Watermelon Lemonade & The Personal Freedom Check-In
A simple summer reflection on money, time, attention, and making more room for the life you want.
If you’re like most people in 2026, you’ve probably spent some time taking stock of your life.
Your spending habits. Your income. Your mental health. Your relationships.
The direction you’re heading and whether it still feels like your own.
Where I live, my country is about to have an important birthday. All my retrospective energy keeps taking me back to a simple question.
We often describe ourselves as the land of the free and the home of the brave.
So how brave are we feeling these days?
And how free?
Not as an abstract ideal. In our everyday lives.
Personally. Financially. Emotionally. Practically. In your calendar. In your attention. In our ability to make choices that reflect who we are and who we hope to become.
This isn’t about achieving perfect freedom. I don’t know if that even exists.
It’s an invitation to take inventory.
Because before we can change anything, we have to notice what is already there.
In this article, we'll walk through a simple exercise to help you take stock of your own life, explore a few practical ideas for creating more options with your money and your time, share what I've been learning through my own "Infinite Sabbatical" experiment, and finish with a pitcher of homemade watermelon lemonade that's perfect for the hottest days of summer.
I don’t have a grand solution for you.
What I can offer are honest observations, practical tools, a recipe worth making, and perhaps one or two ideas that help you feel just a little more rooted in your own life by the time you reach the bottom of the page.
Hey friends! 👋 I'm Kaitlynn—software engineer, kitchen tinkerer, and somewhere in the middle of what I'm calling an infinite sabbatical. Feast Mode is a food blog that's grown into something a little bigger: recipes, real talk about financial freedom, and the ongoing experiment of building a life you actually chose. Pull up a chair.
A Personal Freedom Inventory
Grab a piece of paper if you have one.
If you’d rather type, that’s completely fine. But if you’re willing, I’d encourage you to write this one by hand.
One of the fascinating things neuroscientists have found is that handwriting doesn’t simply use your brain differently than typing. It recruits a broader network involving movement, vision, language, attention, and memory. Because writing by hand is slower, it also gives your brain a little more time to organize, connect, and process ideas instead of simply recording them.
That makes it a surprisingly good tool for reflection.
So before you try to solve anything, just notice.
Write down whatever comes to mind under these five headings:
Money. Time. Attention. Obligations. Habits.
Don’t try to solve anything yet. Just observe.
Where does your money go?
Where does your time go?
What captures your attention every day?
Which obligations are genuinely important to you?
Which habits support the life you want?
Which habits steadily pull you away from it?
Again, this isn’t about judgment.
It’s inventory.
It’s hard to navigate without knowing where you already are.
The Second Observation
Once you’ve made your list, take one more step back.
Notice the voice you used.
Was it kind? Harsh? Hopeful? Curious? Resigned?
Did certain categories feel surprisingly easy?
Did others make you tense up or want to skip ahead?
Sometimes the most useful information isn’t what’s on the page. It’s our reaction to what’s on the page.
Treat that reaction with curiosity instead of criticism. It has something to teach you.
In software engineering we would say “we go slow to go fast” and I think that same idea is relevant here. Just a little bit of accurate reflection gives the best direction.
My Own Inventory
About a year and a half ago, I stepped off the treadmill of constantly chasing the next corporate role and the next raise.
Not because I had everything figured out. Quite the opposite.
I wanted to see what would happen if I started optimizing for ownership of my time instead of maximizing my income.
I’m fortunate to be doing this alongside my husband Larry, whose support and partnership make many things possible. Together we’ve been building toward a life with more flexibility, more community, and more room to actually live as ourselves, increasingly on our own terms.
Right now I’m in the middle of my second fix-and-rent real estate project.
The numbers are still modest.
The lifestyle is occasionally closer to “renovation monk” than “financial influencer.”
But something interesting is happening.
Little by little, the financial needle is moving.
The ideas I’m sharing here is all pretty commonly available advice, not some secret investment strategy.
What I’m suggesting isn’t necessarily asking you to do more. For me, this is more in opposition to hustle culture, but it might take a different form for you in whatever season you’re in.
In my experience it’s been consistent effort, patience, willingness to adjust my long-term perspective (and near-term tactics), not to mention ownership of assets that has slowly created more options over time.
The result (so far) isn’t luxury.
The result is ( just a little) more freedom. A few more options.
A life that feels increasingly like my own.
Your Version Will Look Different
If you’re reading this and thinking:
“That’s nice, but I don’t work in tech.” Or:
“I don’t have rental properties.” Or:
“I don’t have a Larry.”
Fair.
Neither did I for most of my life.
Less than two decades ago I was extremely single and functionally broke. My path isn’t your path. And it shouldn’t be.
