Welcome, 2025

"You do not find the happy life. You make it."

Benjamin Franklin

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Welcome, January and a brand new year. I'm not sure about you guys, but the month of December came and went in a flash.  I know its most likely because of the rush of the Holiday season but I think the mix of a new baby always speeds up life, especially as I'm nearing my first hospital shifts out of maternity leave (12 weeks already: HOW?). We're all welcoming the slowness of January and a cozy winter around here.

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And as we know, January brings a lot of new ideas and plans and dreams. We reviewed much business data from 2024 and, though we're proud of all we accomplished, we're faced with the uncomfortable place of needing to raise our prices (a smidge). I wrote a letter detailing our full position (you can read it here) if you'd like to hear more, but it boils down to a third year of rising input costs (cow feed, bottles, caps, labels, ingredients) without us raising prices since 2022. And since we're honest people, we knew we had to make the change and thought we'd bring it out right away since any delay would make it harder and harder. We hate raising prices, because we're on a budget, too, and we get it. But we want to be a sustainable farm business for the next many years, and we all know the key to sustainability is economic viability.  Numbers are numbers. So we settled on a fifty cent price hike starting 1/1/25.  Please know this is something we've prayed about, stewed over and didn't jump into lightly.  And we're so thankful for your continued support and understanding.

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Moving onto the fun stuff: NEW GELATO! I did a poll on Facebook and Instagram (which was so fun and definitely the start of a new trend) and the clear winners of the next flavors are sea salt caramel and butter pecan. And since we can't keep things too simple, we decided to make both! So we've brought back our delicious sea salt caramel gelato and also the creamy, buttery pecan gelato of my dreams. Both are available this weekend at our farm shoppe!

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We're toying with shoppe hours, and since I know Saturdays are busy for everyone, we're going to trial continued Sunday hours into January! I'd love your feedback and any additional hour suggestions for our little farm shoppe, so feel free to leave comments below. I read them all.

January Farm Shoppe Hours:

Saturday 10am until 2pm

Sunday 1pm until 3pm

And now, some links + finds from the week:

• We spent the day at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History yesterday to the complete delight of our dinosaur-loving-six-year-old, and I can't recommend it enough. It's more than just dinosaurs (though they're so impressive and we do recommend the guided tour!) and we all had the best time.
• Some New Years reflection questions from one of my favorite writers.
• I'm saving my Christmas money for an espresso machine: do any of you have this one (on sale right now!) and what are your thoughts?
• On the menu today.
• We did a 2024 photo reflection on our FB and we have so much more to add, so we're planning a video reflection/planning session soon: stay tuned!

Happy New Year, friends.

We're so glad you're here,

Jesse and Lisa