Who I am, What I am about

 My name is Sarah, I live on a small plot of land in Central Maine. I am a stay-at-home mom, aspiring homesteader, novice chicken keeper and home cook. I’m also a lazy housewife.

When I say lazy I don’t mean that I sit at home
eating bon bons and watching soaps. I suffer from severe Anxiety and Depression. Some days it feels like all I have to get off the couch. I want to do things, but I can’t. As a teen and young adult others complained that I didn’t do anything. Lazy, no ambition, anti-social. I’ve heard it all.  It used to bother me, now I really don’t care what others think. I crack a joke, own it and go about my day.

To cope, I began to pursue things that gave me joy. I grew up loving “old-fashioned” things. Frontier life fascinated me. The idea of carving out a life from the wilderness appealed to me in a way that I can’t explain. I read everything I could find related to Pioneers, farmers, homesteading, and Native American life. I devoured The Little House on the Prairie books by Laura Ingalls Wilder. Family and friends found it funny that someone as “lazy” as I was, could be so drawn to a lifestyle that required so much work. It’s very liberating when you stop worrying about others. I kept reading and began dabbling in my passions.

My husband and I have been hobby gardening for a few years. Mostly tomatoes and herbs. I’m starting to get really good at growing herbs! I love using fresh ingredients in my cooking and my kids love learning about plants, the look on their little faces when the first sprouts show is priceless. I quietly dreamed of expanding our little hobby garden into an actual backyard homestead. It was a hard sell to my husband, he knows how some days are struggles for me and he didn’t think I’d be able to handle the workload. Though, he started to warm up to the idea after we moved to a more secluded area with more land and a larger house. He knew I was very passionate about being able to support ourselves using the land around us. He also knew that I cared about what kind of world our children would inherit. After agreeing to start small, adding one new endeavor at a time he agreed to work towards our own homestead! Our first project after a much larger garden is a backyard flock of laying hens!! I ordered a flock of 15, day old chicks from the local farming supply/feed store and we were another step closer to my dream of a backyard homestead.

Our chicken brooder was a simple set up, a box in a dog kennel to protect the chicks from our cats, pine shavings for litter, water and feed containers and a heat lamp. Right away I had 3 chicks with ‘pasty butt’. Waste had caked over the vent. Nothing says commitment like scrubbing a chickens butt. Pasty butt can kill your chicks so it’s best to get it taken care of right away. I spent a lot of time researching online
and the general consensus was warm water, and cloths or q-tips. I chose to use q-tips soaked with warm water and gently swabbed the waste off the chicks. I then made sure each chick was fully dried off before being placed back into the general population.

Our next hurdle was pecking. Chickens peck each other, they are pretty brutal about it too. It is a natural thing that can’t really be controlled. However, my chicks decided to gang up on one particular, unlucky girl. I found her bloody and missing a good deal of tail feat

hers. If left in the brooder with the others I was sure that she would have been pecked to death. My only option was to separate her until she healed up. I made an “isolation suite” out of an empty diaper box. Once she was cleaned up I placed her in the box near the original brooder. My son named her Pickle. Pickle the Pullet, healed in a matter  of days and was back in the brooder with the others. Our cute little flock is a month old now and will soon be ready for their coop. Which we have yet to build.

I’ll be using this blog to show our homesteading progress, the failures alongside the successes. Thanks for coming along for the ride! Check me out on Instagram for daily posts @lazyhousewife86, and leave a question, comment, or encouragement below!