A History of Our Homestead-Part 1

A few days ago, I got lost in a fairly shallow rabbit hole, scrolling back through my instagram grid.  I’m not great about posting but it really was fun to look back at where we started and how far we’ve come. I also realized a few really important things - those lessons, I will get to shortly.  First, I’m going to do a short series of posts that recap our history of moving.

Buckle up! 

Nathan and I have moved quite a lot in our 25+ years of marriage. In fact, I think 14 times is the number I have settled on (this includes a couple of shorter-term rentals, during bigger moves). Someday, maybe I’ll share how moving as a unit of 2 compares with moving as a family of 6 or 7. And then again, maybe I won’t, except to say that I used to love moving…until it involved children. And I used to love moving…until it involved my husband working in another city while I actively tried to keep a house show-ready, while playing the part of a single parent during the week, with a house full of children (at one point, 2 of them under the age of one).

So, I don’t love moving anymore.  

But I digress.

Anyway, the short version of our story is that, in 2015 (about 8 moves into our life together), we uprooted our family to move from Alabama to Georgia for a new job opportunity. We loved it there and saw ourselves staying there for the long haul. 

But then, less than 2 years later, a dream job came open BACK where we originally moved from…and so we sold our new house (we’d owned for a whopping 9 months) and moved again. 

Needless to say, from 2015 to 2017 — with 4 kids (the youngest of whom did. not. sleep.), 2 house sales, a total of 4 moves, and a deployment in the middle of it all — were 2 of the craziest years I’ve ever lived. 

But finally.  In July 2017, we bought a house in Alabama that was pretty dreamy for us…it was the perfect size for our family and sat on 8 acres.  After several years of being settled there, we felt like we could see ourselves staying there forever.

After the ridiculousness that was 2020, we began transforming the place into a quasi-homestead. I really thought of homesteading as a thing to do on pasture land, and we lived in the middle of the big(ish) woods, so a mindset shift was really required for me. We didn’t really have a great setup for livestock - but we decided to try and make our land work for us.

So, we planted ourselves a small garden and raised a small flock of chickens (and, if you’re the kids, we also had: 2 dogs, 5 cats, 2 guinea keets, and a lot of wild animals - everyone counts!).

We were going to make this work.