middle of oneAugust night in 2018 and I answered it to the words of my crying mother telling me my dad suffered a heart attack and died just before he was headed to work that morning as a nuclear power contractor in the United Arab Emirates, I woke Chris up immediately and he had me booked on a flight within just a few minutes from Philadelphia and I was out the door on my way to my mom in Florida shortly after that.

It’s like my body had this inner knowing all along and had been steadying me to be ready to act in that moment and not completely and totally fall apart.

It turned out I was going to need all the steadiness I could muster in those following months to sort out my father’s affairs before leaving and then while I deployed for six months (that nightmare involving no will, overseas bank accounts, and Sharia Law) to none other than the United Arab Emirates where my sister also happened to have gotten stationed for a year, too.

Back in March of that year, we’d found out that she, my dad, and I, were all meant to overlap one another there for a period of six months. Our dad was living and working just a quick drive from where we were going to be stationed. We’d called it a miracle. We couldn’t believe our luck.

But I spent those six months in the desert very quietly and internally questioning everything.

Before I’d left for the UAE, I’d actually been feeling quite lost. The year prior, I’d separated from active duty service and transitioned into the Air Force Reserve after turning down a job to work at NATO and live in the Netherlands for a few years, in order to pursue this little dream I’d developed of building a coaching practice to help people heal.

Up until that point I was having trouble really finding a way to break through.

What I was desperately wanting to help people with was to give up dieting altogether in order to cultivate a healthier lifestyle.

It was what I’d been learning as I progressed through my master’s degree and the follow-on coaching certifications and started diving into client work.

It was the very thing that was helping me begin to heal from the disordered eating and the deprivation and the fad diets and the constant body shaming and opting in to this insane expectation we have of each other as humans to look a certain way.

But my messaging was falling flat and it seemed as though everyone was flocking to all the diet coaches. I’d hired a business coach for far more than my little budding business had even made who I never did quite jive with. Instead of thinking perhaps her approach wasn’t the right fit for me, I took it as yet another sign that maybe I wasn’t meant to do the work I felt like I was supposed to.

My dad had been in poor health for a number of years during all of this. He never really ate the best, didn’t exercise, and was on a whole host of medications to treat a growing list of symptoms and issues.

I tried repeatedly to share what I was learning in my degree. To make suggestions. To encourage small shifts in behavior. To nudge him to take better care of himself.

But I never could break through.

During those months in the desert alongside my sister, but without our dad, when I was alone on a run or had time to myself, I felt like I’d failed both myself and him, too.

With all the education and the training and the knowledge I now had, if I couldn’t even help my own father, how did I think I was going to do anything for all these people I was dreaming I’d help?

Just two weeks before my dad passed, my family was in St. Augustine, Florida on a family vacation…the first time the six of us had been together in years.

My dad had flown all the way back stateside for the trip but wasn’t feeling well in the brutal Florida summer heat, and that vacation had devolved into an airing of family grievances that had been building for some time.

Sadly, it’s not a fond memory for any of us.

But especially not for me, who sat with my mom and dad in a quiet moment on a boardwalk in the shade where I pulled my dad aside to voice my concern for his wellbeing.

I’m really worried about you, dad. And I just really wish you’d take better care of yourself. You’re always asking me when Chris and I are going to get married and when you’re going to have grandchildren, but I’m only 30 years old. I’m afraid that if you don’t start taking better care of yourself, you’re not going to even be here for it someday if or when we’re ready.

(…In real time, I paused for a long while here to hold onto this precious baby in my belly while I sat and let my chest actually physically ache from the weight of today’s reality of that memory.)

He and my mom had that same, “Oh, honey” tone of endearment as they hugged me and he told me he’d do his best, and it struck me that he seemed to have been both the most serious and sincere that he’d ever been about the topic before. It felt like maybe this time there really was going to be a shift.

When we dropped him off at the airport to head back to work in the UAE, I held up the cars in the drop off line and hugged him four times before letting him walk through those automatic airport doors.

Fifteen days later he was gone.

Even today, I don’t rush people in the drop off line at the airport.

In the desert, where I was and he wasn’t, is where I shook my fists at the heavens in anger…mostly at the world and the situation…but partly at my dad, too.

I couldn’t shake the thought back then that he just didn’t love us enough to take better care of himself…to make sure he’d be around so we’d have him to love him for longer.

Before that deployment I’d been ready to give up on my “business” and the prospect of coaching. On that deployment, now I really had no clue what I was going to do next.

I decided, though, that I’d go back to school when I got back home to get an MBA. If I wasn’t going to build a coaching practice, perhaps I’d learn to build a company or develop a product…or go work for some firm if all else failed.

My dad’s little dream in those years he was working as a nuclear power contractor and finally making money after my parents had struggled financially for decades, was to buy a big, quiet piece of land and put a manufactured house on it. That was his retirement dream for him and my mom when he got done working after a few more years in the UAE.

But they never did get to realize that dream.

So on the day that I drove up to this farm to see it for the very first time, I couldn’t stop thinking on the drive home about this big, quiet piece of land with a manufactured house on it that we’d just found in Upstate New York.

I couldn’t stop thinking about how, for several years leading up to stepping foot onto this farm, that Chris and I had this little wooden sign hung on our dining room wall in our city row home that said, “Our Farm House” or that I’d picked up this little steel house and told Chris that we should light it up and maybe one day we’d even have a real little farm of our own.

When I stood with David for the first time together on this farm and I asked him, “I noticed you have a sign holder at the bottom of the driveway but no sign for the farm. If you’d had given it a name, what would you have called it?” and he replied, “I always wanted to call it the Little Dream Farm,” I knew in my bones that none of this was just a coincidence.

It took so many walks up and back our quiet, hilly, winding country road all these years later for me to have the mental space to consider that perhaps it wasn’t at all that my dad didn’t love us enough to take better care of himself in order for us to have more time with him.

But rather, maybe it was that he never really loved himself enough to know or believe how much it mattered.

Certainly I can relate to that, because there’ve been times in my life that I didn’t love myself a whole lot either.

I wonder how many of us can relate to that.

There were so many hardships and so much sadness and, at the time, what felt like so much personal failure all wrapped up in this coaching dream, that I wanted to walk away from the health and wellness space altogether.

And in many ways, many times through the years I have.

I went and got that MBA. I came up with a company that I loved the idea of but ultimately decided not to pursue. I dove head long into cat rescue. I took on one set of active duty orders after the next. I’ve applied to countless jobs at soulless corporations across the country. I grew a giant freaking flower patch and thought about getting a herd of cows and going full-fledged farmer.

None of these things ever felt quite like that dream did, and yet I kept trying real hard to convince myself that door should be closed and that ship had sailed.

