The Hopeful Homesteader

Tag: homesteading

  • 5 things I learned my first month as a cow owner…

    Before getting Buttercup, my experience/exposure to cows was limited to seeing them when driving, adorable Instagram reels of mini cows frolicking around their yards, and visiting a baby cow at the petting zoo in our area. Despite having done research beforehand, there were still quite a few things to learn when we brought her home. Now, almost a month into cow ownership, I have learned a few things that I would like to share for any other novice cowgirls.

    1. Bottle-feeding is overrated.

    Ever since we started discussing getting farm animals when we bought the property 2.5 years ago, I had this vision in my mind of how amazing it would be to bottle-feed a cow or sheep. I had seen many such adorable videos of the bonding happening between the owner and their pet. I thought it looked idyllic. So, when we started looking for animals I told Brent in no uncertain terms, that I wanted it to be young enough that I would have the chance to bottle feed it. Buttercup came to us at only 4 days old, and Brent and the girls gave her, her first bottle with me only getting the chance to help at the very end. Not to worry I thought, I would get to do the next feeding solo.  The next morning, I got up and mixed the bottle and had that experience of solo feeding and it was a very sweet moment. However, the sweetness wears off very quickly when you are having to mix the formula, which is multiple litres, twice a day and then clean all the bottles and mixing equipment in between each feed. The other aspect that helps the sweetness wear off quickly, is once the calf starts to realise that you are the one that brings the food and therefore tries to get milk from you every time you enter the barn. She has licked and chewed pretty much every article of clothing I have worn in the barn and seemed particularly fond of my Uggs (yes, I know, not appropriate barn shoes, the search for good cowboy boots continues). As she got older and more confident in her surroundings, she would start nudging looking for more milk. At the beginning it wasn’t a big deal, I thought her little nudges were cute, but as she has started packing on the pounds and getting taller, it has become more of a nuisance.

    Another aspect of bottle feeding for which I was unprepared, was the amount of froth and drool that it would create on her very large snout. The process of sucking on the bottle, or chewing it as she seemed to prefer, creates an amount of froth and drool I didn’t know was even possible. I am not unaccustomed to slobber as our goldens’ will drool when playing fetch or even my girls when they were babies, major drool queens. None of that prepared me though for the cow drool. It’s not like I can put a bib on her, so feeding quickly became a very messy affair. Whatever I was wearing to go feed her, would have to be washed right after. The need for overalls has never been as apparent for me as it is now that I am cleaning my clothes after going in the barn. All of this made me long for when I would no longer have to bottle feed her, which thankfully happened this week.

    2. Bottle calves don’t just inherently know how to drink from a bucket.

    I finally got the nerve up yesterday to try giving her the milk replacement in a bowl instead of bottles. The milk replacer bag said that she should be bottle fed for her first 14 days and then use the milk replacer for at least 28 days total before weaning. We were getting close to the 28 days, and I still was using the bottles, so I decided, enough with the drool and bottle washing let’s put it in a bowl. I honestly assumed this would make her happier as she could get it more easily. So blissfully ignorant I walked over to the barn feeling very pleased that the trouble with bottles was over, I opened up the gate to an eager Buttercup and set the bowl down. Well, she was not delighted at all. In fact, she got frustrated thinking I must be holding out on her and immediately started to nudge/ram me in what seemed like an attempt to get me to give up the bottles that I clearly must have been hiding in my coat. So, I tried showing her the bowl again, she sniffed it and then came back to me again looking for her bottles. Frustrated, as was she, I put my hand in the replacer and brought it up to her nose, she simply mooed at me like I was some sort of terrible traitor who had given her milk away. This continued for some time resulting in me getting milk replacer all over my arm, which made it very sticky, and trying my best not to get Buttercup to step in the bowl. Finally, I got her to put her nose into the bowl, at which point she hoovered the whole 3.2 L in less than 2 minutes. We had success! Clearly everything was going to be easier going forward, or so I thought until the feeding this morning. Confident that she knew how to drink out of the bowl as I had witnessed her guzzle the whole thing the night before, I brought Penny along with me. We learned a valuable lesson that if we sit in the chair where I used to feed Buttercup with a bottle, she will abandon the bowl, thinking I have bottles to give, and proceed to search for them. This resulted in me trying to get her back over to the bowl while Penny said “it okay Buttertup pie-pie” as Buttercup knocked her bowl over spilling half of it. I am very proud of myself for not swearing in front of Penny in that moment. Thankfully the evening feed went much smoother, and we learned a valuable lesson: don’t sit in the bottle-feeding chair when Buttercup is drinking from her bowl.

