The reason Why

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.