These past couple years have been weird, you know all about it, you lived through it too. For us, they’ve been really weird, we changed almost every aspect our lives. When life gets complicated we get impulsive, that’s how we’ve always been. I mean, I am the girl who met my husband at 18, bought a house and got married at 20, and had our first baby at 21. Our impulsive tendencies literally built this family.
How did we get here though? Between 2020 and 2021 we now have a new home, we’re attempting homesteading, we have a new baby, we’re living a completely different lifestyle, and we’re drowning in animals, but like you can never have too many animals, right? Well let’s catch you up on the last 2 years of our lives.
In early 2020, or maybe even 2019 we became obsessed with homesteading, I don’t even know what started it. We lived in town with a fraction of an acre that flooded every year, it’s not like we could really homestead. We started learning all we could about homesteading, then Covid hit and we were stuck in the middle of town with the worst neighbors. We decided that we didn’t like people all that much, being stuck in suburbia will do that to you quickly. We literally built a chicken coop that looked like it was out of an episode of fixer upper, but I think that just made us want to move out into the middle of nowhere even more.
The housing market was crazy, so on a whim, we decided to put our house on the market. Despite multiple offers right away, selling our house was a complete mess, but that’s a whole chapter of our lives that we’ll just try to forget. We looked everywhere for a house with some land, and we found our dream house. Our school house…that we home school in. It was fate. In fall of 2020 We picked up and moved 180 miles north of everything we knew and loved. Now we live in a 100 year old elementary school Wisconsin’s north woods, how very Laura Ingalls Wilder of us, right?
Now how did we end up with a million animals…or like 70-ish? We started the pandemic with 2 dogs and 2 cats. In spring of 2020 we raised 3 little chicks when we lived in town. Now that we live here we have over 60 chickens, 2 goats, 2 farm cats, 2 indoor cats, and 3 dogs. Our 3 chickens we started with are still kicking even though they’re just little boutique bantams, and we now call them “The OG 3”. The OG 3 are resilient little ladies. We added 10 more chickens last fall so our bantams would be able to survive winter, chickens are like little heaters, so we needed more to keep our bantams warm in our coop…that’s actually our spare one car garage. From there we brooded more chickens the next spring, we picked up some more chickens that someone was rehoming, and then we decided that we needed more active layers because we weren’t getting enough eggs from 50 chickens. Now we’re drowning in chickens and eggs. We did try ducks for awhile, but we decided that we’re not duck people. They’re so messy!
Our goats, well we got those one day when I decided that looking on Facebook was a better idea than going to an animal swap. On a random Wednesday morning before I even finished my cup of coffee we had a deal to purchase and pick up two goats that afternoon. We have a breeding pair of Nigerian Dwarf goats are adorable. Seaweed is our fat female (she loves treats) and Atticus is our bearded guy, I think he’s a little intimidated by his lady sometimes, so I’m not sure if they’ll give us babies or not. It’s always been a family day dream to have goats, in fact Aliceana named Seaweed years ago, way before we had a place for goats.
We also have a huge fenced in garden plot. We canned all of the tomatoes this year, froze tons of green beans and summer squash, and had fresh veggies all summer long. We have tons of fresh eggs, and we’re hoping to have goats milk next year. We’re not exactly homesteaders yet, we’re just people that spend to much to keep their adorable animals alive.
Oh, and we had a baby. We moved when I was pregnant and now we have a 6 month old. She’s already obsessed with all of our animals, I can’t wait until she’s more mobile and can play with them. She’s desperately trying to help me write this, reaching for my laptop. Life is chaos right now, everything revolves around little Greeley and it feels like I get next to nothing done. Here she is in my glasses, the glasses I barely get to wear because she takes them off my face.
So that’s us. Raising our two girls, homeschooling the oldest, taking care of a ton of animals, fixing up our 100 year old school a little bit at a time, and surviving it one day at a time.
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.