And then my health got wonky. And I got news that I was going to lose my job. And I was left with nothing but time to sit around and think while I rested and put my focus on helping and allowing my body to heal.

My mom has said to me through the years, “When one door closes another door opens…but boy is it hell in the hallway.”

In that space at the start of this year…in what felt like that dreadful and agonizing quiet…I had a recollection—a remembering of a smattering of things I learned long ago but had maybe misplaced or forgotten along the way.

I took the news of my poor health so hard not because I thought I couldn’t heal…but because I had this unshakable hunch that maybe it meant that everything I’d been doing to try to walk so far away from this one thing was actually what may have been causing it.

And again, Brianna Wiest’s words I shared with you in the Week 49 Farm Note come to mind,

“You cannot miss what is meant for you. You cannot lose what is yours. Any road you take in an effort to avoid your destiny will inevitably turn into a preparation period—a growth concourse—through which you are forced to face what led you astray in the first place. In the same way that you cannot hide from what is yours to have, you can also not run from what is yours to heal, to grow from, to grow into. The things that are meant for us make us the people we are meant to be.”

What do you say we leave it here for this week and pick up again the next?

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I planned this week to talk about “The call…” as this week’s Note was always intended to be titled. But upon sitting down to write this, I guess a different (phone) call was on my heart that sparked this story I’ve never told.

So for next week I’ll endeavor to get us back on track to wrap up the final Farm Note of this year. In the first week of the new year I’ll fill ya in on where things are headed.

Until then, on Sunday we awake to the Winter Solstice—the shortest day and longest night of the year. Know that I’m wishing you every ounce of peace and joy and good tidings in these last days of 2025.

See you back here next week.

Two week’s ago, in the Week 48 Farm Note, we shared with you the news of our baby on the way come spring 2026.

Last week, in the Week 49 Farm Note, I announced that this newsletter will morph into a monthly publication beginning in January 2026. The Farm Note, in just a few short weeks, will now publish on the last Sunday morning of each month, starting January 25th.

This week, and in the remaining three weeks of this year, I’d like to share a brief story with you in three parts. I’ll have one final note for you in the first week of the new year before we move to the new monthly Farm Note format.

I do plan to tell you all about this project I’ve been working on and not sharing…but the back story to arriving at this work and this place, I feel, deserves a place in the Farm Note, as this farm has been both a respite for reflection and growth and a catalyst for change and for being able to step into this next chapter.

So, are you up for a little story time?!

Well then let’s begin…

The Early Years

I was hyper aware of what was “wrong” about my body when I was barely even 10 years old.

My dad had pulled me aside at our backyard pool to sit me down at the patio table under the umbrella for a chat to talk about the importance of minding what I was eating so I didn’t continue to gain more weight.

Knowing his character, I know he would have meant only the very best for me in having this conversation. But I also was keenly aware he wasn’t having it with my three other siblings.

My parents also never meant any harm when they casually mentioned when I was younger that I was “big boned” or that I took after my dad’s side of the family with “that body type” or that my other three siblings were built like my mom and her side of the family.

But it was clear to me even as a kid, that the way I looked was not as acceptable as the way they looked. I was a little more filled out. They were quite thin and lanky in those days.

By middle school, I was trying to follow along with my mom, who was counting points at Weight Watchers or avoiding carbs like they were evil with the Atkins Diet and working out at Curves and doing home exercise videos (anyone remember the Greer Childers Body Flex videos?) and walking at the park.

I was on the middle school cheerleading team. I started going out for runs in my neighborhood to burn calories so I’d look better in the uniform.

By high school, it was a full-blown eating disorder. Then it was depression medication to manage my “moods,” and birth control to manage my acne, and smoking cigarettes for some place to put my general teenage angst and the need for some kind of rebellion.

This was all while taking Advanced Placement (AP) classes and cheering on the varsity cheer squad from my sophomore to senior year while also competing on a competitive gymnastics team and running on the cross country team and working as a waitress on the weekends.

I’ve tried without success through the years to completely forget about the time a group of my high school girlfriends called me drunk in the middle of the night and left a message on my phone. They said that I really should quit my eating disorder, because it obviously wasn’t working.

I’ve wondered from time to time in more recent years where or how my life might have gone differently if those “friends” who’d left me that voicemail that night had come alongside me and offered their help or support or resources, instead. How different might the years that followed been?

Turns out, it’s far easier to carry on your disordered eating patterns when you’re out from under your parents roof and off to college. There, no one was monitoring me, so what did it matter if I lived on coffee and cigarettes and drank too much on the weekends? My freshman year I was the thinnest I’d ever been.

I know now, that what I really needed through those years was some guidance in healthy eating. I needed support and education and knowledge and empowerment and encouragement.

I really probably could have used some therapy for a place to talk about all the other crap that was going on in my family through all of those years.

But that help and support didn’t come and certainly teenage me never thought to seek it out.

There was diet culture, and health and fitness magazines promoting thinness, and eating disorder internet message boards, and the teen icons of the early 2000s, and Abercrombie & Fitch models, and Victoria’s Secret…and all of that captured my attention and influenced and ultimately became my way of being.

It was sort of implied that it was uncool to be an Air Force officer taking smoke breaks at work on base at the time I came into the Air Force, so I quit that habit cold turkey not long after I arrived to my first assignment on Guam.

I also happened to make a friend in my first few months there who was enrolled in a master’s program for wellness and fitness, and at the end of the program he’d earn a personal trainer certification as part of the degree.

The advice to young officers at the time was to knock out a master’s degree as soon as you could because it helped you where rank promotion was concerned, and it was better to get it done before you began taking on far more leadership and responsibility.

So I signed up for this master’s degree, selfishly thinking it would help me to learn some of the things I wish I’d been taught when I was growing up. Maybe I could take what I was going to learn and change some of my own habits for the better?

As I learned about the human body and strength training and cardiovascular health and the proper ways to train and to instruct others to train, I became fascinated with the fitness element of what I was learning.

That same year, I came across an upcoming bodybuilding competition that was set to take place on the island, and decided I was going to compete. I had enough time for nine months of training and had no idea what I was doing. I was starting entirely from scratch in taking this on while running an office of Airmen, working for a one-star general on a base with a very demanding mission while enrolled in a master’s program.

I asked Chris, who I’d met and was stationed with on Guam, to come alongside me as one of my two trainers in getting ready for this competition. My other trainer was a local Chamorro guy and bodybuilding coach. He was the one who’d help with all the stuff I didn’t know about bodybuilding. Chris, on the other hand, was the most organized, structured, and disciplined person I’d ever met. I’m glad I had the sense back then that I felt I needed that, too.