    3. Just because your calf doesn’t moo the first few days, doesn’t mean it will be a quiet cow.

    When we first brought Buttercup home, I was stunned by how quiet she was. I had expected her to moo when she was being taken off the back of Brent’s truck, or to make a sound when she first checked out her surroundings. I waited to hear her when we put her in her pen for the night and closed the barn door, but there was nothing. The first few days the only sound was the faintest little moo, that almost sounded like a little pig oink. How adorable, I thought, we have the most well-tempered, silent cow around. The last couple weeks though, she has been letting her personality show and that includes her big girl moo. The first time she did it, I was honestly pretty proud. I told her she was a good girl, gave her a nice chin scratch and went about my business. However, now she moos, and loudly, the second we leave her sight. She has gone full on cow diva. We (Brent) installed a chain link fence on the inside of the barn door so that we would be able to leave one barn door open so she could look outside and enjoy the sun while still being safely secured in the barn. She isn’t big enough yet to be left alone in the field, particularly at night with coyotes around. The problem with having the barn door open, is that she expects us to stay right there and wants us to continually feed her grass. The girls started feeding her grass through the fence and thought it was the most fun activity ever. Buttercup agreed, and she loved eating from the girls’ hands. The problem becomes the second we must go inside, or we decide to go play, she now lets us know that she is displeased by mooing very loudly. Now, when it is me, she moos once, realises it doesn’t work, and then goes and lays down in her nice hay bed. The issue is that Penny has a real soft spot for Buttercup, and the second she hears her moo, Penny goes rushing back to the fence. She tells me we can’t go inside because Buttercup is sad, and it is very hard saying no to Penny.

    4. Just because your calf is calm when you bring it home, doesn’t mean it will stay that way.

    Again, when we brought Buttercup home, she was calm, even a little timid. She sort of slowly walked around the barn.  When the dogs ran around in there, she showed us a little spunk and kicked up her back legs. As the days went on, she got more comfortable with us and with the dogs. She started ripping around the barn, kicking dust up, getting on top of things. She started nudging me more and more knowing that I was the one who brought the food and who would give her the good neck scratches. The more she grows though, the less she seems to be aware of her size and strength. She got me with her leg on the second day we had her when she kicked up her back legs in excitement, and I barely felt it. She was only 85lbs. She is probably pushing 110-120lbs now and when she steps on you, you feel it! This is why I need to find better barn shoes than my Uggs, and I am looking into steel toed cowboy boots, which I discovered is actually a thing! Today she got so excited and wanted to be out with us in the yard where all the fresh grass is that she tried jumping against the gate to open it. She didn’t manage to open it, but her hefty weight did shift the locking mechanism and Brent had to adjust it. He decided today was the day that we needed to build her a little outdoor space that she could enjoy until she was big enough to be in the back field. This is yet another reason why it is handy being married to a carpenter. In about 10 minutes he had built a little cow run along the side of the barn that she can access through a little door. She was thrilled to be outside and able to graze on grass at her own leisure, rather than being reliant on the girls and I bringing fistfuls of it through the fence. Her excitement and playfulness however, manifested in a weird new demonstration of energy. The dogs often go in the barn and Brinkley decided to check out her new outdoor space, at which point, I kid you not, Buttercup tried to mount Brinkley. Brinkley didn’t seem to understand what was happening and honestly Brent and I were surprised too. So surprised that I made Brent double check that Buttercup was in fact a girl. After firmly establishing that yes, she was a heifer and not a bull, something that we realised should have been obvious without checking simply from the fact that we have seen her pee, we were at a loss for what she was doing. A quick Google search revealed that, just like puppies, calves are extremely playful. Not having other calves around to play with, she sees Brinkley as her friend and playmate and was essentially trying to roughhouse with him. As cute as this is, I quickly realised I will need to learn how to train her because as she grows, she will quickly be able to squash Brinkley if she continues this kind of playing.

