Let’s talk ticks.

Not my favorite topic – and honestly never something I thought I’d be writing a blog about. But they’ve been splashed all over media regarding the health issues they bring – which is in my wheelhouse – so here we are.

My First Foray

My first experience with a tick was when I was a teenager. I had happened to glance and notice something that looked like a spider was on me – eww. This was my first thought. And then – brush it off immediately.

But wait. It didn’t brush off. No matter how many attempts I made, it seemed as if it was attached to me. WHAT?!? Cue immediate teenage meltdown and screaming. Only my older brother was home at the time and the tick was high on my hip near my undergarments – so there was no way I was going to let him help me! Well, after some coaxing over the phone from my mom and tears shed, I’d agreed to let him help me by burning the tick and removing it - while maintaining my dignity.

Fast forward to now — if you can even imagine quite a different reality as I come across ticks on a frequent basis. I can no longer scream when I come across a tick, I must breathe and attempt to calmly address the situation. I’ve gotten much braver and more capable, but I’m nowhere near as nonchalant as friends and acquaintances who I’ve seen grab ticks with their bare hands and kill them with their nails. I must also admit, if my husband is home, I’m still letting him deal with it if it’s on an animal and not an immediate threat to myself or my children.

A Brief History of Ticks & Biblical Response

Ticks have always been around. They’re not anything new – though the hype of them might make it feel that way if you don’t live somewhere you’re dealing with them constantly. But the fear and severity around them is something that has changed over the years.

Yet, God did not give us a spirit of fear. We may experience fear, yes. But we are not called to live in continual fear. That is a result of living in a fallen, broken world. It truly isn’t what He wants for us:

He wants us to be outside in His creation. Soaking in the sounds, the smells, the sights. Being outdoors is good for us in many ways. He also calls us to steward the things He’s given us. And we can’t do that locked inside our houses.

Funnily enough, my daughters and I were listening to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer last summer (a homeschool book club pick we really enjoyed together) and there is a scene in the book where Tom and his classmate are spending their time in class playing with a tick, as if it were a pet, seeing whose side of the desk it would crawl to. A sharp contrast to the current climate around the pests. Why weren’t they afraid?!

So, if that book was written in 1876, when did ticks become more of an issue - something to be vigilant about per se?

[Side note: There are some discrepancies about the “true” origins of Lyme, Alpha-gal, and Rocky Mountain spotted fever. If you’re one of those who are interested in alternative explanations, I’d highly recommend using those terms as search words on the Weston A. Price website for further reading.]

If you were to do a search online, here’s a quick overview of what you’d find:

1970s – Lyme gets its name

• Lyme disease becomes an official diagnosis after a group of people in or having recently visited Lyme, Connecticut begin experiencing similar symptoms. This included swollen knees, paralysis, skin rashes, arthritis, headaches, and chronic fatigue.1 Origin still unknown.

1980s – Vector Identified

• In the 80s a scientist (Dr. Burgdorfer) also working with Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever (a tick borne illness) links Lyme to ticks as well.¹

Early 2000s – A new illness emerges

• 2009 Alpha-gal syndrome is linked to Lone star ticks

2026 - A climbing trajectory

• Lyme disease and other categorized “tick borne illnesses” are on the rise at an increasingly steady pace. There is no readily available, mainstream cure nor straightforward disease pathway.

Country Folk vs. City Slickers

There is definitely a different mindset around ticks that I’ve found around city or suburb individuals versus country folk. In the country, ticks are just a part of every day life. They’re really hard to avoid – unless you always stay inside, don’t have pets, or tape up your legs wherever you go (ask me how I know about the tape, ha).

Now that I’ve been living in the country for close to two years I do have to laugh at the reactions I used to have. Or the paralyzing fear I would walk with now that I had kids. It was enough to make me avoid forests and taking my children anywhere ticks might be – and then we moved to the middle of the prairie, imagine that. God does have a sense of humor.

Earlier this year, I was at a homeschool meetup and a guest speaker was fielding questions about ticks. People shared they simply wore pants tucked into their socks anytime they went hiking or areas with a high tick possibility. Easy peasy, right? “Wait,” I thought. How am I supposed to wear long pants with long enough socks to tuck them into on 90+ degree days with 100+ heat index in July and August just to avoid ticks?! Spoiler alert, I’m not – and I don’t.

So Lexi, you live in a tick infested region and still go outside, walk in your field, interact with your pets on a daily basis without crippling fear – how do you do it? Well, I may not be as Laissez-faire as my neighbors and friends, but we have found a system that works to help keep us in a lower-risk tick bite population.

Tick Prevention 101

• Cistus Incanus Tea - this tea is made from the rock rose and when drank frequently has been claimed to keep ticks from wanting to bite you. They may still crawl on you, but are said to be less drawn to bite. I have a kiddo that seems especially prone to ticks so she is one I ask to drink the tea more frequently.

• Clove Tallow – Clove is said to be a scent that is not favorable to ticks. We’ve made an essential oil roller in the past, but we use tallow on a daily basis or at least after every shower, so this most recent batch I whipped up I included clove.

• Terrain Support – If you’ve read my previous blogs on the importance of your terrain, you know why I included it here. Having a healthy terrain, a strong immune system, and eating nutrient-dense foods all around will give your body a leg up even if you have a tick bite. Someone with a compromised immune system is more likely to have a negative response to a tick bite versus someone who has a strong immune system. Therefore, this is going to be one of your best preventative defenses. Just another reason to eat well and exercise on a regular basis. (Note: even with a strong immune system, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be vigilant about ticks or respond smartly to a bite)

• Swift Smacks - something crawling on me? I don’t even look before I smack it away. Once I’ve done this, then I can examine whether it was a tick or not – not vice versa.

• Nightly Checks - Every night each of us checks our armpits, anywhere there was tight clothing, and especially our hair. I’ve also heard of ticks on backs, in belly buttons, on toes —so a check with a family member or in front of a mirror does the trick.

• Mowing - keeping the areas where we spend most of our time mowed low helps reduce the number of ticks. They are particularly fond of grasses over 1 foot. They like to hang on the edge with their little arms held out like a toddler asking for “uppies” before they grab onto their victim. (how’s that for a little imagery)

• Tall rain boots - any type of shoe that can easily be grabbed by that aforementioned ‘needy toddler’ is not one I’m wearing in tick infested areas. My lovely nearly knee high tan line is testament to the daily muckboots I wear to ensure ticks do not have a readily available surface to hang onto.

• Chickens - When we only had bantam chickens (little ones) I didn’t notice much of a difference in the tick population. We still had a ton. Now that we have 4 full-sized chickens, they explore the property more confidently and have a pretty wide radius of where they’ll go foraging. This has helped immensely this summer.

• Tick Identification - For the sake of my mind, I have made it a point to learn the different markers of ticks that we find and know which disease they’re said to carry. Can you see this when they’re engorged? No. But if you find one creepin’ crawling along, you can largely tell what they are if they’re full-grown. The nymphs are a bit harder to tell at times.

Tick Action 101

• Tape: Whether you have packing tape, masking tape, or even scotch tape, this is a great way to grab a tick you see freely crawling that hasn’t attached yet. We just stick the tape to the tick whether its on your skin, clothing, or crawling nearby to get ahold of it without squeezing it. Then we enclose it fully inside before throwing it away. I’ve also seen people use cat hair rollers for this purpose after they’ve been out in a tick infested location.

• Tick Key: This thing has been a life saver. For pets. For ourselves. Wherever we are, we like to have these on hand. One thing about tick removal is that you want to be sure you also pull the head out. It can detach if you’re pulling the tick out by its body. Tick keys are such a simple way to place over the tick’s body and slide it back to pull the whole thing out, head and all. We each keep one on our keys and one in the garage for animals.

• Tweezers: Tweezers are another great alternative to the tick key. Before I had heard of it, I had a little tick response kit when we’d go camping, which also contained a pair of tweezers for removal.

• Lighter: For the ticks we’ve removed with the key, we prefer to burn them. There’s no way we want them to continue to crawl around and reproduce or latch on to another person or animal. I believe ticks can lay up to 200 eggs at a time. Gross.

Want to purchase the exact products I use on a daily basis? You can find a succinct list with links HERE.

Bite Response

There are lots of great posts out there about what to do if you have had a tick bite. Things like bentonite clay, homeopathic medicines, tinctures, etc. Things that we would use if we have had a tick we’ve had to remove and confidently identified that it isn’t a deer tick. But I’ll either save that post for another time if enough people indicate interest in such a post or leave it at prevention and let others speak to what to do in that case.

If we were to identify a deer tick had bitten one of us or our children, the first thing I would do is pray. Pray for guidance and direction and a clear mind. Some people choose to send their tick in for testing at a lab – there are some that test for free. I hesitate to do this, because there can be false positives which to me leads to an unnecessary fear.