I trained for those full nine months for that competition and didn’t even place the day I stood on stage. It stung, for sure, but the journey I’d gone on and the things I’d learned and the ways I grew and changed from that training and the whole experience still stick with me to this day.

I went on to train for another competition when I moved back stateside and was stationed in Delaware. I backed out of it before that next competition, because the training was taking over my life and the obsession with it was just like an eating disorder but in a it’s cool, you’re an athlete kind of way.

During that training for the second competition, however, I’d graduated from the master’s program and took the certification exam and became a credentialed personal trainer.

I followed that certification with another to become a credentialed nutrition specialist and then another to become a certified life coach. This was in between running an office of Airmen and government civilians and working at a base with an entirely different mission while now dating Chris, who was stationed at the Pentagon at first and then separated from the Air Force and remained in DC for his first job post-service.

By that point, I was wanting to help others as I was finding my own footing and slowly changing my own habits and perspective.

Many years ago, when I’d look back at family photos or pictures of me from before middle school, I’d see them with such harsh judgement and think I was such a chubby kid.

Today, when I look at those exact same photos, I just think, My gosh…I was just a perfectly normal little girl.

I realize now that so many things had to happen…so much healing had to take place…in order for that perspective to change.

I really wish I’d had the me that I am now back then…little Sarah could have really benefitted from her influence.

Next week, should you choose to come back for more story time, we’ll get into those first years of coaching and the ways it formed and shaped my philosophy on wellness, which has shifted and further developed through the years as I coached more clients and changed in so many ways myself.

We’ll get into all of that, too in the following week’s story time.

In the meantime, you can hop on Instagram today and follow “@ourgrowthera.” This is a new account, and while there’s nothing there at the moment, this is where I’ll be spending my time in the coming year and (part of) the reason for spending far less time hanging out on our farm’s IG account and here in the Farm Note. Once we get through story time, I’ll tell you more about what you can see/expect there.

I do hope you’ll join us.

Catch you next week for the Week 51 Farm Note.

It’s titled, “The call…”

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A most hearty welcome to the 100+ new subscribers joining us here in the Farm Note! Thank you to all our subscribers and readers for your readership. We’ve been doing this free weekly Farm Note for nearly 3 full years running now…every Sunday for 153 Sundays.

In last week’s Farm Note we shared with you our big news—the news of our very first child on the way come Spring.

Even if it were possible, I’m not sure we could have planned the timing any better. I’ve been my most able through the months of the year when I was needed here on the farm, and now I’ll get to really and truly rest following our first big snowstorm this week that brought us 6+ inches of the most beautiful white powdery snowglobe-esque snow and turned everything in sight into a pretty little picture book.

For me, it’s pajamas and tea and baths (albeit cooler) and sitting by the fire and more intentional workouts and heartier meals and lots of good sleep until my body and this baby decide it’s time for us to meet earth-side.

Chris has got the stick from here and will be carrying us all through this winter season’s chores and farm care—our loving and dependable man of the house.

Come spring, given all goes well, I’ll be ready to resume many of our late-spring annual farm endeavors with our little one lovingly strapped to me or to Chris every step of the way.

That our child is expected in spring as new life and a new season and new energy is upon us is in no way lost on me—it’s a kind of perfection I couldn’t have scripted anymore beautifully and poetically if I tried.

As we approach the end of the calendar year, it feels like far more is coming to a close than just 2025 coming to an end.

One chapter—or one book—really, is closing, and another chapter—or perhaps another book entirely—is beginning anew.

These last months I’ve spent a considerable amount of time thinking about and talking with Chris about what I want, and what we want, to be part of this new era.

Which brings me to an update on this Farm Note and our farm’s Instagram account.

For the Farm Note:
Beginning in January 2026, the Farm Note will now be a monthly (as opposed to weekly) publication. Still free, of course, and you can expect to receive it once per month, delivered to your inbox the last Sunday morning of every month (Jan 25, Feb 22, Mar 29, Apr 26, May 31, Jun 28, Jul 26, Aug 30, Sep 27, Oct 25, Nov 29, Dec 27).

For our “@littledreamfarm” Instagram account:
I’m not anticipating us spending time there. Please continue to follow the account, as I will use it to post every now and then and will share links to the new monthly Farm Notes there as they come about.

As the title of this Farm Note indicates, a change is in the wind. And this maybe isn’t something that I’ve necessarily wanted to do, but is necessary in order to make room for new and different and better things to emerge.

We’re often, as humans, so reluctant to change, which I’ve always found to be amusing since it’s really one of the only certain and reliable things we can count on.

I’ve found that becoming a gardener has made me far less resistant to change. The notion of a good pruning no longer terrifies me, but is a necessary part of growth. Pinching plants and removing one-third of their early growth doesn’t set them back, it makes them more vibrantly bloom.

If I’m being honest, I want and need and have been longing for more privacy in my life. Less documented moments online, and more time spent fully and presently living them. Less capturing and sharing life through the device in my hand and more fully feeling and being fully with this life I deeply love. I still want to capture it, to savor it and look back on these good old days, but I’ve been feeling very strongly that it’s just more for me now. I still want to show up online, just in a different way (more on this and a different place to follow us on IG in the weeks ahead).

With the space and margin this year has both forced and unlocked for me, I’ve been drawn to an inclination and a desire to take something old and breathe new life into it. There’s something I once longed for that I never did quite give proper time to bloom.

But you could say I’m a different gardener now in a lot of ways. A far better one, too.

In reflecting on the year, 2025 feels like a hard pruning. A necessary one…like the winds of change lobbed off and snipped and pinched and discarded away everything that was old and dead and diseased until only what is needed is left to grow anew.

First it was my health. Then it was my job. All of which made way for a very much desired baby on the way. The shifting and changing and ending of some things and the beginnings of some totally new things.

Chris and I keep joking that, technically, I am 38, unmarried, unemployed, and pregnant. Winning! It makes me giggle every time I say it or think about it and thankfully I/we can laugh about it.

I’ve made only the most vague mention of a project I’ve been working on since the summertime. But really, I’ve been working on this almost my entire life…at least since I was just a little girl.

It’s something that I felt like I should have been able to do and wildly succeed at back in my early 20s, though it didn’t come to fruition for a whole host of reasons through the years. For a long time I carried it as a great failure of my life. A sign that maybe I just wasn’t meant to do what for so long I thought that I was put here to do.

Only more recently, in these last few years while we’ve been here on this farm, has it occurred to me that perhaps it just wasn’t meant to work the way I thought it should back then.

With time and the opportunity for all kinds of different experiences and through the years of watching nature’s cycles and observing the living world all around us on the Little Dream Farm, I now sense that life wasn’t telling me, No, at any point along the way…

It was simply whispering, Not yet. Not that way. Not without this lesson. Not before I show you this. Not before you get to learn that. Let me also teach you this (and this and this and this…). And let me put a few more pieces and people and places in order so that it all makes a little more sense…so the picture is clearer.

