I can distinctly remember planning out what my life would look like in my thirties for a school assignment in high school. I still have the ‘day in a life’ write up that I made that described my life with two kids, living in Toronto, working as a high paid editor for a major publishing company. I was going to be going to lunch with famous writers and driving home in my Mini Cooper convertible. My description of my children makes me laugh, as I described them as reserved and well-behaved children who listened to everything I said without question. Never would I have guessed that I would be living in Manitoba, let alone that I would be a stay-at-home Mom, living in the country about to try homesteading for the first time.
I grew up in Mission, BC. I always considered it to be a small town, especially when compared to Vancouver. Both my parents worked, my dad as a teacher and my mom as a bookkeeper. We lived in a townhouse, and our backyard was a tiny cement pad. We had a large communal grass area in the middle of the complex and a small garden bed in front of our townhouse. Never once did I aspire or even show interest in gardening. Plants bored me, bugs both grossed me out and terrified me, and working with my hands in the dirt, no thank you. As for the time I spent outside, it was either on a sports field or going for walks in a park. My family did not go camping, and I never spent time in the country. Farming was something that I saw in movies and shows or when driving around with my mom. The very idea of having to do outdoor physical labour was laughable to me. I helped my mom with small renovations around the house, but I was certain that when I grew up, I would avoid physical labour at all costs.
I would love to say that my decision to move to Manitoba was based on extensive research of the schools here and careful consideration of what I wanted to do as a future career. Embarrassingly, none of those factors applied. I based my decision solely on the fact that my oldest sister was a teacher in Winnipeg and some of her male students, upon learning that she had a sister their age, added me on Facebook and I thought they were cute. At 18 years old, this seemed like a flawless plan. Now, as a mother of two young girls, it seems laughable and embarrassing that I made such a big decision based on cute guys, but what can you do.
Even when I did move to Manitoba, I was living in apartments in central Winnipeg. I dabbled in banking before becoming a high school teacher. I loved my job, and my husband (who incidentally was not one of the “cute guys” I moved out here for) and I bought our first house 10 months before we got married. I loved our house. It was a bi-level and was just under 700 sqft. It was the first time I had a yard that was all my own and even though it was very small, and the backyard was almost entirely cement save a small patch of grass for our dog, it felt like a big step up from apartments. After several years of marriage, we were finally expecting our first child, and then the pandemic hit. Our first daughter was born April 2020, right at the height of the first lockdown in Manitoba. Despite all the uncertainty and anxiety around the pandemic, the silver lining was that my husband and I were able to have several months together with our daughter in our own little bubble. When my maternity leave ended, it was back to work. Although I was excited to see my students again, and to have adult interaction again, it was incredibly difficult to leave our daughter every day. She was being watched by my mom and my mother-in-law, so the best possible option, but I felt guilty and missed her terribly. I was only back at work for one school year and then I was on maternity leave again. We quickly realised that our well-loved, small home would not accommodate our growing family. Anyone who has kids, knows that even though they are tiny, they create a ridiculous amount of STUFF. This all meant we would need to look for a new house.
So, there I found myself seven months pregnant, my house being completely updated (thankfully my husband Brent is a carpenter), and looking for a new house; good thing we didn’t have a ticking timeline or a bunch of hormones making me emotional. When we first discussed it, I was suggesting staying in the city and just finding a bigger yard. Brent on the other hand had his mind set on living in the country. This worried me as I had no experience living in the country. The very idea of the sheer number of bugs freaked me out. Once when I was sitting in our little office (pre-kids) I saw what I thought was a tick on my hand while I was eating popcorn, and I threw the entire bowl up in the air and all over the floor hysterically trying to get it off. In retrospect, it’s entirely possible that it wasn’t a tick at all as I had never seen one before, but needless to say I was not exactly an “outdoorsy” person.
Brent and I began negotiating on our list of wants for the new house. I wanted my dream house that was completely finished exactly how I wanted it, and I didn’t care much about the yard, as long as there was grass for the kids to play on. Brent was the opposite. To him the house didn’t matter as much because he could turn it into our dream home, but you can’t change your land. I told Brent that we could live outside the city, but that we didn’t need more than 5 acres of land. In my mind, 5 acres was way more grass than we needed and really what else were we planning on having. If there was room for a bigger play structure for the girls and somewhere to set up our pool, that was good enough. Yet here we are, living in our country home in need of some major updates (as it was built in the 1970s) on just over 20 acres of land and I am a stay-at-home mom and hopeful homesteader.
We moved into the house in September and my due date was the first week of October. I can remember sitting in the living room on our couch as Cece played with her cousin in another room and I just bawled. I don’t mean a few minutes of steady tears; I mean full-on ugly crying while my mom and sister tried to console me. I was a real mess. I felt so far from everything, despite only being 30 minutes outside the city. It dawned on me that there would be no quick trips to Starbucks which used to be a 3-minute drive from our house, and we couldn’t even get food delivered. I felt like I was really roughing it. We had no internet set up, and our cellphones had terrible reception with our cell provider at the time. Everywhere I looked there were crickets in the yard, and spiders in the garage and barn. Suddenly, I was going to have to check for ticks whenever the kids played outside. I just cried, unable to remember why I had moved out here. Because we were moving all day and the doors were wide open, the crickets made their way into the house. I was so scared of them that when Brent went into the basement, he saw an array of cups all over the floor where I had trapped them, too scared to try and squish them. I would get Brent to kill the spiders and freaked out when I saw them. Not exactly the qualities you need to become a great homesteader.
In those first few weeks at the house, I put on a brave face. Most of my family had been in disbelief that I was going to move out of the city and possibly thought I was going to have a breakdown within the first couple of weeks (although it happened within the first hour of moving in). My mom told me, that out of her 4 daughters, I was the last one she thought would live on a farm. But in those first few weeks, once I settled in, got to know my neighbours, and developed a better cricket trapping technique, I got to witness how much Cece was thriving in the country. She was only two and a half, but much braver and adventurous than I was. In fact, she used to try and catch the crickets in the driveway. She loved them so much that one day she told me to close my eyes because she had a surprise for me, and I was silly enough to comply. This resulted in her placing a dead cricket in my hand…I am still amazed that I didn’t scream or throw it back at her. She was, and still is, fearless. She thought it was the most amazing thing that we had neighbours who had goats, chickens and horses. She loved riding her bike down the gravel road, and I loved not having to worry about cars. The more I saw her enjoying her time out here, the more convinced I was that we did the right thing.
Shortly after moving in, our second daughter was born. Over the last two and a half years, I have grown so much more accustomed to the country lifestyle. Seeing my girls having so much room to play, having so many interactions with animals, helping with the garden, it has filled my heart with joy. Now that the girls are older, Brent and I decided that this was the year to make the most of our land. In the past, we did nothing with the back 15 acres. We let our neighbours use it for pasture for their horses in the spring and summer, but most of the time it was just wild fields. This year, however, we are getting ambitious, and we are going to try to start our homestead. I have exactly zero experience with farm animals, and virtually no experience with gardening. I wanted to start blogging about this experience because it will certainly come with many errors and lessons, but I remain hopeful that I will be able to build my dream homestead that I have had in my mind for the last year. If you are looking for solid homesteading advice and practices, this is not the place. If you want to laugh at the trial and errors of a city girl trying to build a vegetable garden, cut flower garden, raise cows, sheep, possibly pigs, and unfortunately, most likely chickens (more on that later), than this is a blog for you. I promise to document all the silly mistakes and hopefully some successes along the way.
The Hopeful Homesteader 
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