Others immediately go to the doctor to begin a prescription of antibiotics, which has been said to stop the possibility of Lyme if caught early enough. But other sources state that 20% of the time the antibiotic is ineffective. (Dr. Berg shares in this video that there have been animal studies on the possibility of stevia in stopping the spirochete bacteria). Personally, it’s something I’d like to research more – the effectiveness of antibiotics on prevention of onset and what the alternatives are along with their efficacy.

Lyme is not a disease to mess around with. It can lead to a lifelong battle of pain and managing a disease – something I’m all too familiar with already while managing an autoimmune and genetic disorder. Remember, I’m not a doctor. This is not medical advice. I’m simply sharing what I would do in my personal life, not recommending any course of action you should take.

One thing I would suggest if you are in an endemic area or plan to go camping, hiking, etc. – is to have a plan ahead of time. Have the tools you need to respond. That way, when you find one and are internally freaking out in the moment, you have your plan in place already and can follow that and any backups you may need.

Where do you go from here?

Ticks are close to the top of my list of least favorite things. I’m actually less afraid of spiders now thanks to ticks. BUT because they are a lived reality for us, I understand I cannot live in crippling fear of them like I once did. What’s that saying? Prepared, not scared. The best thing I can do for myself and my family is to be prepared. Prepared to prevent tick bites and prepared to act if a bite occurs. We’ve had about 7 bites among the four of us over the course of 3 years. Prior to moving to the country and while out here.

I’ll reiterate here that God does not want us to live in fear – to hide out in our houses, away from His beautiful creation. That’s not His plan for our lives. So, get prepared. Create your own tick kit. Have some of these preventatives and action tools on hand – and get out there and enjoy the beauty of God’s world!

References

1 History of Lyme Disease - Bay Area Lyme Foundation

Fun fact about me, back in 2020 I found myself in a toxic work environment doing already stressful social work. My family saw how it all weighed on me and my mom, being the entrepreneur she is, suggested I start a business of my own. I knew I’d need something to support my family if I was looking at stepping away from my job.

To be honest, it was my mom’s idea to do curated gift boxes. But my own spin on the idea was to include a gift card in each box to a local business and to only fill the boxes with items from small businesses in the USA. Small businesses were really struggling during the pandemic with shutdowns, and I felt passionate about supporting them by making it easier to find intentional gifts for loved ones. It’s very easy to shop on Amazon. My hope was to do the gift shopping for the customer to avoid that pitfall.

I’m also somebody who doesn’t like cheap, breakable, will-go-unused gifts. Whenever I gift, business or not, I ensure it’s thoughtful and leans a bit more practical.

Once we made the cross country move, I was also consulting as a researcher and trainer during the time and we decided to start homeschooling, I couldn’t keep up with the business and ended up letting it dissolve. It was fun to make curated gift boxes, especially the themed ones and those paired to the recipient’s interests, but homeschooling took precedence for me.

Mid-Spring Baskets Over Easter Baskets

Several years ago, I decided to stop giving my children Easter baskets. I began to feel like it was detracting from the real reason of the holiday – the resurrection of Jesus Christ. My kids began looking forward to the gifts on that day more than time at church or reflection on their salvation.

There are other Christians out there that weave the story of Christ through their Easter giving, but we transitioned to doing May Day baskets instead. [We don’t celebrate May Day as a holiday, we’re just marking it as what feels like true spring.] It actually worked out perfectly because both of my girls’ birthdays are in April and usually fall around Good Friday or Easter – it’s just a lot of concentrated gifting overall. Spreading it out to May worked perfectly for our family logistically and more importantly to better align with our faith.

I see it as a win-win. My kids still get fun-filled baskets and Easter is spent more on reflection on Jesus than receiving gifts. It’s a personal conviction decision. There’s no shaming from me if you do.

But Lexi, you might say, it’s already mid-June, why are you posting about Mid-Spring baskets? Well, it’s been a very busy spring (see why here) and my girls have been very lovingly reminding me on a frequent basis that I hadn’t given them their gift baskets yet.

I had a *rare* free day to myself where I could put together the baskets and have the items be a surprise. Otherwise, my girls are with me everywhere I go. As an added bonus I was able to find a lot of the items on clearance or at our local thrift store. At last, they have received their long-awaited gift baskets and they were a hit.

Anyway, here I am giving you a back story like an online recipe when you’re here for the gift ideas. Without further ado, here are my scrunchy, homesteady, homeschooling gift baskets.

*Full disclosure I will be posting affiliate links on some items – these are brands I’ve purchased before and am not sponsored for this post – I simply want to provide URLs for easy access to those interested and support my family a bit in the meantime. Only buy what you’re truly interested in and can afford!*

Scrunchy, Homesteader, Homeschooling Gift Basket Ideas

Snack Foods

You just can’t go wrong with adding fun snack foods or treats to a gift basket. Most people won’t turn down food, unless they’re picky. And if they’re picky, they probably need to be working on balancing their gut microbiome.

My kids’ gift baskets always. Include. snacks. They’re always asking for them anyway, so why not. Here’s what I included this time:

· Aspartame-free gum

Listen, my little one has loved chewing gum since she was 3-years-old. She has a grandfather that always has Orbit gum on hand. She learned quickly that if she asked, grandaddy would give her some. So, at three she walked around chomping on that gum like she was a full-blown teenager from Clueless. However, I do not like the fact that most gums on the market contain aspartame. Aspartame is a known carcinogen and potential neurotoxin – like, wait, what?! Some studies have even found it to have effects on mood (serotonin & dopamine) and memory.

Basically, my point here is I stopped allowing my little child, with a developing body and brain to chew just any gum. It’s rare she does get gum now, but for special occasions I’ll make an exception – as long as there’s no aspartame.

· Annies Fruit Tape

This is another “for special occasions” treat. I’m not the biggest fan of Annie’s brand, thanks to General Mills acquiring them, but I’m also not a never say never type of person. I allow pre-made treats or buy from big corporations from time to time.

· Made Good Bars

These are little rice crispy alternatives by Made Good. They’re gluten-free and in this case, that was enough for me. I didn’t check the label for seed oils or ingredients. This was a fun gift for my kiddos. My oldest, who has a gluten allergy, loves having Made Good products from time to time.

· Justin’s White Chocolate Cups

I just can’t resist these cups as a little treat for myself – and anything that I find as a treat, usually becomes something my kids long for as well. My oldest always asks for her own. In this case she got them as part as her gift basket.

Beauty products

My youngest is a girly girl. From a very young age she enjoyed putting on lip gloss, was interested in makeup, and always getting in my things. I have always found this interesting because it’s rare that I wear much makeup or lip gloss, I suppose it’s just been woven into her DNA. Therefore, I usually try to find a way to work in a beauty item for her gift baskets.

To be clear, she is not allowed to wear makeup and “lip gloss” is usually chapstick. Because, one, I want my little girls to enjoy being little – not little adults. Two, I think we should all embrace our natural beauty. And three, it’s really hard to find lip glosses without toxic ingredients and the clean ones have a hefty price tag.

My oldest is the complete opposite and is appalled if my youngest wants to put lip gloss on. Her beauty gifts are usually more practical as you’ll see here:

· Bamboo Nail Brush

Living on a homestead is dirty work. There’s constantly dirt or grime under your nails from animal care, gardening, fun outside, you name it. This was the perfect gift for my practical eldest.

· Mineral Nail Polish

Just like lip gloss, nail polish is often full of some really awful chemicals. It’s not always cheap to swap out for better options, but I’ve been working on doing so over holidays and birthdays the past few years. This brand is quality and I scored it on the clearance shelf.

· Organic Face Masks

Both girls love a little pampering. Yes, even us grimy homesteaders. It’s been something they’ve both enjoyed from a young age; it’s become sort of a fun shared activity from time to time. My youngest fell asleep wearing hers and when I went to remove it, I couldn’t find it until the next morning. Ha.

· Hair Detangler

I’m honestly not aware of this brand, but it was on clearance at Natural Grocers and I had just brushed through some very tangled curls that very morning. It just made sense for my little one who loves beauty products – and who was the culprit of the tangled hair.

Educational Gifts

What homeschool mom doesn’t love adding a little learning opportunity into their gift-giving? My kids really enjoy the things I add in as well, so it’s not simply imposed upon them.

· Math Flash Cards

Math is one of the areas that doesn’t come as easily to my oldest daughter. I was at the thrift store and found these pocket-sized flash cards to help reinforce math facts for her to memorize.

· ASL magnetic poetry

The proclaimed favorite gift within the basket for my oldest. She has been working on learning ASL in her free time over the past year and learned part of the lyrics to Forrest Frank’s “Lemonade” in ASL to perform at her co-op share day. We usually check out library books with different signs to learn but thought these would be a fun way to view and learn them on a daily basis.

