I love your sun hat. And I love that you are almost always smiling in your pictures. You make life look so idealistic. You wrote a while back about a book on homesteading where the family with kids had it real hard and life was not all that great. Do you ever think about if you would homestead with kids? I think I read somewhere that you made a choice about kids.

My smiling in the photos is in large part because Mark's always behind the camera.

We decided not to have children because neither of us was drawn to parenthood. Adding kids to the mix would definitely make homesteading harder, but I'm sure it can be done. That said, I think you can only sink your heart and soul into a small handful of things at the same time, and if you have children, they should be near the top of the list. I like to tell Mark that he married a single Mom --- with the farm being my offspring --- so my small handful of heart-and-soul projects were pretty much full up once I let Mark in. Even with just us and the farm, it can sometimes get overwhelming (like during this spate of deer invasions...)