I heard the writer Brianna Wiest once say in a podcast interview, “The road you take to step away from the calling becomes the path that leads you to the calling.”

Mmm. It both chokes me up and soothes my soul every time I read those words.

She’s also said this:

“You cannot miss what is meant for you. You cannot lose what is yours. Any road you take in an effort to avoid your destiny will inevitably turn into a preparation period—a growth concourse—through which you are forced to face what led you astray in the first place. In the same way that you cannot hide from what is yours to have, you can also not run from what is yours to heal, to grow from, to grow into. The things that are meant for us make us the people we are meant to be.”

I’d need an entire book to explain why these words are so significant, and maybe one day I’ll actually write that whole story, but for now I’ll plan to tell you at least some small bits of it in just a few parts.

I’ve reserved the final Farm Notes of this year for some story time - a story I’ll share with you in two or three parts, and then a final Farm Note the first week of the new year before we transition to our monthly publication cadence.

I’m excited about the changes I’m/we’re making and I’m so looking forward to all that lies ahead of us in the coming new year.

As always, thanks for coming along for the ride!! More soon.

Be easy and be well, friend. We’ll catch you back here next weekend for the start of story time.

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Before you go, I just had to share with you the most adorable photo of Molly-Max and Dominic in their new winter jackets during the snow earlier this week. Look at these two amigos in their spiffy coats and precious Molly-Max in his shoes!

The two of them very hilariously tried to avoid us at all cost when we headed out to put their jackets on earlier this week. Once we finally got them on, it’s as if they were like, “Hey mom and dad, these aren’t half bad!”

I just can’t get over how incredibly cute they are!

Perhaps Chris and I have stumbled onto our biggest dream yet…

We’re excited, happy, and humbled to share with you the news that we’re expecting a baby come Spring 2026!!!

I’ll pause briefly here for those of you who need a moment to get back up onto your chair!

I say that tongue and cheek, but if you’ve been hanging around us online for any length of time through the years, then you likely know we were team, “No kids for us, but we’ll let ya know if that ever changes,” for about the last decade.

And this year something shifted in us.

Back in the summertime we had this verrry casual hypothetical conversation about baby names while we were out on one of our hot dates (re driving 100 minutes round trip to go grab a decent dinner).

Turns out it wasn’t just casual.

I was finding myself out on walks daydreaming about the little faces with these names we’d landed on.

I was having dreams.

It was on my mind a lot.

Then one Sunday on a 4+ hour drive back to the farm after one of our weekend adventures, it came up in conversation with Chris that I wasn’t the only one who’d been thinking about it. He said he very much had been thinking about it, too.

What followed was a week of constant conversation—all the things we’ve discussed more than a thousand times before—but this time with more curiosity, more openness, willingness, and with far more excitement than any time previously.

We decided, in true Chris and Sarah fashion, that we wanted to come to a decision quickly so that we could either begin down the path of trying to start a family, or finally put that dream to rest and allow ourselves to move forward with the life we’d been living as our 38th and 40th birthdays were awaiting us in just a few months.

We gave ourselves time to think about it as individuals and to each go through our own decision-making process to decide what each of us truly wanted for ourselves before discussing what we wanted as friends, teammates, partners, and lovers.

Then Chris came up with the best, sweetest, most precious plan.

While I was going to be out of town for most of the week, we’d spend our time thinking about what each of us wanted on our own. When I returned home, we’d wake up in the morning, we’d each write down our decision—a simple yes or no—on a folded piece of paper, and we’d show them to one another at the same time.

We agreed that two yeses equaled a yes and a yes/no equaled a no. That no matter the answer, our relationship and the life we’ve built together matters far more than absolutely anything else.

I’ve thought about that one morning countless times since we lived it, and I still have yet to find the words to describe the feeling of our two yeses (Chris’ read: “Yes, please.”) scribbled on yellow stock paper with Sharpies.

I just know that I can’t accurately place a time in my life when I’ve ever been happier.

As fate would have it, I was sitting on the bathroom vanity with Chris standing in front of me at 4 a.m. in our pajamas as we were giggling our faces off just a few short weeks later when the very first pregnancy test had a faint double line.

The tears are welling up in my eyes thinking back to that morning, as I’ve always been such a marrow-deep believer that our life’s timeline is something of divine perfection—no matter how rocky the journey and no matter whether we think we’re “on time” or not, or if our lives look the way we think they’re “supposed to” or not.

For me, if this had come even just one day sooner I’m not sure I’d have felt ready to say yes to it all.

But Chris and I have said countless times in the last several months, there’s no doubt for either of us that it’s this farm that made us actually really feel ready…that elusive feeling everyone says never comes.

For us, it was that one decision to take the leap and trade our city life for a slower, quieter existence on a little farm in the country.

It was bringing along two feral city cats and watching them morph into house cats.

It was raising several dozen hens and loving them and watching them leave us, despite our very best efforts, through the years.

It was saying yes to two donkeys (who can live well into their 40s, talk about commitment!) who’d need significant and ongoing care.

It was diving in head long to growing production-style gardens for the fun of it to see if it might be something I might like to do for a hobby or perhaps for a living (filing under: hobby!).

It was building systems and processes and routines and schedules and ways of working together that makes this farm run like a steady machine.

It was that saying Chris has been repeating to me since the day we decided to be more than best friends: Everything is better as a team.

Funny enough, it was one of our youngest cats, Little Lady, of all things, who taught us one of our most precious and favorite lessons to date. After bringing home a stray kitten at the beginning of 2024, she reacted so poorly to his being here that she started peeing all over the house. With time, medication, far more patience than we ever thought we could muster, and a lot of very passionate but empty threats of thinking of finding her a new home, we tried one last Hail-Mary approach: apply more love.

Instead of getting mad, we got softer. Instead of banishing LL to one room, we began spending more time with her. Instead of more meds, we tried more playtime and stimulation. It’s still not perfect (every other month or so), but it’s nowhere near as bad as it was (several times a day everywhere). In return, she’s grown into one of the sweetest, most adoring, most loving cats who genuinely appreciates our affection. We think this lesson she’s taught us: apply more love, will hold a significant place in our life going forward.

As it happens, it’s 4 a.m. on Thanksgiving morning. So hello from the recent past! I’m writing this to you in bed with a steaming cup of half-caf coffee and four of our seven cats sleeping/snoring scattered around me. Chris, my favorite person in this entire world, is peacefully asleep in the next room over. I just pulled the fresh turkey from our farmer out of the fridge so we can begin our day of cooking tradition together much earlier this year so I can make room in this growing belly for a big meal!