Homestead Relevant Gifts

The gift baskets themselves were thrifted and will double for usefulness on the homestead. My oldest has been needing an egg-collecting basket and my youngest has wanted a basket while collecting items from the garden. Both can be re-used after the gifting and were roughly the same price as new gift bags from Target.

· Organic Seed Packs

My girls have both asked for a garden bed to take care of this year. We’re honestly behind on our garden and it has sadly taken a back seat to figuring out sheep husbandry and building out our apartment space. This really saddens me because I very strongly believe in growing your own food, but other things have simply taken priority.

When choosing which seeds, I was mindful of their capabilities (flowers for the younger) and timing (what can be planted later in the season). I purchased seeds that require more care for my older child (carrots and lemon balm). Can you get free seed packets from the library? Absolutely! And we do, this was just something to add dimension and fun to the gifts.

What do you think? Are these things you would add to gift baskets for your children? Are there other ideas that have been meaningful and a hit that you would have included? I’d love to hear!

Blessings,

Lexi

Do you ever find yourself wishing that something with a catchy beat you have stuck in your head had meaning behind it that aligned with your faith? There are some fun Instagrammers out there that “redeem” popular secular songs and remix it with new lyrics. I always find these entertaining to watch.

We aren’t a family tha…

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Let’s be honest, not all Christians embrace holistic healing. In fact, some run from it. There is an air of fear of the unknown, the misunderstood, or simply jumping to conclusions. This is largely because it is something that has been unlearned in our current generation and among many Westernized nations.

For thousands of years cultures have turned to God-given remedies for their maladies, ailments, and injuries. Herbs, poultices, teas - all things that grow from the ground or come from animals, have been utilized for miraculous healing. Why miraculous? Because what’s from God is good, and God is thee Miracle Worker.

Are there people who have used what God has given us in perversion? Absolutely. Through witchcraft, in worship of false gods, as a sole source of healing.

I understand the hangup.

It can be hard to navigate good and evil in this fallen world. What’s good is being called wrong and wrong right. Operating in today’s world calls for discernment, lots and lots of it -which requires prayer and time in the Word.

I see where people are coming from. I truly do. But who actually told us that natural healing tools were wrong, and why did we believe them?

I have some ideas about where this specific perversion came from (research the Flexner Report; contemplate money, greed, and power).

The enemy also loves to take what God meant for good and twist it, but why “holistic healing is bad” became blindly accepted among some believers is something I’m still working through myself.

God does reveal himself in various ways. A lot of times it’s in a still, small way - or through His Word, but we’re too busy living of this world to see or hear it.

So, dear reader, I’d like you to contemplate this along with me. Why are the things God has given us - good, beautiful things - now considered evil?

What’s From God is Always Good

In Genesis, God blesses the world with abundance. An abundance of plants, light, herbs, and living things for our use.

When God gave us these things, He allowed us to utilize them. He asked us to steward them, just as we are called to steward our bodies. He knew the world would become broken after the fall, and if you look around, He has already provided everything we need to be restored: red light from the sun, healing energy through grounding, day and night for rest and wakefulness, seasons. I could go on.

He also gave us signals within our own bodies to understand what we need: the condition of our eyes, skin, nails, tongues, and our nervous system. In short, we’ve fallen out of touch with understanding ourselves and those around us. Great-grandma knew though. If little Sally was pale and listless, she knew what to pull from the pantry to help.

I know there will be “what about-isms” even here. “But what about life expectancy?” “What about extreme measures in extreme situations?” Absolutely there is a time and place for medicine and medical intervention, one hundred percent. But that should not be our first response to every bump, bruise, or cold. I’m not criticizing medical advancements. I’m questioning our overutilization of and sole trust in them.

In Ezekiel 47:12, Ezekiel is shown trees along the bank: “their fruit will serve for food and their leaves for healing.” Plants are capable of healing.

So what about that?

Things We’ve Let Culture Steal

Holistic healing isn’t the only thing we’ve let culture distort.

The rainbow, God’s covenant sign, is now almost exclusively associated with a cultural movement. Christians are afraid to let their child wear a rainbow because of how it will be perceived. Is the rainbow wrong? Of course not. The symbol predates any modern movement by thousands of years.

Frequency and grounding. Our bodies have electromagnetic frequencies. This is not new age mysticism, it is biology. The nervous system utilizes bioelectric currents to communicate throughout the body. These signals can be picked up by instruments to give us further insight into what’s going on internally.

God commands the very electrical currents of our world. In Job 38:35, God asks: “Do you send the lightning bolts on their way?” All around us we are surrounded by electrical currents and frequencies. Grounding (simply going outdoors barefoot, feet in the grass) is not a new age practice promoted by wellness culture. It is a physical one with documented effects on the nervous and immune systems. God created the earth. He created our bodies. He made them to communicate.

Bees are another example. They hum at 150 to 400 Hz, which falls within a documented range of emotional healing therapy for humans. God-given, and remarkable.

Herbs and plant medicine have been utilized throughout history by believers; mothers, healers, and medical practitioners. These Christians were not practicing paganism, but stewardship. And there are testimonies where prayer, laying on of hands, and herbs in conjunction provided miraculous healing.

When did we decide that because something has been claimed by a movement we disagree with, the thing itself is off limits? Is that actually a biblical framework, or does it teeter on the legalism of the Pharisees - the ones who missed the miracle of Jesus because they were consumed with the rules?

Pharmakeia — A Word Worth Considering

Understanding Greek and Hebrew gives further insight into biblical texts. One word particularly relevant to this conversation is the Greek word pharmakeia. It appears in Galatians 5:20 and Revelation 18:23 and is translated in most English Bibles as sorcery or witchcraft.

Though there is some nuance to this. It is often difficult to find a 1:1 translation between languages. Take déjà vu for example. Try explaining the complexity of this in two English words.

Sources suggest pharmakeia referred to the use of drugs and potions in pagan ritual. A deliberate manipulation of the body and mind through chemical means to access spiritual powers and deities other than God the Father.

I bring this up to point out that there are Christians who would not touch an herbal tincture who are completely comfortable consuming synthetic pharmaceuticals, some of which contain heavy metals, adjuvants, and compounds derived from sources they would find alarming if they read the ingredient list with a keen eye.

Not to mention the symbol for pharmacy is known as The Bowl of Hygeia – which is a serpent coiled around a chalice. Just a little too coincidental if you ask me.

This is not an argument against all pharmaceutical medicine. Many are derived from natural sources to begin with (e.g. penicillin), then often laden with much more. Rather, this is an argument for consistency. If the concern is what goes into the body, that concern should always be applied.

This is not to encourage a pendulum swing to fear pharmaceuticals. My hope is to invite discernment and faith-driven decision-making rather than fear-driven.

The Danger of Idolizing Doctors

“Let doctors be doctors” is something I’ve been told as I bring to light my concerns with the medical establishment we have today.

“Trust the science” was an oft touted statement over the past 6 years (which as a biologist is a very silly statement to me, as science is literally meant to be probed and tested).

“I trust my doctor” is a common statement around health concerns.

But where should our trust actually lie?

Those versus make it abundantly clear where our trust should lie.

Ultimately, our trust belongs to God and God alone. There is a difference between respecting the gifts and sacrifices of medical professionals and outsourcing the stewardship of our bodies entirely to a system and calling it faith.

Consider 2 Chronicles 16:12. King Asa did not seek the Lord but only the physicians. This is not an argument against physicians. It is an argument against making physicians the primary authority over our bodies in place of God.

I view medicine and holistic care alike as tools God has given us to cope with living in a broken, fallen world; a world where we will not realize our full potential until we receive our heavenly bodies. I see herbs, homeopathy, biofeedback, and iridology as tools from God to be used wisely, not in place of God but ultimately from Him.

God’s provision sometimes looks like a surgeon in the right city at the right moment of a rare diagnosis. That is God working through medicine, not medicine replacing God.

Three Pitfalls to Avoid

The pitfall of fear and avoidance. We can become so avoidant of seeking any care (whether from distrust or cost) that we end up worse off. A small malady becomes a kidney disease. An infection leads to losing a limb, which I have seen happen to someone I know. My own ancestors were Christian Scientists (I am not) who refused medical intervention for my great-uncle when he was twelve years old. He ultimately died. That is not walking in faith, but a theology that has let fear and Gnosticism lead.

The pitfall of miraculous healing. Praying for healing doesn’t always result in that miraculous restoration. We still continue to trust in God. Be pragmatic about it. God can do it, but He doesn’t always do it.

The pitfall of Gnosticism. This is the belief that the body is a prison and that spiritual life is all that matters; physical life and physical sins are less relevant. Jesus rose again in his body. Gnostics would see this as counterintuitive as they view the body as a prison we get released from when we die. Paul writes that our bodies are the temple of the Holy Spirit - the same Spirit that raised Jesus from the dead. Our bodies matter to God. If Jesus’ body was worth resurrecting, ours are worth stewarding.

