My home is my land...for now

Warning: This is more of my train of thought than a coherent essay.

I have been thinking a lot lately about moving. Not moving far. Just to the country. A huge garden, many chickens, a couple of goats to milk, maybe a pony for the kids. I have been looking into how much we could sell our house for. I've even been scrubbing the bathtub and thinking about paint.

 I scrubbed the bathtub so hard and for so long that it became real physical labor. The kind one who wants a homestead and wants to work outdoors in the garden and with animals craves. So I had an epiphany. Taking care of my home will substitute for taking care of my land...for now. I just have to work HARDER.

I feel like I already take pretty good care of my home. I value my home, I value the FEELING of home. However, I do homeschool and I do have four young kids. So my house gets dirty. My walls have holes in them from when some kid slid the rocking horse down the stairs. There are holes from doorknobs. There are happy faces and sad faces and height marks. These things can be fixed when the time comes. For now, I will work on keeping counters, hardwood and tile floors, fixtures, etc. in good shape.

"Grow where you are planted."

 I believe in this. Sure, I LOVE mountains, clear streams, and cool summer nights. But I also love Texas. I also love my family. 

While we (more like I) think of moving, I do not want my home to become just a house. I want it to remain our HOME. I want to take care of it a little better, yet still really LIVE in it. I do not know how long this process will last. 

We will likely need to sell our house while living in it. Then we will need to move to an apartment until we find our FOREVER home.

Simplify. Take care of the FEW things we own.

My goal is to be living and working on our homestead by the time I am 35. I am almost 32. I want to spend a lot of my younger years there and I want my children to be raised there.

While in our current home I want to study and experiment. I have found that reading blogs and checking out gardening books is not very helpful if the people do not live in my part of Texas. Duh. So I need to start studying the very local. How we grow right where I am. I can work on canning with store bought or farmer's market bought items. I have the materials to make my own soap but have not yet tried. I've only made one type of cheese and would like to make more.

One thing that hit me while reading Ben Hewitt's book Saved was that I should enjoy spending large amounts of time in the kitchen. I should be thankful I have that time. I should not resent it. We have a very relaxed lifestyle. Sometimes, thankfully, we do not drive once during a day or stretch of days. I love that. So why do I try to cook fast meals? 

Weird.

So, in all honesty, we will probably live in a trailer. 

However, in my romanticized mind I think of this.

In other news, we have been participating in a family nature scavenger hunt. Here are some photos from our "forest" hunt.