Time To LOVE Our Land Again...

As our busy lives start to get a little easier with the kids basketball season ending this past weekend, we are starting to get excited for springtime here at the Homestead. This past weekend we had our final basketball tournament about an hour and a half away, so we decided to rent an Airbnb and make a 3 day mini getaway out of it.

Payton Opening the Gate to the Garden

We didn't do much, but we actually needed the rest. As many of you know, we homeschool our children, but they play basketball for a local Christian school who lets homeschoolers play. It is a true blessing and we love many of the other families who have children on the team.

But between our business and running kids to practices and games, winter can be a little overwhelming at times. And with the horrendous winter we have had this year (again), it was exhausting.

I've been thinking a lot lately, about our goals we had over the past decade of living simpler, and realize we haven't achieved some of those goals due to our busy lifestyle at times. I recently watched a video from Roots and Refuge (a big YouTube channel), and it really hit home with me.

She (Jess from Roots and Refuge) travels a lot due to a lot of requests to have her speak at various Homesteading conferences, etc. In the video Jess talked about how they made the decision to slow down this year and will be staying home all year. I can really relate.

Janel and I have made a plan for this year and we are really excited about it. We can't reveal a ton of what that means, but part of it is to get back to to living the lifestyle we love. More home time, more family time, more growing stuff and more outdoors!

We are almost done with our new barn. Some of you remember the fire we had in 2024 where we lost our barn and all of our animals, garage, tractors/implements and a lifetime of tools. It was devastating. See the video here. Since then, we have rebuilt most of everything, but have not gotten animals yet. We really miss that. We LOVED raising animals.

So this year we have decided to slow down a bit and fall in love with the land again. To raise more food. To add animals again. To get more healthy. (I've lost over 13 pounds so far!). We also have some exciting news to share later this year, but that's for another blog!

Stay tuned for more blog AND vlog posts on upcoming projects here at the Homestead. Including finally adding animals again. It will be emotional. We are looking forward to living this lifestyle with the intentionality that we did years ago. We are excited!

Thanks for checking in! God bless. -Steve