I’ve heard Christians take a stance of apathy toward their physical health. They say, “I know I’ll die eventually, and at least I know where I’m going” as a reason for neglecting their health. Well yes, but, you are not practicing a posture of stewardship. Stewardship includes ALL blessings from God, including the body He gave you. Some Christian circles view physical health as worldly, idolatrous, or prideful, when God’s word says He will raise our heavenly bodies upon Christ’s return.

Taking care of our bodies is a delicate balance. Neither fear nor obsess. Neither avoid nor idolize.

The Wellness Obsession Danger

On the opposite end of the spectrum, we can find ourselves obsessed with wellness. Whether that be in the pursuit of low-tox living, perfect fitness, or overcoming illness/disease. These pursuits, while good in proportion, can become their own idol. Chasing perfect health can become all consuming.

Terrain theory, biofeedback, herbal protocols, and eating clean are not inherently bad. But when we begin to trust them over God, we have moved from stewardship into obsession. When we are more anxious about seed oils than we are at peace in God, we’ve gone off track.

Health is not the goal. A relationship with God and being well enough to share the gospel is the ultimate goal. Utilizing what God has given us to steward our bodies well is a means to that end - the great commission.

It never hurts to check in with yourself, or with a trusted friend: am I caring for my body so I can better serve God and others, or has caring for this body become my purpose?

Tools, Not Idols

There are a lot of health and wellness tools out there that can be used to detract from our faith. I’m sure some come to mind without me listing them off. My point here isn’t which ones do or don’t, rather we can get so caught up in calling things evil that we miss what God has made available to us.

A knife in a kitchen is not malicious because it can also be used as a weapon. An MRI is not wicked because it uses electromagnetic fields. An ultrasound is not evil because it uses sound waves to see inside the body. A tincture is not sinful because of the properties of the plant. Many tools themselves are not inherently bad. Often times it’s the intent behind it and the authority over it that remains in question, unless we can discern is outright wrong.

I’ve encountered fear over biofeedback for the fact that it gathers information through the palm of the hand, and has been likened to the practice of palm reading. I believe this fear comes from a place of wanting to live righteously. I also think it comes from a lack of understanding. As biofeedback utilizes the nervous system to identify stressors in the body. Similar to standing on a scale that can tell you your fat content and bone density. It is not accessing the spiritual realm. It is reading the nervous system God designed.

I’ve seen biofeedback utilized as a tool for people who have been told for many years that no one could find out what was wrong with them. I’m one of those people that was helped by it, when for many years nobody else could. And I knew it was a good thing because many divine appointments lead me to the point of having my own biofeedback scan done for the first time:

God laid a friend from church on my heart. I felt encouraged to ask who she sees for medical care – I already knew we aligned in skepticism of our current medical system. She pointed me in the direction of an herbalist who utilizes biofeedback and iridology – and is also a Christian. She read my blood work carefully, identified my low HCL and likely MTHFR, and became my mentor - another divine appointment. Multiple of my clients that I’ve since scanned have told me they were praying for answers in their health and my business was brought up in a divine way.

As a society, we embrace PET scans, MRIs, EEGs, CT scans, and ultrasounds. All of which assess the nervous system and tell us what’s going on internally. Why not the lesser-known tools like biofeedback and iridology?

It all comes back to discernment. Does this tool help me understand and steward the body God gave me? Is it being used in submission to Him or in replacement of Him? Asking yourself these questions will help you navigate the medical and wellness industry, while weaving your faith throughout.

Steward What You’ve Been Given

One of my favorite biblical wellness verses that serves as a call to action for all believers is 1 Corinthians 6:19-20.

“Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own; you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your bodies.” - 1 Corinthians 6:19-20

Let us honor the bodies God has given us. Not because we fear getting sick. Not because we want a beach-ready body, but with wholehearted gratitude for the blessing God has given us – in recognition that He knitted each of us together in our mother’s wombs. That we are His masterpiece. With understanding that we are uniquely and bio individually made by a Creator who cares so deeply about each of us that He knows the exact number of hairs on our heads.

Let us not only thank God for what He made, but that He sent His only begotten son to the cross to redeem it.

Bottom line: Let’s stop fearing the things God made. Stop yielding them to movements that have claimed them. Take back the rainbow. Take back the herbs. Take back the frequencies. Take back the faithful stewardship of our bodies that Scripture calls us to.

I’m doing that by closing the door on fear, on obsession with feeling “my best”, on the pursuit of crunchy perfection and instead running full speed into the arms of my Father who knows me intimately and has given me an abundance of blessings readily available on this earth, waiting to be rediscovered and understood while embracing the tools He’s given me to do so.

Fear not the tools nor the ailments so much so that you forget the Ultimate Healer, the Prince of Peace. May God bless you and lead you on a similar path of peace.

Blessings,

Lexi

This pretty much sums up how my spring kicked off.

Blogging has been on the back burner and here’s why. This is essentially a blog about why I haven’t been blogging. How ironic.

What’s Been Happening

Have you ever had so many good things happening at once - you’re excited and overjoyed, then suddenly it becomes too much and you realize you can’t be fully invested in each thing at the same level as before?

Welcome to springtime on the homestead.

I started my Substack fired up and energetic, and then life. I’m still on fire about writing on homeschooling, homesteading, and most importantly biblical wellness. That desire is still there. But there are real-life things currently taking priority.

Priority number one: finishing a small apartment space in our pole barn.

As much as I’ve loved that we could pull off tiny living, there are some inefficiencies that have been wearing on me. No plumbing, small solar load, inclement weather. I see the blessing that will be coming from this, but otherwise we’ve not been living optimally for the past year.

In December we had contractors frame out a 500 sq ft space in the upper level of our pole barn and now we’re DIYing ourselves to the finish line. Easier said than done, but we’re chipping away at it.

Here’s why I’ve been anxious to complete this project sooner than later.

We live a football field’s distance from our tornado shelter, in a tiny home. Tornado season and tiny homes in the Midwest don’t align well. Which means I’ve been experiencing high cortisol (already trying to heal from adrenal fatigue) and cannot sleep through a strong wind or a thunderstorm. It is windy out here.

I’m so grateful for the community we’ve found. They have been kind enough to offer help finishing the space - I’m working to get it to a point where it makes sense to have multiple families out here for a big push. Prayers would be appreciated for wisdom in knowing how others can help, endurance to see it through, and the timeliness of it all.

So yes, writing has taken a spot on the back burner. That saddens me. But there are seasons, aren’t there?

There’s more.

The Homestead Is Alive

You can’t possibly live on a homestead and only be torn between two things. Make it a semi-off-grid homestead you’re building from scratch and the idea becomes laughable. I’m laughing so I don’t cry.

I knew we probably didn’t need more chickens. But the idea of different breeds was enticing, and when you hear those little chirps in the farm store, who can resist? My husband spoke sense into me and we held off for a while. Then he gave in and we came home with six baby chicks: two blue eggers, two barred rock, and two California gray.

Baby chicks are always such a delight.

Sadly, we had our first chick ever pass away, which was heartbreaking. And yet, homesteading has a way of acquainting you with the reality of life and death.

Spring is also a season of birth and rebirth. We welcomed three baby lambs onto the homestead, born to our two ewes. It was beautiful. It was thrilling. It was such a blessing. And we were not entirely prepared.

But that’s how we roll.

Our Great Pyrenees puppy sounded the alert on a Tuesday morning, a yelp that told us something was happening. My husband went down to find our youngest ewe, Beylah, had delivered her first lamb. It was beautiful, the sunrise making a backdrop of it, and Beylah was an attentive mama from the very first moment. We were thrilled.

Then, surprise.

Two days later, at three in the morning, the same puppy yelps. My husband came running back with news: our other ewe had delivered twins. Two boys. Twins are uncommon for a first-time mother sheep. We woke our oldest daughter so she could witness it, watch Bren (the sheep) clean them up, and take in the whole wonder of it. By the end of the week we were very, very tired.

Our three lambs are named Ceyla, Bijarni, and Sigurth.

Ceyla is a variation on Selah, after her mother Beylah. Bijarni means bear. Sigurth means victory.

A Time of Celebration

Spring is a busy season for most people. Graduations, weddings, gatherings. Everything wakes back up after the quiet of winter.

Three of our four family members have spring birthdays, and our two girls are born just two weeks apart. We celebrated them with special tickets to Winter Jam, their favorite meals, birthday dinners with family, bundt cakes, and homemade treats.

They also joined me on a trip to Wisconsin while I attended an herbal conference - that trip deserves a post of its own. We found some truly wonderful gems.

