It's a busy life when you choose to homestead and an even busier one if you are in my shoes! My life can become extremely stressful at times and sometimes the voices in my head ask "is all this really worth it"?  I mean really, I wake up between 5 and 6 am, my husband and myself get ourselves ready for the day, he makes coffee I dress and change our youngest and our grandson who lives with us now, then we drink coffee while feeding ten hungry children, do chores, make bread, teach lessons, build coops, make lunch, tend to the fields, clean house, make dinner, blah blah blah its never ending! By the time I am done organizing and cleaning one room, I start on the next and boom the room I finished looks like I never touched it. Not to mention the fact that I deal with the stress of an unstable step daughter who likes to put us down, talk to us like dirt and then have the nerve to say she is going to kill herself and then either not talk to us for days on end or act like nothing ever happened. I would really like to say a few words to her but I keep my mouth shut and just get on with life.  I guess what I am trying to get at is that everyone has those moments but when you ask yourself is it really worth it, do you quit or keep going.
Well, in the last five years I have asked myself many times if following my dream to be self-sufficient is really worth it and through those years I have always kept going. Why, because by becoming self-sufficient I am not only providing a my family with a healthier up bringing, I am also teaching my children how to provide for themselves and showing them that it takes hard work to succeed.  Sure I'd love to sit outside all day and have a cold ice tea and just relax from time to time but in order to provide for myself and my family gardens need to be filled and weeded, baking needs to be done, animals need to be tended to, canning preserves need to be stocked....homesteading and self-sufficiency go hand in hand, you don't have a middle man to do all the hard work everything about homesteading is hard work but as you get older it becomes routine and eventually you get to enjoy everything that you worked so hard for in the beginning and you know you have handed down valuable life skills to your children and in my case grandchildren.

Christmas is only a couple days away and as a mom of nine, an aunt to three and a grandmother to one wrapping gifts wears me out, not to mention making sure I don't forget anyone can get stressful. Counting gifts and making sure no one got more or less is a very important thing to me, the last thing I want is for one of my precious little angels to think Santa favoured one over the other.
But in all honesty the way we commercialize Christmas now a days stresses me out so much. Christmas is supposed to be about family and friends, about homemade gifts, singing carols, and giving. Not about how many toys we receive, how much we spent on gifts or how far in debt we can get ourselves.
These so called "Hot Toy" lists are created not only to suck money out of our pockets, but are created to manipulate our children into believing that's the only toy they want and so as a parent who wants to please their child they go crazy trying to get this one particular toy even if it means spending hundreds of dollars for a toy they will only show interest in for a few days. Our society has become so commercialized that our houses are full of items that were a want but useless to our everyday needs. Items tend to sit on shelves and collect dust, get thrown in boxes and forgotten about and some are sold at yard sales for not even half the original cost. We are going into debt trying to please people and half of them really don't even give a damn, we have become commercialized and I have had enough!
This Christmas I ended up spending more then I anticipated and as I wrap everything I say to myself WHY? Why did I let myself get caught up in the commercialization that I hate so much, well not again. My children have everything they could ever want, I have a 30 foot trailer full of toy totes that we rotate through (No I am Not kidding you!) And so this is officially our final commercialized Christmas!
Next year while all the other parents are running frantically from store to store finding that perfect gift I will be at home with my feet up reading a good book and enjoying my stress-less Christmas. My children will receive a book, clothing and something special but it won't be next years hottest toy and it won't be purchased from a big box store, it will be either hand made or bought locally. It will be a tradition I should have started long ago and one many others should try to start as well.
So starting today....okay let's say starting December 26th just to be accurate, my house will be a commercialized free zone. No more commercialized Christmas for this momma!

I have to admit when I started using cloth diapers way back in 2003 I was not that committed to them.  I used them here and there but the convenience of using disposables and not having to clean and wash them almost daily seemed so much easier.  So for my fist child cloth diapers where a trial went wrong by pure and utter laziness.
It wasn't until half way through raising my second child that I realized the amount of money I had been wasting...just throwing it away to say the least. Sure cloth diapers where expensive to begin with but after spending $200-350 dollars you never had to spend another dime on them, you just had a little more laundry during the week.
As the years past and our family kept growing cloth diapers grew on me so much that I now HATE disposable diapers! I have an extremely large collection of cloth diaper that range from newborn to toddler, and I am not going to lie my collection is still growing.  I saved money by using my cloth diapers on 8 out of 9 of my children and now find myself still buying more as I not only use them for my little one but on my grandson as well.  I like the convenience of never running out of diapers and Love the fact that I hardly have any trash unlike my first year of parenting where I had a garbage bag full of diapers per week.
Not only do I find cloth diapers to be convenient I love the fact that other then the odd diaper rash during teething my children's bums are baby fresh.  Sure the diaper bag is a little bulkier but I know I am doing my part to cut out disposables from garbage dumps across my province and that makes me feel good!
Nothing beats the sight of freshly washed nappys out on the line.

welcome everyone to my mommy corner! This is a place where I will write more about me and my daily activities as a mom. I needed this page for a while now but couldn't figure out just how to go about adding it to our homesteading site. So now that it's up and running and I have almost figured out how to use the app on my Smart Phone I should be able to update our entire site more frequently. Technology frustrates me something fearce sometimes, I mean just when I figure it out how to work something it gets updated and I am totally clueless again 😜. So Thanks for stopping by much more to write about soon.