No. 86. February 2024 recap + how much of our family life do we want to share online?

Life lately, our family's approach to content creation & a sneak peek at my new ebook

Hi, friend! If you're new here, APL is a newsletter for the aspiring modern Proverbs 31 woman, where we talk about building, growing & managing a portfolio of roles, responsibilities & dreams for maximum return on our investment. For more on the topic of women & work, check out my Elevate Blueprint!

Life lately & February goals update

January always feels like it’s three months long and then February flies by, even with the extra leap day.

The highlight last month was celebrating Levi’s second birthday - we didn’t do anything fancy: a doughnut cake with candles (Levi’s current obsession is donuts!), balloons and an animal garland, and pizza, cake and cupcakes with his church friends during Sunday school. 

We also had a lot of slow days at home nesting, watching Levi ride his new four wheeler like a pro, investing time in our local church and finishing up work projects before maternity leave. That’s basically my February goals update as well since my goals for last month included:

• Prepping & organizing for baby #2

• Celebrating Levi’s second birthday and intentional time as a family of 3 before baby #2 joins us

• Preparing for maternity leave at work

I also wanted to make progress on my latest ebook for single women, but ended up working more on another ebook instead (more on that below!). 

As far as weekly goals, we’ve continued to keep up with our weekly finance check ins and tracking our spending, but I was not as consistent about writing this newsletter or documenting weekly highlights in my Day One app / journal. 

For daily goals, my apple watch no longer fits me (gotta love third trimester swelling!), so I haven’t been able to track daily steps, but I have tried to take short walks outside a couple times a week and I’ve been moving a lot around to clean, nest and organize the house. I’ve also been consistent about taking my supplements daily and sticking to a morning routine with some alone time before the rest of the family is awake. But, I have not made regular progress to unplug from social media or read before bed. 

On my mind

We’ve officially passed baby #2’s due date and so every day lately is a game of “is today the day?” and it means my March goals are to deliver a healthy baby, heal postpartum, and enjoy newborn season. 

The last few weeks and days of pregnancy are so hard - mentally, emotionally and physically. I’m ready to not be pregnant anymore and to meet our son, but also am nervous about labor and delivery and the newborn / postpartum season since the first time around was challenging for me. I’ve been trying to pray through my anxious thoughts, and remind myself that every child, birth and postpartum season is different but also I have done this before and it is all worth it.

I am also trying to rest (not so good at this part!), but also keeping myself distracted with purging and organizing the house, spending one on one time with my husband and our toddler, and working on my latest passion project that I can’t wait to share with y’all: a workbook on building a life you love (here’s a sneak peak at the working cover!).

As I’m working on this ebook and my husband and I are taking steps towards building the life we envision for our family, we’ve been talking a lot about how much we want to share online about our life and family.

I’ve always wrestled with sharing online, but it’s become especially challenging since I got married and became a mom because my life now involves others and I feel a responsibility to respect their privacy. I also continue to feel the tug to be more present with my family and spend less time looking at screens, which is difficult if you want to show up online consistently.

At the same time, I have been blessed with so many amazing relationships and opportunities through ministry and writing online for over 14 years (on and off), including meeting my husband via Instagram.

There is so much good I know can be found showing up openly and authentically online, but even good things have a cost, and I’m constantly wrestling with whether the costs are worth the potential benefits.

My husband and I are also both learners and enjoy sharing what we’re learning. Sometimes, we’ll have an in-depth conversation on a certain topic, like personal finance, family values, leadership or marriage, and at the end wish we had recorded it so we could share it as a podcast for our own future reference and to invite others into the conversation. 

Recently, my husband and I have been talking about wanting our social media and online presence to be more intentional - not to just scroll and post randomly but to post with purpose in a way that aligns with the life and legacy we’re building as a family.

For example, if you follow Ballerina Farm’s content, at first, it seems like she’s just sharing her family’s daily life, but if you look closer, you’ll notice there is actually a lot of strategy and purpose behind what she shares. Hannah is selling a certain lifestyle and their family businesses provide tools to live out such a lifestyle. Her content reflects that - it’s meant to inspire you to live a certain way and then provide you with something to buy to achieve that lifestyle. 

For example, Hannah shares a lot about sourdough, and their store offers everything you need to also bake with sourdough - from flour to bread knives. She also shows their livestock a lot, because they also sell beef. She’s always posted about milking cows and using the milk in their home, and now they’re opening up a dairy to also sell their milk and even give fans a chance to experience it in person. 

So, start looking closer at the Ballerina Farm online content and you’ll notice that each story, post and video has a purpose to ultimately drive sales to their products. Yet, it’s done in such a subtle, and often beautiful, ordinary way that you don’t even know you’re being sold on something. 

I respect that. It’s a unique skill not many people have and it’s why Ballerina Farm has been so successful. They’ve built a business ecosystem that thrives on how they already live their life and on the things they already use and do as a family. They’re not trying to push someone else’s products or be something they’re not - they just took what they already have and use, and built a business around that. So, I imagine to Hannah, it doesn’t feel like she’s “selling”, but more inviting and equipping others to live similarly to how their family lives. 

Observing this has led my husband and I to talk about how we show up online and if we do open up our family’s life to the online world, what is the purpose? How do we want to make people feel? What do we want to encourage people in? What parts of our lives are we willing to share and is the cost of sharing publicly worth it?

But it all starts with first being firm in our family identity and values. That’s why I’m so excited to be working on this ebook on building a big vision for your family and creating a life you love. It’s what my husband and I have been working through personally the last few years and we’re starting to see fruit from those efforts in some surprising and amazing ways. 

We’re working on some big things for our family that we’re not quite ready to share yet, but here are the themes we’re seeing emerge in what our family is about and what we like to share / talk about most often: 

• Encouraging and equipping young women to thrive in the single season (Yelena) and young men to become strong leaders (Dan)

• Helping couples build a strong foundation for marriage and be equally yoked 

• Building portfolio lives, generational wealth and an impactful family legacy

At first glance, all these things may seem to be all over the place, but over the last few years, as we’ve dated, gotten engaged and started to build our own family, we’re realizing that all these things are actually connected and build off of each other. 

What you sow in your single season, you reap in later seasons. 

The spouse you choose to marry determines the trajectory for the rest of your life. 

The life and legacy you build is determined by how you steward and multiply what God has entrusted to you.

They’re all woven together. 

That being said, what would you like to see me, and us as a couple, talk and share more about online? 

Note, even if you don’t post on social media or want to ever be a content creator or influencer, these concepts also apply to how we consume content online - do the accounts, websites, and people you follow online align with your value and the big vision you have for your life and legacy? It’s something worth evaluating!

Until next time,

YPS

P.S. I love this quote from Peta Kelly on content creation as a writer and being true to what works for you and how you show up online:

Are you really a content creator or influencer?

Or are you an artist who really needs more space between creations?

To make bigger things over time, instead of small bitey things right now? ….

There may be a difference between your craft and the craft of ‘influencing’ and ‘content creating’. They’re not all just one thing.

What is your true work?

What is it that you’d do in your real life if Instagram didn’t exist?

What would you make?

Sometimes we think that Instagram is the main thing, and then we fit our work in with it.

Let your work be the main thing again.

Let your life be the main thing again.

I just want you to know that you’re not falling behind, just because you may not be participating in a ‘way’ that isn’t right for your craft. I want you to feel the freedom in not needing to keep up relevance. Your success isn’t there. Your peace isn’t there.