That’s a Wrap

We’re finishing Year 4 of Ambleside Online and Kindergarten. It was a good year. My Year 4 daughter loved the history reading, particularly the biographies of Abigail Adams and Isaac Newton, and George Washington’s World. Our favorite read-alouds included Robinson Crusoe and The Incredible Journey (if you’ve read it tell me I’m not alone in choking back tears for most of it – even knowing it had a happy ending).

There was real growth this year for all of us. My oldest performed in her first play, alongside both children and adults. My youngest taught herself to ride a bicycle. We all became more capable on the homestead. Woven through it all was early American history, multiplication, reading comprehension, Latin, and mythology. Life skills and bookish learning both hold weight in my view, spoken from someone who was book-smart and had to learn essential life skills rather later than she should have. My children will be better equipped.

Biblical Wellness

In addition to teaching at home, my husband and I stretched our faith by volunteering to create and teach a twelve-week Biblical Wellness course at our church. Inspired by BiblioDiet and several podcasts I had listened to over the fall, I felt called to bring my passion for this subject to other believers. Thus our class was born.

The enthusiasm from participants is what carried us through days already depleted from homesteading. The spiritual opposition during this season was real and not taken lightly. But all of it was for the glory of God.

Business Launch

And if all of that weren’t enough.

My excitement over unlocking my own health mysteries led me to want to help others do the same, to offer nutritional support tailored to each person’s bio-individuality. God knitted each of us together uniquely in our mother’s womb. Why wouldn’t our approach to health reflect that?

So I launched a business offering biofeedback sessions. In short, biofeedback is like a survey for the body, examining stressors by receiving feedback from the nervous system. Through this process, individuals can better understand what their body needs, whether that’s herbal supplements, identifying which systems are under stress, or simply gaining a clearer picture of what’s going on from a root-cause perspective.

Have you ever searched your symptoms online and discovered there are dozens of possible causes for migraines or eczema? Biofeedback helps narrow that down. I think of myself as a nutritional detective, truly listening to a client’s history and partnering with them to figure out what’s going on, without diagnosing, and providing a path forward through nutrition and herbal support.

I also offer pantry audits, walking clients through their pantries to identify hidden sugars, ultra-processed foods, and glyphosate sources. Some clients choose a more extensive protocol that includes circadian rhythm support, exercise guidance based on their scan, and more.

I’m having fun discovering what I can offer: tinctures, balms, herbs, electrolytes, whole food proteins, and education on how to take charge of your wellness. And for those who are interested, exploring the theology behind why it all matters.

I’ve already worked with a number of clients, and it truly fills my cup to help people begin to feel better.

You’re starting to see what I meant when I said there were an overwhelming number of good things happening all at once.

What’s Coming

Summer is closer than it feels. We’re looking forward to week-long camps at home, gardening, pushing homestead projects forward, some travel, and catching up on a few school subjects we fell behind on.

I’m beginning to feel the weight lift as weekly commitments wrap up and the schedule winds down. It’s time for toes in the grass and sun on our faces, garden strolls and firefly-lit walks, hammocking under the stars and popsicles on the pavilion.

I’m hoping to bring more biblical wellness content here this summer, along with herbal education, homestead updates, and anything we learn along the way through travel. Perhaps some cooking, some baking, homeschooling preparation, and science and biology. Really, I’m looking to see where the Lord leads.

If any of that interests you, subscribe, follow along on Notes, or reach out. I’d love to hear from you.

Lexi

I’ve grown up in a family shaped by injustices. Both social and medical. I would have had an older brother, yet he died at the hands of doctors – proven in a malpractice lawsuit. My mom had a brush with death when delivering my oldest brother – the doctor had showed up slightly inebriated and cut into her intestines during the surgery & still sewed her back up without fixing it. I’ve experienced judges who didn’t listen during custody cases and watched cops brush off decrees about my father’s frightening behaviors toward us.

And still – questioning what was laid in front of me wasn’t always the way I operated.

I grew up in a moral family and operating from a default of trust was a big part of that. So if someone was positioned as an authoritative figure or an expert, the general attitude was to trust what they said or told us to do. In school, I was a top-performing student who never questioned the authority of my teachers out of respect.

But deep down. Deep down a spark was being ignited. I’d watched the adults in my life wronged many times – yet no justice came of it. This spark lit a fire that kindled quietly and slowly over time. As I aged, I became less trusting of new acquaintances. By the time I was a teenager, I was more of a skeptic than any of my other family members.

But still, teachers, doctors, figures of authority were not to be questioned and I maintained a general sense of trust. The injustices toward my family were simply running across some “bad eggs” in the system, otherwise operate with a sense of trust unless proven otherwise.

A Skeptic is Born

It’s hard to pinpoint exactly where my skepticism towards the medical system began. Attending my Master of Public Health program was the first time I learned about the failures of our country’s medical system. The pay-per-test model that encouraged doctors to perform more x-rays, more strep tests, more “diagnostics” that may not necessarily be needed, but were overutilized due to higher payout.

This was also where I learned pharmaceutical company tactics. That several had gotten in trouble for their incentivizing doctors in unethical ways – fancy dinners, tropical vacations, new cars. Incentivizing them to prescribe their drug exclusively or excessively. Therefore, rules needed to be put into place to keep the bribery from happening to halt the bonus driving the push.

I have a few favorite documentaries and dramatizations on this: Dopesick on Hulu, PainKiller, The Pharmacist on Netflix, and Love and other Drugs.

Regardless of this, I still held a belief in the goodness of medical professionals. That there were people like me who went into the field to help as many people as they could. Surely, they were doing their best with no ulterior motive or lack of compassion.

Unfortunately, my personal experiences to the contrary were beginning to add up. Misdiagnoses, lost lab tests, and being sent in circles for relief from my symptoms – some still with no answers.

And whenever I spoke with some authority of my own - having studied anatomy, physiology, chemistry, organic chemistry, etc. - I was met with a “well how could you know” look, because of course I didn’t go as far as to attend medical school. My own life experience, knowledge of body systems, and intuition wasn’t enough to hold any weight in that white-washed room.

Once I became pregnant with my oldest daughter, like the good student I am, I wanted to know the best environment and birth experience I could provide. So I began researching. I quickly dove into how to live a non-toxic environment while pregnant, what foods to avoid for baby’s health, and how to keep my daughter well during a birth by avoiding an epidural and other medical interventions.

I immediately knew I wanted a low-intervention birth, as long as there was no emergency. Watching The Business of Being Born was very eye-opening to me. Seeing the history of medical involvement, how they would tie women down during labor after giving them a hallucinogenic pain reliever to keep them from jumping off the bed. Nothing about that seemed natural to me. I wanted to do what my body could on its own to bring my child into the world.

Maybe this was the moment. It was one of the few times I cared about history up to this point. I was invested in the history of childbirth and how it was handled. But it was very telling. And seeing how they treated childbirth as unnatural and putting women into unnatural birthing positions really disgusted me.

Maybe the medical system wasn’t what I thought it was? After this, I’ve had numerous experiences. Docs who told me to have life-altering surgeries rather than make lifestyle changes to heal – I didn’t do the surgery. Doctors who told me my liver was failing via teledoc. Then hearing no, I was just dehydrated, but couldn’t speak to why I had rashes all over my body. Three years without figuring out it was actually celiacs. Doctors who talked about my daughter being “malnourished” into a microphone right in front of me, not believing that she’d been in the 1^st percentile her entire life – my husband and I were both small children ourselves. Lost labs. Antibiotics that only made the problem worse. Doctors who wouldn’t see me because I was too ill and sent me off to urgent care?

It was disappointing really. I chalked it up to moving to a new state and figured their standards just weren’t as high as the state I moved from – wrong.

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Pandemic Panic

Then the pandemic hit. It was scary. I had a newborn. Public health officials everywhere were in alignment with the lockdowns. The masks. The distancing. The quarantine. Same with my fellow peers from my Master’s program. Honestly, I was navigating a tough work environment and a newborn, trying to avoid postpartum depression – I didn’t really have time to think about whether there was anything nefarious in what was going on.

So I fell back into my old patterns. Follow the rules. Don’t question authority. The one thing I did know, was I wasn’t about to sign up for an experimental vaccine as everything in science needs a trial period. A time to test its efficacy. So I knew above all else that I’d at least wait before signing up for a new vaccine.

It was at the crux of when vaccines started becoming mandatory for travel that I began to wonder if it was something worth considering. I lived halfway across the country from all my family and friends – “What if I could never see them again?” I wondered.

This wondering lead to a heated discussion between my husband and I which turned into an argument – he felt strongly against getting the vaccine because he had a feeling something bad could happen to him if he did. I didn’t see it back then, I do now.

It was enough of a disagreement that I figured I should finally do some digging of my own. Up until this point I was only consuming mainstream media’s take on things and whatever was posted online. And it was becoming increasingly hard to find anything about natural healing – and I’d always believed in the healing capabilities of herbs, food, and exercise.