The point isn’t to copy somebody else’s life. The point is to discover where your own leverage already exists.
Maybe that’s:
💳 Paying off debt
🌱 Learning a new skill
🚀 Starting a side business
🥕 Growing food
🤝 Joining a cooperative
❤️ Building stronger relationships
💵 Creating a second income stream
✂️ Reducing expenses that don’t actually improve your life
Freedom isn’t one thing. It’s a collection of options. And options tend to grow when we pay attention to what we already have.
A Practical Next Step
If finances feel overwhelming, consider doing a formal financial inventory.
Many platforms (I used betterment) offer introductory planning sessions or tools that help organize your assets, debts, spending, and goals. Doing this the year before my sabbatical is one of the things that helped give me the courage to take a bit more risk while I have the chance.
If you speak with a financial professional, learn whether they’re acting as a fiduciary. A fiduciary has a legal obligation to put your interests first. Not every financial advisor operates under that standard, so it’s worth asking the question.
You don’t need a perfect plan.
You just need a clearer picture than you had yesterday.
While You Think About All That... Make some watermelon lemonade.
Seriously.
The world has enough spreadsheets. Let’s drink something cold.
This version is refreshing, inexpensive, surprisingly filling on hot days, and perfect for pool trips, cookouts, renovation projects, or simply surviving July with plenty of electrolytes and hydration.
🍉🍋Watermelon Lemonade
Ingredients
4 cups watermelon, cubed
1-2 cups of any excess watermelon juice you have
Juice of 3 to 4 lemons
2 to 4 tablespoons sugar or honey (optional)
sure, you can just sub-in a little pre-made lemonade instead of lemon juice and sweetner if you need.
Ice
Instructions
Blend watermelon until smooth.
Add lemon juice and sweetener if using (I also blended the honey into the lemon juice, which worked great. And sure, you can just sub-in a little pre-made lemonade here if you need.
Add any excess watermelon juice.
Taste and adjust.
Serve over ice (or blend it with the ice, so good).
That’s it.
Summer in a glass.
🍉 Watermelon is mostly water... but not just water
Watermelon is about 92% water, which is one reason it feels so refreshing on hot days. But it also contains potassium and magnesium, two electrolytes that help maintain normal muscle and nerve function. You’re not replacing a sports drink after a marathon, but for an afternoon at the pool or painting a house in July, it’s doing more than just tasting good.
A Small Historical Side Note
Watermelon carries a complicated history in the United States.
After the Civil War, racist caricatures deliberately tried to turn a fruit that many newly freed Black Americans grew, sold, and enjoyed into a symbol of ridicule.
Which is a strange fate for something that is hydrating, accessible, delicious, and remarkably well suited to hot weather. Like many stereotypes, it was never really about the food.
It’s a useful reminder that not every story - not every default socio-economic situation we’re handed deserves to be accepted.
Whether we’re talking about food, money, success, work, or freedom, sometimes the best thing we can do is look directly at reality and decide for ourselves what serves our communities and our bodies.
We’re also literally making lemonade, perhaps a perfect picture of where life in my neck of the woods in July 2026 is at. Let that sink in with a cold glass of hydration. Then keep reading and think (kindly) about how you can shift your attention, your financial habits to make more room for who you really want to be and to build connections with the people in your everyday life.
Where your attention goes, energy flows. What we give our attention and resources to gets bigger. So notice what’s good.
One of my favorite things about being a human on earth is that our bodies often crave exactly what the season naturally provides. Summer offers water-rich fruit, bright citrus, herbs, tomatoes, cucumbers, peaches. Whether you frame that as evolution, agriculture, good luck, or a little bit of everyday magic, I think it's worth paying attention to.
There are always going to be negative feelings issues that have to be addressed and processed. But let’s get it handled, keep it moving and let what is already so beautiful and so present in this world loom larger in our lives.
What I’m Taking to the Pool
This watermelon lemonade will be coming with me to the pool and to our renovation site where I’m currently juggling cost priorities, contractor schedules, painting from top to bottom while sweating like I’m in a hot yoga studio in between and finding the occasional surprise hiding inside an old house.
One day at a time.
One glass at a time.
One degree of freedom at a time.
Because that’s what this Infinite Sabbatical experiment is really about.
Not escaping the life I find myself living.
Building it up to look a little bit more like who I want to be.
What is one thing you could find a little bit more freedom in by this time next month or next year: money, time, attention, relationships, skills, or peace?
Next Up
We’ll talk about the idea of a Safe Number:
The amount of income, savings, support, or stability required to make your next decision from confidence instead of fear.
Whether your safe number buys you a sandwich each month or supports an entire household, the principle is the same.
We’ll start there.