We live on a lake in Northern Michigan, with a third of an acre of land. The back yard is sloped towards the water, and the front yard is mostly garden and wood from the trees we dropped in the fall.

We don’t have a lot of property. Dad wants to hunt, Mom wants to farm, my sister and I just want a spot where it’s quiet and away from people. We would like to have a smaller house and more land, and talk about it constantly, but we’re not sure if it will ever happen.

But we do what we can with what we have, where we are.

 

Mom, ‘Sid’, stays at home to school us. She cooks nearly all of our food (she and I are on the GAPS diet), gardens, reads about nutrition and essential oils, and runs us everywhere. You can imagine how busy she is.

Dad, ‘T’,provides a lot of the meat we eat through hunting and fishing. He’s often fixing machines up to sell, fixing the many things that break around the house, and building the inventions that Mom thinks up. (If she can think it, he can make it.)

I (16) drag everyone around the state to my violin lessons and gigs, but I get them mini vacations with free hotel rooms and campsites. I’m the dishwasher, which is no small feat since we cook everything and don’t use the microwave, and a guinea pig for Mom’s food and health ideas.

My sister, ‘C’ (14), has a love for animals – specifically horses – and disabled people. She volunteers at a ranch that uses rescued horses therapeutically for both the physically and mentally handicapped. She’s also a cellist, but is not as involved in it as I am. She takes care of the animals at home, too.

 

We do a lot of things differently from most people, and we do our best to take care of our bodies and creation, as God has told us to do. 

We’re not very original, we take a lot of ideas from our friends and the internet. Call us copycats. We’ll all be writing about those things, but most of all, what we’ve learned.

~M