I knew there were some public health figures who I had enjoyed reading post-grad. Those who spoke clearly and authoritatively about addressing public health programs. Those who had been in the trenches of epidemiological outbreak.

Research Taken into My Own Hands

So I began searching. What did they think of what was going on? I saw a lot of public health practitioners speaking up publicly - nobody I’d heard of before.

My searches proved to be fruitful. My eyes opened.

I found the blog of a cardiologist who was mentioned in a book I had read. He was sharing his concern around the vaccines effects on spike protein and cardiovascular events. He had anecdotal evidence from his own work that supported his concerns. Him ringing the alarm bells was met with threats to his career, to him personally – he was shadow banned online and de platformed. [I wish I’d saved the blogs, because searching keywords doesn’t return any results - it’s probably been scrubbed]

This really didn’t sit well with me. Science is meant to be questioned. Trust the science is one of the most anti-scientific phrases that could be uttered. Science is always changing, always evolving. We’re making new discoveries all of the time. Hardly any hypotheses become a Law – meaning they are irrefutable such as the Law of Gravity.

This was a big eye opener for me. I started to be more alert to the messaging that was going on around me. Masks and hand sanitizer were flying off the shelves, but vitamin C was still stocked full. People were told to stay inside rather than outdoors in fresh air and getting vitamin D? People were being bribed to get a shot with some of the worst foods possible – donuts, fast-food – you could even win a car! This also went against my scientific education – you are NOT to bribe people when asking them to participate in research, even when voluntary. To complete my capstone project, I had to be very careful how I worded asking parents in Tanzania to fill out a questionnaire in order to not coerce them. Some of these tactics for vaccination seemed… very coercive.

Alcohol could now be delivered to your door? Hand washing went out the door for messaging. Ivermectin (a Nobel prize winning discovery) was mocked by the CDC as horse medicine. A lifesaving pill!

The flu magically disappeared and any flu-like symptoms were automatically the big C. Prevention messaging was all but buried and the only way to stop what was happening was with what seemed to be a magic shot.

None of it made sense.

It was like the scales had finally fallen from my eyes and I was seeing the world in a whole new light.

Sharing out of Love

I kept quiet for a long time. Shocked at how people attacked my husband for what he posted on the mishandling of everything. Hurt and in awe at being uninvited to weddings or other gatherings because we didn’t comply.

Many of my friends and family chose to do what was asked of them and I’ve stayed quiet for a long time. Some people know where I stand, but I’ve never wanted anyone I know to feel ashamed for the choices they make – it should be a voluntary choice after all! But the fact that people are making this choice without the full picture of the inherent risks and small sample sizes and length of study is against the Nuremberg Code.

Still, people should be able to decide how they would like to approach their and their children’s health – as long as they’re fully informed – and not be shamed, ridiculed, threatened, or fired.

Sometimes it feels as if there was a before. Before I started questioning everything and an after. A time when you can’t go back to sleep as to the corruption going on around you, nor do you want to.

It was a lot easier then. In the before. A lot less to worry about. A lot less vigilance. Easier to connect with others who also don’t care.

But I wouldn’t change a thing. And I’m glad I am where I am now. Now I only wish I could wake up others I love to see what I have seen, but they must come to it of their own accord, like I did.

This is Part 1 of my Big Food & Pharma Series. Stay Tuned for the next part where I examine how the two industries are one big revolving door and what those ultra processed foods are actually doing to your body.

If you liked this post, subscribe so you don’t miss out on the rest of the series.

This post has been a long time coming.

I tend to be a fairly quiet person - an observer. I gather my thoughts and feelings and keep my cards close to my chest, unless I know it’s a safe space to share.

Well, I’ve been gathering and quiet for long enough. I now feel comfortable sharing what’s been on my mind — and why — about the industries holding us hostage to our health. Our poor health, to be exact.

I’m not a big feather ruffler. If I’m speaking out loudly, it’s likely because I’ve reached my boiling point or enough time has passed to feel safe doing so. While we’re still in the midst of it all, I’ve lived far enough beyond my eyes being opened that I can say confidently: I’m glad they have been.

After I realized the blog post I was writing on Big Food and Big Pharma was quickly turning into its own novel, I figured it’d be best to break it into a series to make it more digestible. I know how many of us have goldfish attention spans anymore -- a 20-page document as one post just didn’t make sense. So here we are.

Why Do I Get a Say?

I’m not a big-name celebrity, influencer, or award-winning scientist. And honestly, I think that’s what makes this more worth reading. I’m just an everyday mid-30s, child of the 90s, Midwestern mom whose eyes have been opened to the greed and nefarious activities of two big industries designed to keep us sick.

And I pack a punch, because I have a degree in biology and a Master’s in Public Health. I know what I’m speaking to from both an educational and a personal perspective.

Rather than the voices of the so-called “experts” drowning us out, I think it matters to lean into those of us living through the frustrations. Those of us who don’t have endless cash flow to live above the current circumstances.

I’ve had plenty of experience with the medical system to speak to its flaws. I’ve studied the errors in its ways. And I was raised with Big Food lining my fridge and my pantry — I’m no stranger to microwaveable meals and boxed everything. Home-cooked meals were a rare experience for me, so I can speak to the damage it’s done in my own life.

As someone passionate about wellness from a young age, enough to study it for six years, I have the knowledge to speak on body systems and the wherewithal to find legitimate research and suss out what doesn’t add up.

But more than my education, it’s my lived experience. My trial and error. My failed attempts at clean eating until I finally figured it out. And even more than all of that — my faith. My faith has helped me discern the truth about eating well, moving my body, and knowing what’s right.

God has a plan and a purpose. Though I’m a homeschool mom now, He’s using my degrees and my passions to share what I’ve learned, and am still learning, with others. To educate and encourage people to steward their bodies well and care for the temple God has blessed them with. It wasn’t all for naught after all. Hallelujah!

What It’s All About

What do I hope you walk away with after this series? Not necessarily being more informed, there’s plenty of that out there already. More than anything, I hope to nudge you toward listening to the prompting of the Holy Spirit. To utilize your God-given discernment to open your eyes to God’s truth in our fallen world.

This series is not about living in fear or losing all trust. Swinging your pendulum too far can lead to a life frozen in “what ifs”. That’s not how we’re meant to live. Fear is mentioned numerous times in the Bible and God’s response is always the same: “Fear not”.

This series is for anyone curious about how someone traditionally schooled in wellness walked away from what she was taught. For anyone questioning messaging in health and wellness. Or anyone who can relate to what it’s like to wake up from the daze of blind compliance.

What to Expect

I’m going to launch this series with my own personal experience of walking away from Westernized medicine & diet, the injustices my family experienced to push me to where I am, and how the pandemic shook me fully awake. It goes deeper than my blog on how I became interested in wellness. This one is about how I got radicalized.

From there we’ll move into the biology behind what today’s foods are doing to your body.

I’m genuinely excited to dive deeper into what the Bible says about all of it. God’s ways are higher, and He knew we’d be here, right now, experiencing all of this. Yet, the Bible is timeless, and as applicable today as when it was written. That’s why it’s the Living Word.

I’m still writing this series, so you’ll get it fresh — straight from my brain to the keyboard.

A Note Before We Begin

I am not a medical doctor. I did not attend medical school and I am not suggesting you break up with your doctor or stop taking your prescriptions. That would actually be dangerous without proper guidance. I am however, hoping to urge you to realize that not every malady is fixed by a pill, and that there are things you can do, even while on prescription medications, to better your overall wellness.

Come in with an open mind. Willing to hear one person’s experience and thoughts on Big Pharma and Big Food. I’m not the first to say any of this, nor will I be the last. I just hope to plant a seed that makes you a little more curious about the food you eat and the pills you take.

I understand not everyone is ready to go there, and that’s okay. I just ask that you respect my stance as I respect where you are.

Why It All Matters

Because you matter. God created you with a purpose. And you deserve to know what’s going into your body and how it’s affecting it.

With an increasingly loud number of voices telling you what supplement, pill, or workout will fix everything – I hope to point you toward utilizing your God-given discernment and toward the Bible for what you don’t yet understand.

I hope this series gives you the perspective shift that I’ve received over the past seven years and especially in the last seven months. If this sounds like something you’d want to follow along with, subscribe so you don’t miss it as it comes out.

I look forward to bringing you along on this journey.

- Lexi

Words I used to say when it was a new month, and I was expecting mail from the Kirby Kangaroo Club. I honestly don’t remember much of what was inside, but I remember the feeling – the feeling of joy and excitement that there was something in the mailbox waiting for ME. Not boring old bills, or advertisements, but a letter with my name on the front meant for nobody else but me – in any month that wasn’t my birthday.

There’s something special about allowing a child this experience. Someone speaking directly to them, letting them know they matter enough to reach out from the other side of the mailbox to say hello, to share something that mattered to them.

