Lost and Confussed

During the past year I have been overwhelmed with life's reality, I have had to put my life and dreams on partial hold and have learned more then most will ever know. For those who don't know me, I am overly nice, maybe even to nice. I was raised to be polite, considerate and help others who need to be helped, growing up I always wanted to be a mom and when I was about eight years old I met this wonderful family who babysat me, they were foster parents and so kind and thoughtful. Every child that came into that house, whether it be over night, a few days, months or even years, each one was treated like family, like they belonged. It was then that I had realized that not only did I want to have a large family, I wanted to help kids that needed a family or a home. 
​It's been twenty seven years since I decided I wanted to be a foster parent or adopt and in all honesty I admire those who can do so. For the last fifteen months we have been kin parents through the kinship program and I don't know if its because I have nine children of my own or the fact that I am a schedule person and am used to having half my year scheduled by January for appointments, but kinship is the most stressful life you could imagine. Maybe being a foster parent is easier because you don't have to actually deal with the children's parents and you don't know the background, I don't know but since I've been a kinship parent my life has been expected to just stop and it seems that I'm supposed to put my children and their appointments and life second to our kin child. 
​When we moved here in June of 2016 we had plans, we had dreams of what we where going to do with our land, our home and our lives, now sitting her in December 2017 we still have our dreams and our plans for the future, but we have a lot of unneeded stress and fears and honestly it really brings you down. We lost days in the field last year because I had to travel to access visits, so my husband had to take on my job and homeschool our children on those days and between me being away and Mother Nature providing us with huge amounts of rain on the days I was home, our garden was planted late and after planting season was done coincidentally so where those visits. Farming is hard enough on its own but when its just your husband and yourself and your learning to farm, homeschooling and trying your best to homestead and be self-sufficient time is money. So as many of you know our crops didn't do so well this past harvest, our beets, kohlrabi, radishes and tomatoes did well but being that they where planted late our harvest was only enough to preserve for our family's winter storage. And our hay, well due to not having our own equipment we lost a lot when the people we hired had their machinery break down and our field that gives us close to 2000 bales was still like soup by September. We've learned that with homesteading and farming comes loss and fails but when you add on the stresses of not knowing if your coming or going, hearing two sides of things and not knowing what to believe, and being forced to treat one child different from the others, well it makes life a lot harder. I had plans to place my children in "after school" programs this year, but even that was put on hold because we no longer live on a set schedule and its like other people our running our lives.  I find it funny how many double standards there are with the whole kinship program, and how funny it is that you can basically abandon a child and then over a year later when they are set to be placed in someone else's care, you can say hey I've changed and uproot a child and try and take them out of the only home they know, in my eyes its not looking out for the well being of that child or the family who cared and loved for them. How is it that protecting a child and giving them a loving stable home means that you are expected to change your whole life, that all of the sudden you are expected to uproot your way of living to accommodate someone who abandon their child and refuses to even verbally communicate with you to know their child.  As 2017 comes to an end, I am taking back my life, my homesteading, my farm and my family. I will no longer have someone else schedule my life for me and I refuse to be told to be nice to people who disrespect me and my family. Life is way to short to live a life full of stress, our dream was to live as self-sufficient and happy as we could and by golly I refuse to let that change anymore.
​So looking ahead into 2018, our blog will be updated weekly after January 20th and our journey will begin all over again. I hope everyone had a Merry Christmas and all the best to all our readers in the New Year!