    5. Calves are more work than you expect, but definitely worth it.

    To say I was naïve before raising a calf, would be an understatement. I truly thought that cows were calm slow moving, gentle giants. I thought feeding a baby cow would be simple and possibly even therapeutic. I did not expect to have to learn so many things on the fly. The sheer amount of milk replacer she needs every day was an eye-opener. Having the properly wash the bottles to remove all the residue otherwise it quickly stinks up the kitchen, was an important lesson early on. The work of having to clean out the stall, carry fresh water to the barn in a large enough bucket that she can’t tip it over, has been exhausting some days, particularly when the girls haven’t slept well the night before. I have learned how strong even a once month-old calf can be and have been licked and chewed more than I ever thought possible from an animal. Still, I would get a calf again in a heartbeat, especially now that Buttercup is drinking from a bowl. The work is hard and time consuming sometimes, but soon she will be out in the field grazing through acres of grass, free as can be, and these first few weeks will have been worth it. If nothing else, seeing Cece and Penny have this bond with their first cow, makes it all worth it, although it might make eventually eating her a bit more difficult.

  • The things you learn when trying to add livestock to your homestead…

    Because we live in Manitoba, spring takes a while to reach us. During the cold winter months, we turned our attention to acquiring animals for the spring. There are certain things I expected to learn when we started the endeavour into homesteading/hobby farming. For instance, I assumed I would learn a lot about the importance of proper fencing with animals, how to properly care for various farm animals, how to slaughter those animals humanely and where to go to process the meat. However, there were certain things that I did not expect to learn during this process, some which made me laugh and others that simply frustrated me to no end. Full disclosure, some of these discoveries will come as no surprise to anyone who has experience in hobby farming, but as a first-time homesteader, I was naively unaware about pretty much everything involved in the process.

    To start, I had the very foolish idea that it would be easy to find animals to add to our farm. I honestly assumed that I would simply type into Google “calf for sale near me” and that I would be able to find one relatively quickly for a reasonable price. Part of the reason I believed this was because last year when we were just starting to talk about getting animals in the near future, we had asked Brent’s cousin who has cattle, and he had told us that we should be able to find a calf pretty easily and that we shouldn’t pay more than $500 per calf. This seemed like a pretty decent deal for the amount of meat we would be able to get once it was fully grown. Unfortunately for us, we could not have predicted that cattle prices would skyrocket by the next year when we started looking for ours. When we started looking, we noticed that people now are asking $1000-$1500 per calf! Not only that, but there are way fewer people offering up bottle calves and people are clearly jumping at the chance to get them, thus justifying the price. As we continue looking, we are faced with the not so fun prospect of having to spend double what we had intended and then add on the fact that some of these cows are 2.5-3 hrs away from us. Brent remains confident he can find a cow for cheaper, despite the fact that when he posted an add on one of the cattle selling pages saying “$500 cash for a calf, will pick up today” most of the responses included people telling him he was dreaming or that he needed a time machine.

    Despite Brent’s confidence to be able to find a calf for a good price, we started discussing the idea of getting a yearling. For those unfamiliar with cow terminology a yearling is a cow between one and two years old that hasn’t had her first calf. This was disappointing to me because I had hoped to have the experience of a cute little cow that the girls and I would be able to feed with a bottle and bond with before the inevitable slaughtering time. Now, my mother questioned whether that would perhaps make it harder to kill and eat and that the girls might not be happy when their cow was gone. I would like to be clear that we have had full discussions with Cece about the process and explained that we want to make sure that the meat we are eating was treated well before it was killed and didn’t come from a feedlot. Penny is still too young to really understand so I am sure we will have some tears there for sure. This led to some new discoveries when we were looking at older cows, either male or female because at this point, we aren’t as picky. The funniest discovery I made was how the male cows that were up for auction were detailed in their write up. They always mention the birth weight, what breeds their parents were and then, if they are being sold as potential breeders, they list their scrotal circumference…The first time I saw this I couldn’t help but laugh. I was just not at all prepared for the idea that it would be something to even consider. This also led me to questioning who has the unfortunate job of having to measure something like that? Also are buyers actually going to get out a measuring tape to confirm that it is accurate? I am assuming that seeing as it is listed on many of the breeder bull write ups that it is something that is often considered when purchasing a bull, but I think I can confidently say that it will never be on our checklist when purchasing any future cattle.