I wonder if many kids are getting that these days. I’d referenced in my previous blog that children today are living in a world of instant gratification. Texts, calls, facetiming. No thought that crosses their mind has to wait to be answered – or not long anyway. No “How are you doing?” with a 3-day to -week wait in between, wondering if today would be the day you’d hear back.

A lot of millennials talk about recreating the 90s for their kids, well I think this is one form of nostalgia worth revisiting, that offers a lasting impact.

Why we still teach handwriting and cursive

Handwriting is an important skill that we incorporate in our homeschool lessons. It’s important because it engages the brain differently than typing; it improves memory, comprehension, and fine motor skills. The format we use to teach handwriting, from a Charlotte Mason approach, is called copy work. It’s a method of teaching handwriting and language art skills by using rich literature. Beautifully written. Copied down.

We personally started introducing cursive in 1^st grade and my 4^th grader is fairly proficient in reading and writing in it. Cursive specifically activates reading and writing centers of the brain simultaneously. I’ve read that, sadly, many teens and Gen Zers today cannot read or write in cursive – so much so that some brands have adapted their brand names to manuscript because it wasn’t able to be read. Some young adults today struggle to sign their own name in cursive - and honestly, it wasn’t until the last two years that I could confidently write a check without second-guessing myself, so I’m not entirely throwing stones.

Cursive is also imperative to learning because it creates a connection to history. Many historical documents, letters, and family letters were completely cursive. A part of me is saddened thinking a generation will pick up a letter like that and be at a loss to what it says.

When cursive goes, a kind of literacy goes with it.

What screens have quietly replaced

While I and many others benefit from the technological advances we’ve lived through and grown with, there are some things that have been lost along the way.

The Waiting

Remember when we had to wait for the next episode of our favorite show to come out? It required clearing the calendar or gathering with friends on a specific day so we could all experience it together. One Tree Hill or The OC parties – anyone? Learning to sit with anticipation and live through delayed gratification are their own kind of development. Lessons that will serve our children well as they become adults and learn not everything comes instantly (falling in love, growing a child, saving to buy a home, a car, etc.)

The Physicality

There’s just something about holding an item made by someone else’s hands. Not 3D printed, not computer generated, a real creation that was formed by hands and came from the heart. Something we miss out on in a digital world.

The Permanence

As much as we value hearing from our loved ones via text – we can easily keep in touch with those who are states or oceans away – it’s not something that will be saved. It will disappear into the ether, be forgotten about - not stored away in a box, waiting to be rediscovered. The past versions of us - what we thought and how we felt are erased by the here and now. Lost on the ever-refreshing media feed.

The Personalization

Opening up the mailbox and receiving a letter addressed to you (that’s not a bill or ad) means someone took time out of their day to think of you. They made a conscious effort to put pen to paper, fill an envelope, stick on a stamp, and transport it to the mailbox. There’s something special about that.

Why a letter in the mailbox hits different

I’ve touched a bit on this already, but there’s just something different about communicating via mail.

It’s slow. It’s called snail mail for a reason.

It’s intentional. The writer who sent the mail was committed to their thoughts. There’s no going back and editing a letter once the mailman has picked it up.

It’s heartfelt. It says you were worth my time in a way a text cannot. This leaves a more lasting impact on children who aren’t used to receiving mail.

What instant gratification costs

There’s a cost that comes with instant gratification. One that is worth sitting with and reflecting on. When we can no longer wait for the things we want – instant coffee, instant delivery, instant messaging – what does that say about us? We want, we get. But what does that teach our children? How is it affecting our brains? How is it preparing the next generation?

When it comes to communication, instant gratification has led to the erosion of written self-expression. Kids who never write letters often struggle to write anything personal.

Reflecting on all of this, finding the letters left by my grandma and great-grandpa and the feelings it stirs within me, hearing from others about the family legacy their ancestors left behind in writing, and how those of you are already incorporating this into your own homes – makes me want to not only lament about the loss of the beauty, but actually do something about it.

Apparently processing this out loud amongst family members and in front of my daughter is having an impact. Enough so that grandma has reached out with an idea for how my daughter can do something.

My daughter is passionate, and I mean PASSIONATE, about encouraging other children to get off screens and interact with the world around them. She just presented an opinion writing to her 4th grade homeschool class titled: Should kids be glued to the TV?

Her little heart breaks when she sees kids fully immersed and in a zombie state in front of a screen. She also calls it to attention when I get caught up in doom scrolling – the true millennial I am. She wants something different for me and for our family – and I wholeheartedly agree with her. I appreciate other posts I’ve read about breaking up with Instagram or smart phones. We need more encouragement and real-life examples like that.

We’re still teasing out the details of what it might look like, but my daughter wants to bring her encouragement to other kids, in a way that meets them at the mailbox. She's already further along than I expected. More on that very soon.

In week 1 we followed a single drop of water through the full water cycle.

Week 2 we slowed down and went outside - to notice how water gives life to everything that gathers near it. Plants. Civilizations.

This week we lift our gaze to something bigger.

Week 3 is called Forms and Flow of Water. It encourages children to hold two thoughts about water in their mind – something most of us have never considered together:

Water is always moving. And water is always resting.

Right now, at this very moment, water is locked inside glaciers that have barely shifted in centuries. In other places, it is seeping silently through soil and stones beneath your feet. At the same time, it is traveling invisibly through the atmosphere above your head, waiting to fall as rain somewhere thousands of miles away.

And somehow, all of it - every ocean, every glacier, every hidden underground spring, every cloud - is part of the same single continuous journey.

“He gathers the waters of the sea together as a heap; He lays up the deep in storehouses.” — Psalm 33:7 (NKJV)

God doesn’t just send rain. He stores water (in ice, underground, in the air) and releases it at exactly the right time. Week 3 helps your child see that provision does not always arrive quickly. Sometimes faithfulness looks like a glacier.

This week’s nature walk invites students outside to observe water in whatever form they can find — frost clinging to leaves, dew resting on grass, a puddle slowly shrinking, a trickle from a drainpipe. Not to collect data. Just to notice. To ask where this water has been, and where it might be going next.

The narration prompt this week is deeper than nature study alone:

How might our own spiritual life mirror this rhythm of motion and rest?

A Charlotte Mason-styled narration prompt. Created for children, about water, that lands like theology.

That’s what this series is.

Week 3 - including the full lesson, nature walk guide, narration prompts, notebook work, art connection, simple experiment, and faith reflection — is waiting below.

If you’ve been thinking about joining, here’s what’s available:

Full subscription — $6/month — everything listed in the nature study plus wellness deep dives, biblical meal planning frameworks, and all paid content.

One time purchase options coming soon to Gumroad for those who prefer not to subscribe.

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To be honest, no two days are identical, but we do have a “go-to rhythm” that keeps us going. If I look back just four months ago, even a year ago, the way we lived looked vastly different. Here is a look at how we currently spend our days.

Rise and Shine (and the “Pellet Stove Sprint”)

On our slow days, when we are on the property and don’t have to rush off to “the world,” we start slow. I’ve never been a “get up and go” morning person. In this Midwest cold, that looks like crawling down from our lofted bedrooms and starting the pellet stove immediately. Because we have to save our solar power overnight, we often set a timer for our heat to turn off in the early AM hours. While we stay warm cuddled up (husband and wife in one bed, kids in another), getting out from under those blankets into a room that has dipped into the 30s can be... a shock to the system.

Solar Check-In: Living with finite power centers your day. One of my first tasks is checking our solar levels. I’ve become a bit of a weather-obsessed planner. Will the sun shine today to recharge us, or are we looking at three days of clouds? If it’s the latter, I have to be conservative with every power draw and appliance. - cooking and using power when the sun is up is my best bet.

Before the chaos of the day begins, I prefer to start by opening my Bible. I’ve found that if I align my heart with God’s Word before I start our homeschool day, the entire atmosphere of our home stays more peaceful. Starting with God before the noise starts is the habit that makes every other part of the day possible.

The Morning Chores

When it’s freezing outside, it takes every ounce of willpower to bundle up and walk across the property. Full disclosure: I did not grow up as a “country girl.” I was a suburban kid with very few responsibilities. To imagine that I have learned to love and embrace this life is a miracle in itself. I suppose obedience to God looks like that sometimes - jarring at first, then overwhelmingly beautiful.

Reframing my mindset is key: each animal is a blessing from God, and I am their steward.

• The Kids: My eldest feeds the rabbits and chickens; my youngest cares for the cats.

• Me: I handle the dogs and check the sheep (who are remarkably self-sufficient as long as they have hay and water).

  

The Classroom: Living Ideas & Nature

Once the animals are fed and we’ve had breakfast, our school day begins. My oldest is in Year 4 of AmblesideOnline. We follow a Charlotte Mason approach, which means we trade dry worksheets for “living books” - rich, thought-provoking narratives that make history and science come to life.