We’re now a little beyond halfway through a pregnancy I couldn’t have even fathomed at the start of this year, and I just felt two tiny kicks at the very front of my lower belly. I genuinely had absolutely no idea how much absolute pure joy and peace that feeling would give me.

Thankful…grateful…doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface for us.

I just keep thinking: this may just be our biggest dream yet.

For someone as forthcoming and open as I normally am and who has been sharing my life online for the better part of two decades, I’ve been feeling quite private about this pregnancy and this chapter of our life. In fact, I debated and went back and forth for a long while whether we’d share this news online in this way, or if I wanted to share it even at all (like, who am I?).

But I did say many times over through the years that y’all would be high on our list to hear about it should we ever change our minds, and I do endeavor to keep my word.

Feel free to ask me all your burning questions (I know y’all!) in the comments and I’ll very happily answer anything I feel comfortable sharing! Thought this would be more fun and engaging for us to have a proper chat than for me to just rattle off a bunch of stuff to ya.

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It’s been a long time since you’ve seen us on IG! Taking time away from social media has been so good for my soul. I’ve told y’all I’ve often daydreamed about deleting every app permanently and disappearing off the internet entirely. While I won’t be doing that, I am planning on some significant changes in the year ahead.

In these next few Farm Notes I’ll be sharing with you the details of this project I’ve been working on (aside from growing a whole sweet tiny life inside me!!) and what’s next for me and for us. Ideally, I’d have shared this with you in late summertime but you could say I was a bit preoccupied.

So, hang tight these next few weeks as we wrap up the year and I’ll share what’s in store.

A very Happy Thanksgiving to you and yours—no matter how you spent it, if you celebrate—I do hope you enjoyed yourself this year.

From both Chris and I, we’re wishing you all the magic and wonder of the holiday season ahead and very much hoping this year is a bright one for you.

We’ll see you back here next weekend.

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P.S. Because I know y’all and how kind you are, I’m obliged to tell you that I cancelled our P.O. Box a few months back. That thing was getting wicked expensive! SO! If you send us holiday cards and packages each year, please hold off this year, as that address is no longer valid and we will not receive what you send. We will no longer be receiving packages, but we can’t thank you enough for all the kindness and generosity and gifts and wonderful snail mail through the years!

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Well would you look at who we got to see!! David gave us a shout a few months back that he’d be in the area at the start of this month and that he’d like to come by the farm and see us.

You know Chris and I—we’re always positively thrilled to see David and love catching up with him about his life in Florida and his travels, teaching, and vibrant social life, telling him about everything going on here on the farm, and for him to get to see how things are coming along here.

David just got back from a nice long trip to Switzerland where he said he had a wonderful time taking language classes and living with a local couple while he was there.

Down in Florida he’s got a whole host of activities that keep him busy and people to keep busy with.

It makes our hearts happy to hear it, as we know those later years here on the farm were starting to feel quite lonely and that you have to make a bit more effort around here to keep up with and connect with friends because everyone is more spread out and generally busy with their land!

He thanked us before he hopped back into his rental car to jet off to see the next friends on his big list of people to catch up with while he was in town, and told us that he’s grateful for how we’ve kept up the farm and continue to take care of it.

It feels nice for us to know that he’s proud of what we’ve done here, because I know I’ll care so much about the people who buy this farm if and when we ever decide to leave it someday. All we can hope for is that they’ll love this land the way we do, the way David did, and the way those who came before David and us did, too.

This week Chris took three days off from work for us to spend the time together and we got to knock a bunch of errands and fun little adventures out together across those days—it was so nice to just have the string of uninterrupted time to spend together.

This weekend he’s down in the big city spending time catching up with two long-time friends and going to a few events—happy for him that he’s getting to catch up with old friends.

In just a few weeks I’ve got a trip planned to spend time with some of my long-time girlfriends, and I’m counting down the days until I can squeeze them so tight and just be with them for a weekend.

Up here on the farm, I headed out yesterday to pick up some local goodies for our upcoming holiday meal and got out for a long walk with a friend and her two pups. This friend is the woman who used to live in an off-grid yurt here on this farm with her husband and two young children back when David owned the place.

It’s such a fascinating story of their time living and farming here on the land and it’s incredible how we became friends with this couple and their family after learning they’d lived here on the LDF.

We love how so many of David’s friends when he lived here have now become our friends, too.

As we’re headed into the week of Thanksgiving I’m finding myself in simple, thankful happiness.

This has been a challenging year in a number of ways with my health, our farm, my career, and in a few personal relationships.

But it also has turned out to be one of the best years of my whole life, as these challenges brought about a host of incredibly good things that are taking shape now and will make the years ahead so, so much brighter.

In the coming final weeks of this year I’ll be telling you all about it and what’s next, so stick around and stay tuned for that and we’ll catch you back here next week, same time, same place, same channel.

Happy Thanksgiving to you if you celebrate it and may you have a lovely week spending it in a way that brings front of mind all the things you have to be truly grateful for.

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It’s fun for us every year to await the first snow. This year it came on November 10—about two inches of gorgeous sparkly fresh falling powder.

Chris had just stopped at home to swap out his bags from a weekend trip with friends to another packed bag for a week-long work trip and had made it safely to the airport and boarded his on-time flight as the snow began.

Here on the farm, it snowed all afternoon into the night and the whole next day while I lit the first fire of the year (sadly we did miss doing it together, darn!) and the kitties all curled up by the stove, happy to have their cozy heater back and ready to settle in for the winter like we are.

The weekend prior we’d finished up our outside tasks for the year—patio furniture is put away, all the hanging baskets and planters are broken down and stored if needed, we took the screens out of all the windows and stored them away for winter, and we closed up the gardens for the year.

We had new tires put on the car for winter, new tires put on the truck earlier this year, and we just ordered a few new fire bricks for the inside of our wood stove to replace and refresh those for the season ahead. I had one crack and fall into the stove this week while I had a fire going, so this week we got to learn how to replace the stove’s fire bricks for the first time! Always something to learn or figure out—thankfully this task was quite simple.

Our chore list also looks simple in the winter months—the only thing we focus on is deep cleaning the house and doing an annual clean out of our things to keep things tidied up and refreshed every year.

We spend so much time focused on everything outside most of the year that the house always feels like it could use a little love when we’re sitting around all cozied up in it for months on end.

I’ve mentioned before that this is the time of year I go through my emails and unsubscribe to just about everything to quiet my inbox down for the holiday season. I clean up photos on my phone, delete old messages, comb through and organize the notes on my phone, and get my digital life tidied up, too.

We go through our closets and drawers and give everything a good look over to see what might no longer need to take up space here in our little home and make a nice big donation pile to offload the things we let go.

