The Beginning...

We all have to start somewhere, right? Well, my somewhere is right here.

This journey has been amazing. I never thought that I would love to spend so much time being dirty raising girls and animals, trying to provide as much for our family as we can {every step counts} and still wanting more. More animals, more gardens {those silly squash need their own space}, more time to manage everything, more time and ability to absorb more knowledge, and more happiness that comes at the end of a dirty day on the farm. 

In the past two years, we have radically changed our diet to cut out all grains, pesticides, gut-irritating additives like carrageenan, guar gum, and xanthan gum, hormones, and chemicals that just don't belong in our food system to start with. The girls and I eat strictly pastured, wild, and organic foods or we get sick. I have digestive reactions, Halle gets rashes and Macy has behavioral reactions. 

Cleaning up our diet helped me address the way we clean ourselves and our house. Our skin is our largest organ, so we don't put anything on our body that we can't or wouldn't eat. This means that I make nearly all of our lotions, sunblock, and topical ointments out of edible ingredients, we use castile and homemade soaps for washing our bodies, and we clean with the basics like vinegar, baking soda, essential oils and a phosphate-free dish soap.

We started restoring the farm to a farm by adding our first flock of birds this spring that we hatched ourselves, followed by two more groups that we ordered from hatcheries, then added a fully-grown flock of runner ducks this week. I have grand plans of adding goats, pigs, cows, geese, and sheep hopefully by next spring {ha, wishful thinking, but a girl can dream, right?}

Thank you for reading. I am excited to start this new adventure in blogging and share with all of you!