OUR STORY

Quiet simple life = boring?  Nah.....we went from anxious wannabe city girl and serious biker dude to rural small town homesteaders 

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 It wasn’t supposed to be this way though. I was going to be a big city girl. I was leaving small town life behind...and I did for a while.  I lived in Houston and then Denver, but Indiana called me back home to finally settle down.

Problem is, I have generalized anxiety disorder and panic disorder with panic attacks.  I didn’t used to like the quiet because anxiety always seems loudest in the quiet.  I can't remember not having anxiety. There were several years the attacks were so bad I could hardly sit in a room with people or with any amount of stress without feeling like I was going to come out of my skin.

Have you ever had to leave a cart of groceries at the store because of a panic attack coming on? Have you ever left in the middle of a meeting for one? It’s not so fun. There were years I dreaded anything that might start a panic attack and so I sort of just stayed home a lot. 

After several years where the anxiety and panic attacks worsened, I finally discovered something amazing - grace and turning 40. ha.  I found grace outside in the backyard, I found it in walking around the pastures with the dogs, in planting sunflowers and getting my hands in the dirt. And then we went on vacation and I HELD MY FIRST CHICKEN and the rest is history.

From the chickens came the cows and then pigs and more chickens and more cows and planting a garden and canning and baking and processing our own chickens and filling our freezers with our own ethically and humanely raised meat  - we were learning to be self-sufficient. I was learning to be self-sufficient.   

Additionally, I used to hate to buy meat from the grocery store, because you never really knew how those animals lived out their lives.  I wanted to know that the animals had lived a life that was as close to natural as possible. As Joel Salatin says, by letting "the pigness of the pig" shine through. A life where pigs could wallow in mud, cows could lay in the pasture and eat grass and the chickens could forage around in grass eating bugs and peck around for other goodies. 

Learning to homestead has made my world immensely more magical and worthwhile. 

One of the reasons I love this homesteading lifestyle so much is because it affords me the freedom to be outside and learn new skills and be with animals and still feel like a useful and productive person. This is my job. And I’m lucky my husband also loves this lifestyle and likes that I can be home to do all the things for us.

I never thought the day would come when I would live a quiet life at home and would prefer it over running around all the time and I don’t know anybody who would’ve thought a guy who was in a biker “club” and a girl who liked to party a lot would ever turn into two happy homebodies that also like to be in bed by 9pm, lol, but here we are killing it. Join us in this adventure.