One of my favorite children's books is If You Give a Mouse a Cookie by Laura Numeroff. First of all, this book fits my personality in how I tend to jump around with ideas, inspirations, thoughts, etc. It also has a deeper meaning to me. The deeper message is that you don't always know where a decision will lead you.
When you say "yes" to something, you are inevitably saying "no" to other things. Despite the discussion of inequalities and unfairness, we all have the same number of hours, minutes and seconds in a day. We must choose how we spend that time. When we choose to participate in activity A, we cannot also participate in activity B, etc. Yet, there are some activities that we choose to participate in that begin a trail of unforeseen adventures. This is a story of one of them.
As moms, we tend to focus solely on our kids. We sometimes even forget who we were, what we liked to do or how to behave when not performing some tasks entirely related to our children. A few years ago, I started some small refinishing projects in our garage to escape and have some alone time.
(Full confession: it was indirectly related to the children. I didn't want to spend a lot of money on furniture for their bedrooms knowing that they would eventually destroy it, yet I wanted their rooms to have functional and pretty furniture.)
Working on these furniture rehab projects in the garage provided the solitude that I craved at that time in my life. It turned out that this furniture project was my cookie, as it is referred to in the book. After encouragement from family and friends, I started to sell some of these projects.
Then, it grew into a side hustle with a few craft shows. We added the products from the master crocheter (The Master Crocheter – PJ's Projects (pjsprojects.com).
Later in 2020, when the hubby had his hours cut from his j-o-b, he spent some of this extra time creating woodworking projects to add to the business.
The woodworking projects inspired customers to ask for custom orders. I agreed to many of them with confidence that the hubby would figure it out and produce a great product. He reluctantly agreed and the confidence in his abilities grew. He began to take on more complicated projects and the orders rolled in.
Then, our kids wanted to participate in the fun. They have contributed to some painting projects, modeling for the blogs, taking photos and videos and even creating and building some woodworking projects of their own. Now, almost all of our toy swords and knives are made by our 14-year-old.
The same snowball effect happened with homesteading. I missed my grandmother and all of the things that she knew and did without even considering how important or essential they were to a home. I discovered a renewed interest in learning the hard skills that I had ignored growing up. I started canning, homeschooling, dehydrating, cooking from scratch, growing a garden, raising chickens and it quickly grew from there. Have you ever heard of the issue with chicken math? Chicken math doesn't follow the rules of normal math. The numbers grow exponentially without a real explanation. It's truly a conundrum.
I don't think the growth of homesteading, or the business could have happened without the entire thing becoming a family effort. We all have our talents and things in life that we simply do not enjoy. Yet, everyone has found ways to make this alternative lifestyle (working from home, raising livestock, exploring permaculture methods, homeschooling, etc.) beneficial to them.
The kids have been the optimistic catalyst for most of the decisions to grow and get bigger. I admit that if left to my own devices, I would have gotten lazy, quit, or switched gears, when things became difficult. The kids have endless energy and apparently a limitless number of ideas. They want to do ALL the things. They want to experience life and all the things this world has to offer to their young minds. Most importantly, they have goals. These kids are more goal-oriented and hard working than I ever was at their age. They know what they want to do and are not afraid to try it. Their mindset is inspiring. The individual goals are different for each child (and will probably change over time), but we want to encourage and support their dreams as much as we can.
As a result, the kids are pushing us further than we ever dreamed of going with PJ's Projects and our homesteading adventures. With their encouragement:
- We are trying new things and learning together.
- We are growing in scope, livestock, fertility and design.
- We are risking failure to help our kids succeed.
- We are growing roots for our children to brace them against the storms of the future.
- We are transforming our property into a real, bona fide, soil enhancing, income-generating, sustainable production system called a farm.
We are proud introduce Growing Roots Farm, established in 2023.
Stay with us as we begin to incorporate more farm-related materials onto our website. Then, who knows where this will lead?
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