Harmony Family Farm

I know you know the feeling… the complete overwhelm, the anxiety, as Bilbo Baggins puts it, “I feel like butter scraped over too much bread.”

That is how I felt after starting this blog. I was so jazzed about it. I was finally bringing one of my dreams to reality! And the reality set in. Taking care of babies, animals, the house, the garden, cooking, cleaning, and the list is never-ending. I put this aside because it simply felt like too much. Now, here we are, almost a year later!

Here are some updates:

We are expecting a fifth baby! God has certainly blessed us with the big family we wanted when we were dating! Although I absolutely LOVED my homebirth, and I had done an entire post on the importance of homebirth, my perspective has changed somewhat. Birth where you feel comfortable. I am having a hospital birth with a midwife this time. In the beginning, I had some really scary nightmares about postpartum hemorrhaging, and I simply felt safer being in a hospital this time. Plus, insurance covers most of the cost. The trick is making sure you advocate for yourself and make informed decisions about your care. Know that you can say “No.”

We have completely eliminated all processed food from our diet. We keep only ingredients to make meals, we make everything from scratch, and we get as much organic food as we can. Both Robert and I got salmonella from something we ate on New Year’s Eve, and we have no idea what it could have been! It was two weeks of absolute misery. Since then, the difference in how all of us feel is absolutely incredible! I definitely think it’s playing into how fantastic I feel this pregnancy. Nutrition is everything.

We are finally able to plant our entire garden! It’s been so fascinating to watch our dirt turn into soil! We have four beds of sunflowers and corn, three beds of pumpkins, one bed of melons, a bed of tomatoes, one of peppers, and four on corn and lettuce. In our two larged raised beds, I have a pollinator flower garden and a chaos veggie garden. We have ten more beds to plant still! I’m planning on radishes, brassicas, greens, cucumbers, summer squash, beans, herbs, and whatever else I have in my seed stash. I also sowed wildflower seeds with reckless abandon pretty much everywhere.

Now, to what has been on my mind that I wanted to share…

There is something about simple homestead living I was not prepared for. Although it’s simple work, it’s WORK. To be an effective homemaker/homesteader/homeschooler, you absolutely have to be in constant motion. It honestly was a shock going from working full time to being a full-time homemaker. I did not have a good example of routines, housekeeping, and home management growing up. I have had to learn everything. And let me tell you, I am absolutely not perfect by any means. My husband can tell you about how messy a person I am! As I am writing this, there are dishes in the sink, the living areas are in disarray, the master bedroom has everybody’s clothes in it for some reason, I have piles of laundry that need folding, I need to wash diapers, and I am behind on deep cleaning because I was painting and finishing our daughter’s room. When I do projects, I tend to neglect the rest of the house…

Perfection is not what you are going for. Your house does not need to look like nobody lives there. I am happy with the imperfect progress I have made in my homemaking. One big project I have been working on is purging. I was astounded by the sheer volume of stuff that I threw away! How did we accumulate THAT MUCH CRAP?! The clutter is one reason housekeeping has been such a struggle over the years. It’s impossible to keep up when you have an abundance of stuff. I’m working really hard on keeping a cleaning routine, too. Every day, I use a planner to write out my day. I have one or two priority goals, then daily chores, then a checklist of things I need to get done that week that I can fit in with everything else. I also assign a certain room to a certain day, so I am not trying to deep clean the house all in one day. I find that too overwhelming and ridiculously stressful.

My main goal for our home is to have everything purged, organized, and painted by the last week of May. Setting realistic goals and not being overconfident in your ability to get things done helps tremendously.

We are taking a small break from school to get house projects done. And I am referring to seat work. Kids are always learning through play, cooking, and taking care of animals. Come June, we are kicking off “No Screen Summer.”” There will be no screen time except for outdoor movie nights with the projector! House projects will be done, so we can out a focus on school, field trips, and bonding time before gummy bear makes her arrival at the end of August!

In my coming posts, I’ll be covering things like gardening, sourdough, common recipes I cook for my family, and how to use up all the eggs we are getting from our hens! (There’s so many!)

See you soon!