There’s something about heading into a new year with everything feeling refreshed and the load lightened that is both soothing and inspiring for me.

Happy to report that Chris’ work travel went well and he thankfully made it out and back without travel fuss while all of us back here on the farm enjoyed our first proper cold week and the first proper snow of the year.

Chris and I ventured out on a gym date, coffee date, and errands date on Saturday and picked up the donkey’s winter blankets which we’re happy to have, eager to use, and happened to find on mega sale…what a steal! We’re hoping the boys don’t mind wearing them!

A few years ago we got them fly masks since most of the horses around here wear them. Well, our stubborn donkeys despise them and they literally turn the other way and take off when they see us coming with them! Apparently they’d rather have flies all over their faces than to have to wear the masks. Hopefully they’re not as stubborn when it comes to wearing their coats.

I’ve mentioned a few times before that we always give them access to the barn in the winter when it’s really cold, but we’ll come out in the morning to check on them after a frigid night and we can tell they didn’t even step foot in their space…hay isn’t eaten, no poop or pee on the ground…those donkeys are tough as nails and apparently don’t mind the rugged life. So let’s see if we can convince them that wearing their coats might be a nice upgrade to winter life.

Speaking of the donkeys…here they are hanging out with me in the snow earlier this week! They both look absolutely fabulous and they’re growing in that thick winter coat that I love so much because it turns them into two super fuzzy buggos!!

That’s the long and short of it for us here this week. I hope this week has been good to you and this weekend gives you a chance to do exactly as you need to feel whatever it is you need.

Take care of yourself and be well. We’ll catch you back here next Sunday.

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It’s amazing to me every year the way the Dahlia Patch and all our gardens seem to return to the state from which they begin at the start of the season.

In this photo above, there are still a few rows of tubers in the ground towards the front of the photo, but for the most part the 2025 dahlia season is all wrapped up.

I spent four days this last week cutting down all the corralling twine, pulling up all the t-posts (Chris did this!), saving seeds from the plants, cutting down all the spent plants, pulling up all the drip irrigation, and digging up and dividing all the tubers I’d labeled back in September and planned to save to grow again next year.

The last steps will be to pull up all the landscape fabric and landscape staples and clean that off and store it in the barn. And then finally our neighbor will come by to spread donkey manure on the patch for the winter.

Every year when I have this huge task on my plate at both the start of the season and the end I’m constantly asking myself, am I nuts for doing all this work as just a hobby? But somehow I seem to keep wanting to come back to it each year. It’s something about those mesmerizing dahlias. It’s how unique they all are. It’s the way they grow into such massive plants from such teeny tiny tubers. It’s the whole lot of it…a labor of love that I can’t or maybe just don’t want to give up even though my back was aching and my fingers were so raw this week and it is so. much. work.

The patch, in the end, looks just as it did when the season began. There’s something about that that speaks to me every year…the cycle of it all.

I said that I’d talk more about dahlia tuber storage and how I’ve changed some of my methods this year.

For all my larger clumps that I didn’t take the time to divide, I stored those just as I have in previous years—in a box lined on the bottom with newspaper then I place about four clumps into the box together and cover them really deeply with pine bedding. This year, I put burlap sacks or paper over the top of the shavings to keep some of the moisture in the tubers since mine tend to dry out a bit using this method. I’ll check them in a few weeks and if they seem like they’re drying, I’ll tape the boxes shut this year as an added precaution.

Another method I used this year was compostable plastic-like bags with a small clump of tubers placed at the bottom and then covered in vermiculite. I believe my tubers were dry enough to close the bags so I twisted them at the top and sealed them off. I’ll also go and check those to make sure I’m not getting any condensation or moisture in the bags, but I’m trusting that they should be just fine.

One method I’d planned to try was clear plastic totes with the tubers all separated and labeled and then lined in the totes and covered in vermiculite. I ended up forgoing this method because I ended up not liking the sizing of the totes that I ordered and sent them all back.

Once I find the right size for my collection, I’ll order those and head over to where I store them and start processing them that way into these totes.

Something I plan to do differently this year is to take a table and pruners and my supplies over to the basement where I store my tubers and spend the winter months processing the tubers. I’ve never taken the time to do this before, because I typically just knock it out in the spring once I’ve picked them up and go to plant them. Now that the collection is so big, this will save me far more time come spring, and I think it’ll be a nice way to knock out a gardening task in the dead of winter when there’s not much else to do but anticipate the growing season ahead.

I have a small dahlia tuber clump sale going on here on the farm locally this weekend and had a few ladies stop by yesterday to pick up clumps and will likely have a few today. Anything that doesn’t get sold from these clumps I’m likely going to let rot in the ground this winter—these are varieties that I have far too many of and am willing to let go, as even if I held a sale online I don’t believe they’d sell like many of my new varieties would.

So, I’m culling part of my collection this year, if you will, but I’ll offer them up for free in my community before letting them go to waste. If you happen to be local to us, feel free to come on by and grab some tubers if you’d like!

If you have any questions about dahlia growing, storage, purchasing dahlias, growing from seed, or dahlia care in general, feel free to ask away in the comments today. I love helping people enjoy them to the fullest…they are just such special flower, an incredible plant, and I’ve so enjoyed growing them over the last five years. It’s hard to believe it has been that long already!!

I said I’d update you after our farrier came by this week and I’m happy to report I’ve got really good news on the Molly-Max front.

It was four weeks ago that our farrier Matt was just here, and our vet has suggested we trim his hooves every four to six weeks instead of every eight to ten like we’d been doing in previous years.

I was eager to see what Matt thought this week, as we’ve had Molly-Max’s shoes on every single say since the last time he was here working on Max.

It delights me to share that Matt said his hooves look really great—the thrush he had in his left foot cleared up completely. The infection he had in his right hoof from his last abscess has cleared up and resolved, too. The shape of his hooves looks great from last time Matt trimmed them down and re-angled like our vet suggested, and Matt had Molly-Max walk around for him without his shoes on and said that everything about how he’s moving looks excellent right now.

We’re so so so so so pleased and feeling really happy for Molly-Max. It’s comforting to know that he’s having good days just ahead of winter.

We’ve been feeding him as little more hay so he can put on a few pounds before the cold sets in, and just the other day Chris and I went to a horse supply store and picked out some blankets for Molly-Max and Dominic for this winter. We’ve got to measure both of them to get the correct fit and then we’ll pick those up in just a few weeks. We live near Saratoga Springs, NY so thankfully we have amazing access to everything equine because of the race track. That’s really worked in our favor for having these donkeys!

