Welcome and Goal setting

Hello everyone and welcome!

I am Amanda and this is one woman's journey from a country living pampered chick to homesteading pioneer woman. *ha, ha, ha!
But seriously, I hoping to use this blog as an outlet to document my new experiences and adventures! I'm hoping to write about homeschooling, growing your own food, canning your own food, raising chickens, goats, and bees, making soap, knitting, crocheting, cooking from scratch (or cooking by scratching as my kids say), and so on and so forth. Basically this will be my adventure of my new life as we head toward self sufficiency. See, I'm just starting this whole "grow your own food, live off the land, knit your own socks, own a goat" lifestyle. I do a LOT of research and irritate talk to a lot of people for advice. So if you would like to follow along with me, WELCOME!

So first off, it is January... time of changes, big dreams, goals, and plans. So that is exactly what I am doing. Gathering research, planning, dreaming, and basically driving my husband crazy with seed catalogs, elementary drawings of garden boxes, and chicken facts. So my big plans for this spring are...

• to get a flock of laying/meat chickens established (dual purpose birds)
• to clear some ground to plant a feed plot (or maybe two or three)
• to have a kick butt garden
• to start an orchard

I was really really lazy last year and didn't can a darn thing from our garden. This year, I would like to can everything! I'm so tired of buying crap food from the grocery store when I know that homegrown food is so much healthier for you. So I suppose that is another goal.

Another goal set, would be to become more knowledgeable about natural health care and medicine. I'm sure that anyone reading this blog knows me so you probably know that I am a RN. I know a lot about traditional medicine and I definitely know that the health care system is broken. We have (almost) no preventative care. Therefore, I am making another goal for this year to learn as much as I can about alternative, holistic medicine. To learn ways to make myself and my family as healthy as they can be so that we may not need traditional health care (or use it as little as possible!). Along with this goal is always the goal of losing weight and getting myself fit. I'm not sure what that really has to do with homesteading, but it has a lot to do with being healthy! Ha!

I'm sure there is another 100 things I could add to this list but for now, I think I'm done. It's bed time because... I'm getting up early tomorrow (0500) to exercise and start day 1 of all my new changes. I know, I know...it sounds silly but really, doesn't all change have to start somewhere?! So, tomorrow is my day! Have a great evening everyone!