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.
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.
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