Thought I’d leave you today with a VERY exciting video of Molly-Max. He’s been feeling so good that he started running again. We haven’t seen him move like this in a very very long time and honestly every time I watch it I get a little teary because I am just so madly in love with this donkey and so proud of how much of a fighting spirit he has…he’s really something special and it’s such a joy for us to be the ones to get to care for him and love him through these later years of his life.

Here’s some pure joy for you on your Sunday…

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Chris was bright-eyed this morning at 3 a.m. which was really 4 a.m. and I took advantage of the changing clocks to snatch an extra hour of sleep for myself. Don’t mind if I do!

I’m halfway through cutting down all the dahlias and will finish that up today before moving onto digging them up, cleaning the tubers off, and getting them into their storage bins for winter storage.

Next week I’ll share more about my new storage methods for this season…planning on testing out a few different methods and analyzing what performed the best come spring.

Chris has been busy raking up and blowing leaves to pile onto the garden and other growing spaces for mulch for the winter. I love how this bit of effort now buys us so much time in the spring because the leaf cover keeps the weeds from growing in the early spring before we can plant out our gardens for the year.

Yesterday, Pop, our neighbor, was out on the hills mowing the back of our farm. We’ve split up the job and have him doing specific spots each year so that the pastures get a rest between seasons and the cows grazing. This year he’s doing the old orchard on the western hill, the two really tall hills at the back of the farm, and the hill next to the pond. Earlier in the year he did the western hill and front eastern pasture, and that’ll do it for us this year on mowing the LDF pastures.

He always sends me photos from inside the tractor cab—those are the ones I’ve shared with you in today’s Farm Note.

Wanted to let you know that Molly-Max has been looking good since my last update. He’s moving a little better and he’s pretty well used to his shoes at this point. We have a farrier appointment this Friday and that’ll give us a good indication as to whether his hooves have healed more or gotten any better in the last few weeks and will help us think through next steps once we have that info. I’ll let you know how it went in next Sunday’s Farm Note.

We’re down to three hens at the moment and as of now we’re thinking we’ll get new hens in the spring but that may change depending on how things go with Max—time will tell with him and winter will tell with how our three remaining hens fair this year.

This week’s leaf peeping took us out to Vermont for just a quick drive to one of our favorite bakeries and favorite farm stores in Wilmington, VT. All the leaves were already fallen up in the mountain, but the drive out there was so impressive and we laughed that we have some of the very best fall views directly in our back yard in just the next few towns over. It’s what we love so much about exactly where we live…it’s one of the most picturesque, bucolic, hilly countryside farm land I’ve ever seen and the views at all times of the year never gets old.

We’re getting our butts outside for a quick hike this morning, although I’m having to psych myself up for this one now that these mornings are continually in the low 30s. It’ll be chilly at the start of the hike and up in the mountain, but we’ll work up a good bit of heat as we pump our arms and legs up the rocky trails. I know it’ll be worth it for the gorgeous fall views, but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t already ready to live in my pajamas and hibernate in front of the fire with a rotation of piping hot bone broth, hot chocolate, hot apple cider, and hot tea for the winter months.

We had a great night at our friend’s Halloween party on Friday and brought some friends with us who got a chance to meet a bunch of new people. Connecting people is one of my favorite things in life so I’m always happy to get the chance to do it, and this party had no shortage of great food, some really cute costumes (which isn’t really our speed but always love to see the creativity people come up with!) and a killer spooky fall vibe as it had been a wet, rainy, windy day which made for the perfect spooky Halloween evening.

If you need me, I’ll be in the Dahlia Patch for at least the next few days getting things wrapped up out there for the year. The final thing we’ll need to do before we pack it in for the winter is have our neighbor up the road come down with his tractor to spread all the donkey manure onto the patch for winter so those worms can do their work on adding health and fertility to the soil for next year’s planting. I always love this finishing touch and it saves us a ton of money on not having to add any implements to the soil every year. Thanks for all the poo, donkeys!

Before I go, I’ve got Book Club this week at our village’s incredible and well-known little indie bookstore and wanted to share with you the book we read for November’s session. It was a quick read, a real page turner, and I’ll tell you I didn’t have it solved myself while reading, but perhaps you will. I read the physical book, but I have a feeling this would be really good on audio, if that’s your preference. Here’s a link to the book, although I highly recommend purchasing from your own local independent bookstore or from either ThriftBooks or Bookshop.org or renting from your local library.

Let’s do this again next week, shall we? What do you say Sunday same time same place? Can’t wait to catch you then, friend!

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While writing in the title for this week’s post it hit me…nine weeks left in 2025?

Honestly—how could it be?

I remember at the start of this year how it felt like every day dragged on for an eternity when I was struggling with my back injury. Those first few months of the year felt like years.

It derailed my plans for this year in some ways—like how much gardening I did and how many projects we took on here on the farm and the types of exercise I was doing and the amount of hiking we got to do this year. But it also paved the way for beautiful things, too—like improving my health so much that this very comprehensive bloodwork I recently had done measured that my biological age is 10 years my junior! I’m 38 but my body is 28? Not sad about that!! It also led us to new and nourishing recipes. More time spent relaxing. Slower workouts with less intensity, and more focus on wellness than fitness.

There are very rarely days where I have pain and now it’s just generally when I’m doing a lot, like cleaning the whole house in a day and doing endless loads of laundry, or spending time like I am in the Dahlia Patch at the moment cutting all the stalks down and getting ready to dig tubers. On those days I really feel it, but I’m also able to find relief.

I thought I’d be a proper mess once my job ended back in June. I haven’t looked or applied for other work and the project I had in the works took a pause for a few more pressing things. And it has all been fine. I’m picking up right where I left off on the project and the timeline be damned—for the first time in maybe ever(??) I’m not blowing through life at warp speed, and goodness me has it felt so good.

I keep repeating to myself in my head the quote, “Nature never hurries and everything is accomplished.” It’s frequently the words of wisdom printed on the little teabag tab of the tea that I’ve been drinking for years—this time I’m actually heeding its words.

We’ve got a Halloween party coming up with some friends and neighbors this week. We’ve started talking about which dishes we’re making for Thanksgiving this year and Chris and I have plans to spend it like we have the rest of them—here on the farm soaking up this little life we love so much. And same for Christmas this year—we’ll be here on the farm, except this year we think the kittens might just be old enough for us to finally decorate our tree. We’re very much looking forward to that experiment and we’re searching only for shatterproof ornaments.

There’s so much joy to look forward to in the coming final weeks of this year.

In the meantime, we’ve been soaking up the tail end of our leaf peeping adventures and this week we headed south to West Point and Cold Spring, NY to gawk at the incredible color. We stopped through Chatham first and Chris found this adorable cafe that was above a really cool bar and paired with a record store where we had some of the best hot apple cider and had a lovely chat with a few people who live between there and the city. Then we drove the Taconic parkway with our jaws dropped most the way—for all the draught we had at the end of the summer, the colors were absolutely stunning down the parkway this year. It was some of the best fall views we’ve seen in all our fall adventures up here.