    With cattle seeming more and more expensive and in short supply, I decided to turn my attention to my animal of choice, as well as Penny’s, sheep. In my mind, they are so cute and fluffy. I have seen several Instagram reels about curious and rambunctious sheep, most notably the little black-face sheep. Obviously, I was curious about whether or not we could get some black face sheep and quickly discovered that they were called Valais Blacknose sheep. In my mind, this name is deceiving because it isn’t just their noses that are black, but alas, that is their name. I had seen some ads for other breeds of sheep, and they all seemed to be asking between $80-$150 per lamb. This seemed extremely reasonable, especially after seeing the prices for cows. I figured, if regular sheep were $150, then a special cute breed like the Valais, would probably be maybe $300. Oh man was I wrong! On the Valais Blacknose site that sells out of Manitoba, they were asking $35,000 for one of their rams! And yes, I checked the numbers several times to make sure I read it right, and no I did not mess up on my decimal point typing this out. I could not wrap my head around how someone, would willingly pay that much money for a sheep. Now I am sure, if I looked around and did more searching, I could find some for slightly less, but still the idea of spending tens of thousands of dollars on a sheep just blew my mind. Thankfully, one of our neighbours down the road has some pregnant ewes and we are on standby for some lambs.

    Finally, I discovered that there is a wide range of animals that fall under the “livestock Manitoba” search on Kijiji. I found many people selling rabbits, which I know the girls would love to have, but Brent and I have agreed it will never happen. We told the girls that they technically have a pet bunny that we see in our front yard all the time. To make it feel more like their own pet, we told them to name the bunny, so we now say hi to Dandelion most mornings as she or he, really who knows, eats their breakfast in the morning. I made the mistake of letting the girls look with me through the ads once and they saw that someone was selling ostrich eggs for hatching and included pictures of the fully grown ostriches. This created terror in Cece and Penny got upset when I said we absolutely could not buy an ostrich. The variety of birds available is astonishing, and also unsettling for me as someone who really dislikes birds. The girls wanted all of them. That was until they saw the goats, dwarf goats, mini horses, mini donkeys and at one point a mini highland cow. That last one was the hardest for me to say no to, because I would love to have a highland cow, mini or full-sized. We even looked up some mini highlands at one point, and they were hardly better than the Valais sheep. They wanted $25,000 for one mini cow…I did eventually find a more reasonably priced site that was asking only $3500 per calf, but still a lot to pay for a pet.

    Despite all these high-priced animals and scarcity of calves, this has not deterred us one bit from wanting to start our farm. Brent has purchased the fencing; we’ve been mapping out our acreage and I have spent many nights reading about what is required to raise bottle-fed lambs. I am still excited to get to raise some animals and get to teach my girls how to take care of them as well. I am confident that at some point in the future, when I am much more knowledgeable about farming, I will look back at these days when I was naïve and laugh about my shock and surprise with the details of purchasing animals. But for now, I will always laugh at the idea of some poor worker whose job it is to measure the scrotal circumference of the bulls going up for auction.

  • My reluctant journey into gardening

    As I have mentioned before, gardening is not something that came to me naturally. I am the youngest of four daughters. All three of my older sisters each worked a summer at a plant nursery. They each spent a summer, in the heat, working long hours with plants, doing manual labour. I would see them come home dirty, tired and often sunburned. Despite all the work, dirt and sunburns, they all told me it was worth it as they made great money for a summer job. I opted instead to make slightly over minimum wage at Starbucks. I am embarrassed to say that back then the idea of my hands having to get super dirty, or the possibility of bugs being around, freaked me out way too much even if it meant making a lot of money. I preferred to consume way too many frappuccinos and burn my hands with ridiculously hot milk when certain customers would insist on specific temperatures for their milk as if somehow drinking scalding milk made you more sophisticated than drinking regular lattes. This was of course back when you could still request exact temperatures at Starbucks, and we had to write down every preference on the cup with a sharpie instead of the computer just printing off the order to stick on the cup. Yes, I am still to this day a bit jealous that we had to do so much more than the baristas must today.

