I have been thinking a lot about career paths, and how they typically stray far from that path you started in school. I have a 12 year old that we homeschool who is putting a lot of pressure on herself to find a career path, and I keep telling her to maybe find a hobby instead. She’s 12, I’m almost 34 and I barely know what I want to do when I grow up. I’m also teaching a class this fall to homeschooled highschool students where we dive into career paths, so it’s definitely something that’s been on my mind. When do you find your career? I feel like careers really just find you, you just need to follow your interests. I’m pretty sure my husband didn’t want to be a salesmen for craft beer when he was 12, I’m pretty sure that the career my 12 year old will have in the future probably doesn’t exist yet.
If you asked me in elementary school, I was going to be an artist. If you asked me in High School, I just wanted to escape my childhood home, I didn’t care what path that was (I mean within reason, I was basically always the goodie-two-shoes type of kid). If you asked me in college, I was going to be a school teacher. My path in life was constantly changing, at one point I was a Sociology major with no idea what I would do with the degree.
I ended up getting married at 20, having my daughter at 21 and just fell into a career for a while. I was a mom blogger, food blogger, a true pioneer of the influencing world a long with thousands of other moms, most more successful than I was. I worked with major brands, was always away on fun little work trips across the country, and had the most random free things sent to my house. It was amazing for a few years, then mom blogging was phased out, algorithms changed, brands targeted young kids to promote their product and most mom bloggers I know have real 9-5 jobs now. I actually even tried the full-time job thing, and it wasn’t a great fit for our family.
So we did what anyone would do, we moved to the woods, had more babies, started gardening, got a lot of chickens, a couple goats, then we added more and more and haven’t really stopped, and now I guess you could say we have a farm. Some might call it a homestead, some might call it a hobby farm, I don’t even know what to call it, so I normally say “we have a tiny farm.” Ironically I think one of my daughters had a book called “Tiny Farm” that I bought when we first moved here. I’m pretty sure our smallest daughter destroyed it, so I should probably put it on the list of books to replace.
This year we started a little farm stand, and well, this year hasn’t been the best for produce. We’ve had too much rain and our garden is too wet to work in so we’re severely lacking in produce. Naturally we had plenty to share last year, but this year isn’t looking too great. So we bake cookies every Wednesday, Saturday and Sunday. Some days we do great, other days we don’t have a single customer, we’re probably losing money, like a lot of money, but I really don’t want to look at the numbers until I have to, ignorance is bliss, right? Instead I just pack up our extra cookies and bring them along to share with friends whenever we’re invited anywhere. We’re just going to keep going, and I know that we’ll have a time where we have an abundance of produce every single day and it’s going to be exciting and amazing, we’re going to live a life of abundance and I know we will because we’re so blessed tucked up here in the northwoods.
I think we’ll get a hoop house going next spring so we can lengthen our growing season, that way we won’t have to rely on rain and weather to grow our garden. This winter I will be doing a ton of research on growing a flower garden too. I want to sell cut flowers so badly, mostly because I want flowers in my life. We have a plan, we’ll get there, there’s only up from here. It’s just funny to me that I started my career sharing recipes on the internet and now I share cookies with my community. It’s almost full circle.
The day I started the farm stand my best friend sent me a message out of the blue telling me how proud she was of me, I said it wasn’t going the greatest and she said, “But you’re doing it. Something you wanted. You did it.”
That’s how the food blogger opens a farm stand.
Written by, Brittany, the geek behind the blog. Sharing tips and stories from the trenches on navigating life homeschooling and homesteading as a stay at home mom.