When we got to Cold Spring we sat for a nice cozy breakfast at a cafe we went to five years ago when we were still living in Philly but drove north for a day of hiking and leaf peeping in that area. 2020 was the start of our leaf peeping adventures and we pinch ourselves all the time that we drove up this way just for fun and then ended up living here.

We walked the streets in Cold Spring and stopped into some of the stores, and a woman told us in just a few hours a ferry was to be pulling up with 400 people on it from the city—leaf peepers coming north to see the color. Not only were we glad we’d planned to be on the road up to Hudson well before that, but also that all of this is mostly in our back yard just a few hours drive away.

Every year in the fall we seem to be reminded why we wanted to live up this way so badly. And just this past week we hit our four-year mark living here on the farm.

It’s hard to believe that here we are headed into our fifth year here. Also hard to believe that last year at this time we were waiting for the news on the offer we’d made on a 310-year-old antique colonial that we dreamed of fixing up and restoring a piece of American history. I still daydream about the little nooks and crannies of that house and all it’s special features and it’s storied history.

Even when we can’t see it in the present, things have a funny way of working themselves out in exactly the perfect timing.

These last few months with more margin in my life and more freedom in my days have highlighted for me just how much we have to be grateful for and so many wonderful blessings we have to look forward to for the remainder of this year and beyond.

Let’s leave it there for now and we’ll do it all again same time same place next week. We’ll catch you then, friend.

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Chris and I are celebrating our 38th and 40th birthdays this week—we’re just four days apart on the 16th and 20th and every year we celebrate together smack in the middle!

He got back from visiting his dad earlier this week and had two days off at the end of the week so we headed out of town into Massachusetts for another leaf peeping adventure—this time a hike up Monument Mountain in Great Barrington for the most gorgeous hiking trails and a killer view!

We bopped around town to a coffee shop, a bakery, a local grocery store, a few shops, and then drove the long way home to enjoy the views.

We stopped into one of our favorite coffee shops in the region to pick up bags of beans and I’ll link for you here Tunnel City Coffee and our favorite dark roast called Thunderbolt Blend—you can order it online and thank me later if you do…we’ve had a lot of local coffee in the region and this ranks among our top favorite!

Both our equine vet and our farrier have been here since I last wrote to you, and I’ve got some updates about Molly-Max that I’d promised I’d share.

His x-ray appointment went well—he had to be mildly sedated in order to get him to stand perfectly still on top of these blocks so the vet could use her mobile x-ray machine. He’s still awake and still standing when sedated like this…just a little loopy and less responsive and easier to handle. Thankfully, he only needs just a little bit to work with him, and it wears off in about 30 minutes.

They put a big x-ray blanket over me and had me stand back and just watch (this was while Chris was out of town) as they got Max’s front hooves up onto these two wooden blocks. Her husband held onto Max and kept him steady while she maneuvered both the x-ray plate and the machine that takes the images. This all hooks up to a computer inside of a case that she sets up on a table inside our barn so she can review and discuss the images with me.

Not much has changed in the way of Max’s x-rays—we know from doing them before that his front hooves are in absolutely awful shape. But, this round of images did give us a better understanding of how they’ve changed a little since the last images were taken. This allowed both our vet and the farrier to discuss what direction to go with his hooves next to give him the greatest comfort.

Two days later our farrier came by and did a lot of work on Max’s front hooves to make the changes the vet recommended. He’s been doing pretty good since then, but as I mentioned to you last we discussed this, we did have two very lengthy discussions about Max’s quality of life with both the vet and the farrier.

Both of them feel it’s reasonable to put him down as soon as we feel ready—ideally before the dead of winter sets in and it becomes harder to have a large hole dug in the ground (sorry for the image—just the reality of working with large animals).

They also both think it’s completely reasonable to keep going as we are, keeping Max comfortable like we do, until he tells us he can’t anymore.

I trust that in animals—that they’ll let you know. Chris and I have both had animals all our lives and we’ve always trusted that timing.

But certainly its given us a lot to think about and we’ve talked about it at length, coming to the decision that we’ll see how the next three months go and how his hooves are looking heading into the worst months of winter and then proceed from that place.

Winter is really hard on their hooves in general with the hard, cold ground and snowy and icy conditions. This year we have his orthotic shoes to help and we talked about supplementing him with a blanket for the coldest parts of the winter.

We’ve not used blankets up until now for the same reason we don’t put heaters in the chicken coop—animals regulate their temperature in order to survive the elements, and because Molly-Max and Dominic grow in a long coat over the winter, if you were to blanket them too early in the season, that coat wouldn’t grow in like it’s supposed to. So, we’ve opted not to use them in the past because they have access to both the run-in shed and barn to keep warmer on the coldest days and nights. That, and because our vet always advised us against it for the two of them so they don’t sweat underneath the blankets and then become cold anyhow from being too hot and then wet under their blankets which isn’t good for their temperature regulation and can also cause skin fungus.

This year, we’ll likely blanket Molly-Max but not Dominic through the worst of the cold on those really bitter days. We discussed with our farrier that doing all the little things we can to keep Molly-Max as comfortable as possible go a long way in helping him navigate the winter months. So if he can make it to that point, we’ll help him get there.

I know y’all know it’s never an easy decision to make to say goodbye to an animal and sometimes finding the “right time” feels impossible.

We’re moving forward trusting that Molly-Max will tell us, and that we love him and are committed to him and making the right, responsible decision for him if that is needed, too.

Until that day, we’ll spend the time we have like we have all the rest of the 3.5 years we’ve had together…giving him a safe, loving, supported, peaceful, happy life and all the love we have.

No matter when that day comes, we’ll face it knowing we’ve done all that we could and we have zero regrets. We’d have never made it this far without our incredible vet and her husband, and our two amazing farriers we’ve been so fortunate to work with. Plus YOU…caring about Molly-Max, asking about him, cheering him on all the way…we’ve been lucky to have the very best support around us to help us care for these donkeys that’ve stolen our hearts.

You’re likely wondering about what that means for Dominic, and we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. We have several options in the works for how we’ll proceed next, and we’ll decide which route depending on the timing.

I’ll sign off today by saying that none of this is happening today…and hopefully not even in the near future if we can avoid it. But it’s very much on our minds and we’re readying ourselves should we need to face it sooner rather than later.

Leaving you with an adorable video of Maxy clomping along in his shoes—I can’t get enough of his adorable walk with his fancy orthotic shoes. They really do help him and he’s just cute as can be while rocking them so proudly!

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