    It wasn’t like we had tons of plants growing in our small cement pad of a backyard growing up. There was a little flower bed in front of the house, that included some giant bush that was apparently always taking over everything. I remember we had some chives as my dad liked to have fresh chives. Mom always had some plants and flowers growing in the backyard flower bed, but I couldn’t tell you what they were as I always just remember the ivy that seemed to take over the whole back fence. There were a few house plants growing up, but I don’t think I ever watered them or even took an interest in knowing how often they should be watered. I will always remember when we tried to have an apple tree, and we got a little one in the back yard. Our dog promptly chewed it down to nothing, and that was the end of that. We also didn’t need to ever mow our lawn or use a weedwhacker because we lived in a townhouse, and they had someone who was responsible for yard maintenance. When I was living with my sister and her husband, when I first moved to Winnipeg, I remember being so fascinated by his electric mower that I pleaded with him to let me mow the lawn because it was such a novelty. That novelty quickly wore off and I never did it again.

    Even when Brent and I moved into our first house together, I rarely mowed the lawn. He used to work on the railways and would sometimes be gone for two or three weeks at a time, and I would leave the grass to grow until he got back. I never raked the leaves or did any weeding, I took the approach that dandelions gave a little colour to our boring grass out front, much to the horror of my mother-in-law. She only lived a few blocks away and I would often look out my front window and see her there pulling weeds from my front lawn. She is an avid gardener, and her backyard always looks like something out of a gardening magazine. The first time I met her was when Brent brought me home for a backyard barbecue dinner, and I was so amazed at all the flowers she had and how perfect they all seemed. Not only did she grow beautiful flowers, but she had raspberries and tons of vegetables that she used for canning. It was amazing, but it seemed like so much work that I continued to happily tend to my one lilac tree that had come with our house that only required the occasional trimming, which I would generally pass off to Brent. She tried, in vain, to plant flowers in our yard, and I promptly managed to kill them all. Not exactly a recipe for a great future homesteader.

    We did have some small success with a few vegetables in our small yard. We planted cucumbers which actually vined up the lilac tree which was pretty impressive and made picking them very easy. We got a few cherry tomatoes, though we lost a lot to bugs. Our peppers never lasted and always got bugs or diseased before they were ripe enough to pick. Our biggest successes were our potatoes and raspberries that we planted in front of our house. Our raspberry bush went crazy and was producing awesome berries. The potatoes I found to be the most satisfying to cultivate. Every time you dig into the dirt, it feels like you are searching for buried treasure. The potatoes and raspberries were the first big crops, or at least I thought they were big at the time, and they really sparked my curiosity in my gardening potential.

    When we moved to our new house in the country, it was the first day of September, so we were not going to be harvesting any crops that year. We did, however, inherit two crab apple trees, a mini apple tree, a chokecherry bush and grape vines from the previous owners. We collected box, after box, after box, of apples during that first month in the house. There were apples everywhere. I had no idea what we would do with this many apples and it felt extra daunting as I was 8.5 months pregnant at the time. Ultimately, we chose the easiest option which was to make them into applesauce. We filled almost our entire small chest freezer with applesauce. My mom came by to help with the chokecherries which she graciously offered to turn into chokecherry jam for us as long as she got to keep some. Free jam and free harvesting, um yes please! She also decided to pick all the grapes and turn them into jam as well. Seeing all of our preserves from doing absolutely nothing, I was certain that I would be able to handle this gardening thing and that I would be able to make all kinds of foods with our fresh produce.

    In the spring, we started planning out what we would be putting into our garden. As Penny is born at the beginning of October, I became obsessed with the idea of having a pumpkin themed birthday for her and insisted that we make a pumpkin patch, something that we had never had the space, nor the interest in my case, in doing before. Brent got some help from our neighbour and tilled a patch behind the barn that turned out to be bigger than our entire lot of our old house. He threw in the seeds we had saved from the 9 pumpkins we had bought in October when we had first moved in, and we figured we would see what happened. What happened was we ended up with close to 400 pumpkins. I was shocked and pleasantly surprised. We also had another huge crop of apples, zucchini, tomatoes, peas, beans, potatoes and cucumbers. All from just testing out throwing some seeds in the ground and seeing what came up. We thought we had hit the motherload for planting. Clearly it was going to be easy to grow our own vegetables out here. We had barely done any research or planning and had huge success with our vegetables.

