My parents have just spent a wonderful week with us. We celebrated my birthday, we toured around, we played games and walked and ate and most importantly we talked. They came to visit us at a time when our feet are still on this road trip but our hearts and heads are on their way home.

It was wonderful to get a new perspective on our thoughts. My Dad who is living his second chance at life and my Mum who has the gift of really seeing things.

We spoke of our future, we put our dreams into words, we planned for the come-down of those first few weeks back after the trip, we chatted about the roads we've travelled and the paths ahead, we spoke of our family, our business and our life. We started to feel inspired and to look forward to going home and putting some of our new plans into action.

And then all of a sudden, in the middle of their week with us, we started to have so many ideas. Great ideas. The type of ideas for our lives and our business that we had when we first moved out of the city. We will become more self sufficient, we will teach, we will build, we will write, we will redecorate, we will design, we will get more extreme, more social, more involved...

And then one afternoon sitting around the table my Mum suggested we work backwards. Simplify. Instead of making huge changes and pulling our lives apart and putting them back together again, we needed to start closest to home.

What in our lives is not negotiable?

Its almost like that food pyramid that is on the back of the cereal packets. What is most important to us goes down the bottom of the pyramid and we work upwards from there. Like a personal permaculture.

For me its pretty simple, my top three non negotiable parts of my life are: My family. Great food gown and prepared and eaten by family and friends. A creative outlet.

It wont work if we build this business up so that it demands so much time that we aren't able to be with the girls. It does not make sense to be so busy growing great food to send to market and then opening a tin of tomatoes and a packet of pasta to feed our kids for dinner. It will make me unhappy to have so many commitments that I have no time to create.

Sure I have other priorities like the environment, like a lovely living space, like a great social life, like exercise and community and time alone, but I would give up any of these for my top three so they have to come second.

So that's what we're doing now. We are looking at those parts of our lives that are not negotiable and working hard on them. We are making plans that enable us to spend lots of time alone with each member of our family and together as a five as well. Plans to grow our home kitchen garden (as opposed to the farm paddocks), to add some more animals, a pizza oven, a better stove/oven, some more recipes to our repertoire. And timetabled time to write, sew and make. Time to work on my thing without feeling guilty, that I should be doing something else.

Once we have made plans for the big three we can look at the next layer of importance.

Does this make sense? Are your three the same as my three? What three parts of your life are not negotiable?

Travel safe. xx