Hi, I’m Rebecca. I’m married to Colby, my college sweetheart, and we have 7 children. I’m a boy mom all the way: there are six of them, and my little girl sadly (in her mind) is the only girl with no sisters. If I had a nickel for every time she asked us for a sister, I’d be rich! I told her with our track record…well…she’d get another brother. I suppose she will be well-protected and learn to hold her own! Being mainly a boy mom though, I have learned daily to deal with all the indignities that come with it. You other boy moms know exactly what I’m talking about! But it’s also such a blessing to see them growing into young men! We all live in a small, rural town in Texas, in town. Not the country dream we had, but it’s what God has given us. We are making the best of our circumstances and decided to stop waiting for the time and the place to be right to homestead. Instead, we are blooming where we are planted, and have a little backyard suburban homestead complete with chickens and gardens.

I’ve been a homemaker ever since we had our first child. When they became old enough, I began to homeschool them as well. We are classical homeschoolers, and that fits right in with my philosophies. I love classicism and tradition. I love the old ways. Grandma always told me I was an old soul. While my parents worked, Grandma and Grandpa raised us on the farm just a few miles from our own home. She taught us how to bake, crochet, embroidery, sew, can vegetables, shell peas and snap beans on the back porch, and all sorts of other traditional skills that I think many people today have lost. She cooked all the time, and when my parents got home from work there was supper on the table where we all ate together as an extended family. I think I had more meals at Grandma’s house than I ever did at my own. Grandpa taught us how to garden. I still remember sitting on his lap steering the tractor to till the garden, unwrapping strings from stakes to marks off rows, following behind him to put seeds in the holes he poked with the handle of a hoe, watering, and then later harvesting fresh vegetables like radishes, washing them off with a hose, and eating them fresh right in the garden.

As I grew up and we moved away from the farm into the suburbs, it seems like a lot of those skills were forgotten by me. Sure, I grew up on a farm, but now that Grandma and Grandpa are gone, and it’s been so many years since I sat at their feet and learned these skills, it seems like I had to learn all over again as an adult. Add a few kids into the mix, some special needs, and undiagnosed adult ADHD, and life has been pretty hectic for the last 15 years. Some skills I re-taught myself out of necessity. For a season in life we were pretty poor, so learning to cook from scratch was a money saver. Later it became necessary because of food sensitivities and intolerances, and our need to get certain toxins out of our food for the sake of our special needs children who were reacting poorly to the Standard American Diet (it spells out SAD for a reason, folks). Later it became a matter of principle and intention. Food cooked from scratch with healthy and quality ingredients are not only better for you, but taste better as well. I’ve made it my mission to replace every store-bought processed item with something homemade instead. I’m not there yet, but it’s the journey I’m on.

I started this website because I’ve spent the last 15 years learning these skills I once participated in during my childhood. People have asked me often, what’s your recipe for this or that, or I wish I knew how to do what you do. After all the hours helping others learn the things I’ve learned, it was time to share on a platform like this where I could reach more people, and not have to explain it again and again when it could just be in one blog post. I was held back by some negative thoughts though. “I’m no expert. Other people can do this better than I can. My house is a wreck; how am I going to take a video? What if it’s not perfect? What if I don’t have all the answers?” Undiagnosed ADHD can be quite difficult, but now that I know that’s what I have, it’s time to stop letting it hold me back. No longer will the perfect be the enemy of the good. No longer will I procrastinate out of fear that it won’t be just right. And I would never want to give the impression that I have a Pinterest-perfect life. Spoiler alert—I don’t.

So I’m here for everyone who wants to learn. Come along with me. We will learn it together! I’ll show you what I know, and I’m bound to mess up. But we learn from our failures and we figure out how to do better. If you’re up for that, then welcome to the club! Life is messy. All I can say is, Lord bless this mess!