    Last year, we thought we would take some more time to plan things out as to maximise the growing potential. We started seeds indoors in early/mid spring. We had about 70 tomato plant seedlings ready to go, although some certainly got damaged with having a 1.5 year old and 4 year old wanting to touch them all the time. Regardless, we were optimistic that our gardens would be bountiful again and we even decided to try corn. Unfortunately, Mother Nature had other plans. No sooner had we transplanted our 70 tomato plants that we were hit with weeks of intense rain that flooded our entire garden. Sadly, there were no survivors out of the tomatoes. Our pumpkin patch, which had been so promising the year before, had the opposite problem and promptly dried up leaving our vines scorching. The weeds got away from us and we were dealing with thistles the size of our daughters. Despite efforts from both my mother-in-law and my mother to come help with the weeding, we gave up halfway through as I had little time to deal with it when Penny was still very dependent on me. I managed to get my hands dirty a little, especially with the teeny beets that we ultimately ended up composting as they were so small they weren’t worth much. We got a few cucumbers, four pumpkins, and a couple potatoes, although the potato bugs ravaged our crops last year.

    This year, instead of scaling back we decided to go all out on our seeds. We tested a few seeds from each of our vegetables by placing them in between damp paper towel and sealing them in a Ziploc bag to see if they would sprout.

    We ordered new seeds online, and I decided to no longer fear my flower killing abilities and I ordered a dozen new flowers to try to make my own cut flower garden. Now, is this ambitious, absolutely. We are planting potatoes, corn, peas, beans, pumpkins, broccoli, tomatoes, peppers, spinach, romaine lettuce, beets, carrots, garlic, onions, raspberries, strawberries, and blueberries. Would it perhaps have been more prudent to scale back and try to hone our gardening skills to make sure we don’t have another bad crop year like last year, probably. But Brent and I have always been the type to just leap in and figure it out later. We bought our first house 4 days after we decided we should start looking for a house. Brent quit his job when he decided to start his own company 5 months before Cece was born. We have always just believed that things will work out and if not, we will figure it out. This is our approach to this homesteading adventure, and our grand gardening plans, what’s the worst that could happen?

  • My decision to become a stay-at-home mom…

    From the moment we decided that I would stay home with the girls instead of returning to work as a high school teacher, I knew there would be some people who were going to question my decision. I also expected some people to assume that it was Brent’s idea, as it was his idea originally for us to move out to the country. The truth is, I wanted to stay home long before we moved out here. When Cece was born, I had tried to think of ways that I could work it out so that I wouldn’t have to go back to work. Unfortunately, at the time, Brent was just starting his own carpentry company, and it simply wasn’t feasible. So, once we had Penny and we had bought our forever home, I knew it was my moment to convince Brent I should stay home with the girls. I spent many evenings trying to figure out the best way to present my arguments and convince him.

    It started with me dropping hints about how long the drive to and from my mom’s house would be and how much gas that would be using. He suggested that I look at daycares around the town or near the girls’ future school…swing and a miss. It did help my case however, that the daycare attached to their future school had a 5-year waiting period. To which my response was, well after 5 years they will be in school so doesn’t that make the waiting list rather useless? Then I started bringing up more often how it would be really tough to juggle the workload while still being present with the girls, which he agreed with and said the girls were the top priority and he would start running some numbers to see if we could make it work. This was my golden opportunity, my chance to seal the deal and make sure that he would agree that the best option was for me to stay home. I made up a budget for what we would need each month to make it possible, but I wasn’t going to leave it all up to the numbers. Oh no, I had a bigger bargaining chip up my sleeve, one that I knew couldn’t fail me…food.

    As I was home with the girls, and Brent was working, I naturally made dinners during the week. Seeing as I was home all day, there was nothing preventing me from really having fun with it as I LOVE cooking and baking. Being home meant that some weeknights we had a full roast chicken dinner just because I felt like it. He would often come home to fresh baked goods because it was my way to destress while the girls napped. As they say, the best way to a man’s heart is through his stomach. Although, in this case it would be more the best way to convince your man to take on all the financial obligations and let you stay home and be with your kids is through his stomach, but it really doesn’t have the same ring to it.

    Now I am not sure if it was in fact my amazing feats of baking and cooking that sealed the deal, but right before Penny’s 1st birthday, we made the official decision that I would stay home and I sent in my resignation letter feeling completely sure of myself. Completely sure of myself until the next day when I started panicking that I had given up a good paying job that I liked to stay at home and eventually get into hobby farming, something that I had no experience with. It all seemed extremely daunting to me, and I questioned whether or not I would be any good at it, something I sometimes still wonder, but it was hands down the best decision I have ever made.

    When I first started thinking about staying home with the girls, I thought about all the positives. I wouldn’t have a set time that we had to wake up at, I could plan out the days the way I wanted, I wouldn’t need to wear work clothes, I would have concentrated uninterrupted time with my daughters, and I would be able to become a master at hobby farming. First off, it is true I don’t have a set wake up time. Cece enjoys keeping me on my toes about when she will wake up, although it is generally around 1:30 am where she comes into my bed because she cannot stand to sleep in her bed any longer. The way she describes it, you would think her bed was this horrifically uncomfortable bed in a scary dark room, instead of the reality which is a twin bed with tons of stuffed toys, comfy pillows and a sound machine that doubles as a night light that plays soft music. So, my mornings start with Cece in my bed, and then waiting for the sound of Penny coming out of her room usually around 7:30 am. She meanders into my room, generally holding about 3-4 stuffed toys, looking completely unimpressed that she is awake.

    As for planning out my days, Cece is never one to let me forget that wonderful task and asks me first thing in the morning: “What day is it?” Once I answer her, she responds with “What do we do on this day?” Without fail, every single day. The appeal of planning out my days in whatever way I wanted, quickly faded when I realised how tiring it is to give a plan of each day to a 4-year-old every morning. Particularly when that 4-year-old wants each day to be a “special” day and has zero qualms about telling you that your plan sounds boring. Now, in her defense, some days are boring. The days when I need to wash all the bedding, or do some deep cleaning around the house, I agree, boring. The plus side is that she also happens to find things that some would find mundane as very exciting. Both girls get excited whenever we must go to the Post Office. Simple tasks like going to get groceries is fun for them because they like to help me out and put things in the cart. Although now that Cece is older there are a lot more scheduled things that I have to plan around, rather than just choosing what I feel like doing that day. She is in preschool and gymnastics which takes up time and next year when she starts kindergarten, a schedule will be even more set in stone.

    I will admit, not having to wear work clothes is one thing that actually did stay true, and although I know there are some moms out there who still get dressed up and do their hair and make up every day when they are staying home with their kids, and honestly kudos to those moms for managing that, I am so happy to get to wear comfy clothing all day. Now this is not to say that I wear my pajamas all day, far from it, but I enjoy not needing to worry about whether my clothes are professional enough. I rock a crewneck sweater and leggings or jeans most days. Now that the girls are older, it is certainly easier to find the time to shower, do my hair, even diffuse it (anyone with long curly hair will know what an incredible feat that is). I don’t find that I really wear much makeup anymore because I just don’t feel the need. The other day I put on mascara and Cece asked me why I was making myself “all fancy”. Then, of course, Penny wanted lip-gloss to be fancy as well.

    As for the uninterrupted time with the girls, now that I am home all the time, I feel like there are always a million things to get done. We are home much more often now, which means that toys get taken out all day, meaning cleaning up the chaos piles is a daily task. I am not about to tell my kids that they can’t play or make messes with their toys, but having huge messes around the house also stresses me out. Believe me, I wish I could simply live in the chaos and not care, but I can’t, so I tend to be like a little cleaning bot that follows them. P loves helping me clean, she thinks unloading and loading the dishwasher is one of the best activities around, but my wonderful Cece prefers to jump from one game to the next with little thought of the mess. Having this time with the girls, however, has allowed me to be here with them for every new development. I never missed a single milestone with Penny, and it felt so wonderful. I get to be a part of all their games and see the girls playing together which melts my heart until one of them decides the other one isn’t playing properly and they both start yelling or crying.

    Finally, as for mastering my hobbies and becoming a knowledgeable hobby farmer, that has yet to be determined. I have certainly had much more time for baking, which I absolutely love. I have had the time to make soft pretzels, bagels, breads, cakes, cookies, muffins and it fills me with joy seeing the girls and Brent enjoy them. Becoming a homesteader though, is a bit trickier. I have taken out books from the library about gardening, pig, cow, sheep and goat farming. But I feel like reading about them still will not prepare me for when we get our first cow or sheep. The process of even just looking for cow and sheep to buy is daunting: how much should we be paying for a bottle-fed calf? Should we get one that is already weaned, but would that be more expensive? How much should we pay for a lamb, and should we get a male and a female so we can grow our flock or just buy new lambs each year? I foresee this being a trial-and-error process, and I suspect it might come along with many tears. But just as I was sure of being a stay-at-home mom, I am sure I want to try homesteading, and I hope it will also become one of the best decisions I have ever made.