Because of my biology background, I’ve taken the lead on our Nature Study. I’ve actually created two 12-week plans following the Ambleside rotation! These are being made available to other families who struggle to make nature study a consistent part of their week - currently releasing one week at a time for paid subscribers. (Shout out to my friend who is currently “beta-testing” these lessons with her kids!)

This weekend we took a walk around our property and found a tiny brook. My 5-year-old was mindful of the fact that even though it was a small brook, that it was important to care for water because it is living and small microbes make a home there. My 9-year-old was curious of where the source of the water was from - after learning that each brook, stream or river has a source - so we followed it until we no longer could. I’m grateful to see the lessons we explored together 7 months ago are still strongly present within their minds.

I love utilizing the Charlotte Mason approach because it doesn’t “talk down” to my children. They read rich literature and are exposed to deep ideas, even from a young age. My oldest has been reading George Washington’s World and finished Poor Richard first term this year. This past week we went to the local history museum, and she was able to identify Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and Ben Franklin - and connect to the historical pieces at the museum. We saw letters, household items, and appliances we imagined Abigail Adams using. Besides the way living books draw you in emotionally by connecting with the historical figure, this is exactly how the ideas come to life in our day-to-day.

A Shift in Conveniences: Trading Speed for Intentionality

Our days look nothing like they did in the suburbs. In our old life, dishes were “easy” with a full-sized dishwasher. Laundry wasn’t a “trek” across a field. Cooking was simple with a four-burner stove and endless counter space.

And yet, back then, I still felt those things were a chore! Now, everything takes more effort. I’ve had to learn the failures of living off-grid the hard way: like the time I realized I couldn’t run the burners and the tea kettle at the same moment without a minor solar crisis.

It is a massive perspective shift. I’ve had to see these barriers as invitations to a more intentional life. To remind myself that I must do everything to the glory of God. I don’t always have a perfect attitude about it, but I realize I needed this reality check. In the conveniences I was offered in my suburban life, I often filled my extra time with social media or TV. Here, the work itself provides the time for reflection - and growth.

Small Space Management

How do you keep a tiny, semi-off-grid space clean while homeschooling and homesteading? The short answer: You don’t. At least, not easily. Maybe if it were built for the purpose of tiny living like you see on TV, we’d be more successful in this.

Just two things out of place can make the whole home feel cluttered. We’ve had to become ruthless with “stuff,” donating anything unused and storing out-of-season items away. Everything in our home must have a “home.” I frequently find myself asking the kids, “Is that its home?”

In a book club with my mom-friends, we’re reading Habits for a Sacred Home by Jennifer Pepito, and we just finished the chapter on Habits of Simplicity. It was the reminder we needed, that minimalism isn’t the goal - that’s often devoid of personality and practicality when you have children - but rather simplicity in order to free up our time to build strong relationships and spend more time with God.

The Heart Shift

When I view this acreage as God’s provision, my attitude changes. When I see myself as a steward of all the blessings He has bestowed upon me, I take a different approach. The dishes feel less daunting; the chicken coop feels like a privilege, not a punishment. To be clear: I am human. I live in a fallen world and I get cranky or discouraged. But when I pause to realize that every task is an act of stewardship, I can “do everything as unto the Lord.”

I’ve been overburdened by dishes lately. We cook a lot at home and in a space with no running water and no kitchen sink - the cleanup can be daunting, to say the least. I often would put it off, save it for another day. But when I realized the blessings of being able to feed my children home-cooked meals - in order to steward our bodies - I can see this as a worthy effort versus something to put off until later.

Ending with the Sunset

Our days end with a final check of our resources. Do we need to carry more water over? Is the battery charged enough to get us through the night? What does the weather look like for tomorrow’s chores?

Living “Grounded and Centered” isn’t about achieving a perfect Pinterest-worthy homestead. (I found that out quickly) It’s about the posture of my heart, laying it all down at the foot of the cross in order to be a blessing to the family He has placed in my care.

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How God Designed Your Cycle to Work for You

Tired. Hormone depleted. Living on a cycle of ups and downs that felt less like a rhythm and more like a weather system I couldn’t predict. (For those of us in the Midwest, you know exactly what that means)

Mid-30s wasn’t supposed to feel like this.

I’d done the work. I’d taken the pills. I was working out, eating relatively healthy, checking the boxes. And yet, I was still fatigued. Still moody. Under control of the symptoms that I couldn’t get under control: bloating, cravings, acne. Ugh.

It wasn’t until I fasted from social media for 30 days (no Instagram, doom scrolling, or loud noise of the internet) that I gained clarity. I finally had enough quiet to hear something different. I found myself reading more. Taking longer walks. Playing podcasts while I completed chores. Space in my day to follow a thread all the way to where it led.

That’s when I started asking a different question. Not how do I suppress this, but what is my body actually trying to tell me?

I knew hormones were important. I’d been actively trying to get them under control for three years. I’d studied the hormonal cycle in school. Looked at them from the lens of a biologist, which told me what the hormones were doing, but not in a practical application type of way. What it really meant to live with them as a woman. What you read in a textbook versus living with hormones or a hormonal imbalance are two entirely different things.

I knew there was more to the story. God loves patterns. He writes them into seasons, into water cycles, into agricultural harvests. It didn’t surprise me that He’d written one into this too. I desired to understand it, instead of fighting it for another decade.

What Nobody Told Us

Years ago, with my firstborn, I learned that fighting the phases of childbirth was the wrong approach entirely – thanks to a wonderful 12-week birthing class taught by a midwife, Coral.

She taught us about leaning into the waves: to work with my body instead of against it. This paradigm shift was what allowed me to bring both of my children into the world without medication. My body knew what it was doing. I just had to stop treating it like an obstacle and start trusting its design.

Somehow, I never applied that same logic to my cycle.

The messaging is so loud. Your period is an inconvenience, but fight through it. The pain is normal, just medicate it. Being debilitated is just what some women deal with, buck up. And if it’s really bad… here’s a pill that will smooth it all out. It’ll help your acne too! You might even forget you have a cycle at all.

What they forgot to mention was the wreckage.

The birth control pill suppresses your natural hormonal production for three weeks straight. No natural undulation. It doesn’t regulate your cycle, it replaces it with a synthetic version and calls that regulation. This is why it takes time to get pregnant after stopping. Your system has been hijacked and needs time to remember how to run itself again. That is not a side effect footnote. That is the mechanism.

And then there’s the pain. The cramping so severe you can’t get through a school day or a work shift, even a morning of parenting without medication just to function. We’ve been told that’s normal. It isn’t. Pain at that level is your body sending a signal that something in the terrain isn’t right, something needs attention. [See my blog on Terrain Theory 101 - the body communicating verses symptom suppression]

Stewarding our bodies looks completely different from managing them. Understanding what your body actually needs in each phase of your cycle, and applying that, has the ability to change your entire experience with your cycle. Not because you’ve suppressed anything. Because you’ve finally stopped working against a design that was never broken to begin with.

The same God who designed the water cycle, the seasons, and the agricultural harvest also designed the female body with a monthly rhythm. That rhythm is not a flaw to be corrected. It is a cadence to be understood.

And like any good rhythm, it has four distinct movements.

The Four Hormones — Your Body’s Seasonal Language

Think of your hormonal cycle the way you think of seasons. Four distinct phases, each with its own character, its own demands, its own gifts. None of them wrong. All of them necessary.

Four hormones orchestrate this rhythm — estrogen, progesterone, luteinizing hormone (LH), and follicle-stimulating hormone (FSH). They don’t operate independently. They communicate with each other in a carefully sequenced conversation, each one rising and falling in response to the others, all of it working together toward the same purpose: preparing your body, month after month, for the possibility of new life.

You don’t need to memorize the clinical details. What you need is a map. A way of understanding which season you’re in and what your body is asking for because of it.

That’s what the next four sections are.

Phase One: The Rest & Replenish Phase

Menstruation — Days 1–5

Exhausted. Irritable. Overwhelmed.

And then the guilt about being exhausted, irritable, and overwhelmed on top of it.

We live in a culture that has told women — loudly and consistently — to push through. Show up. Perform. Break the glass ceiling on a Tuesday when your body is quietly begging you to lie down. The girl boss era didn’t leave much room for a woman who needed to slow down once a month, so most of us learned to ignore the signal or medicate it into silence and keep moving.

What if that’s exactly backwards?

Your body during menstruation is doing significant, metabolically demanding work. Estrogen and progesterone are at their lowest point in the entire cycle. This is when uterine lining begins shedding. This is a completely normal, healthy process. Not a malfunction. Like any process, it requires significant energy and needs support – not to be suppressed.

Rest during this phase is not laziness. It is not weakness. It is obedience to the body God gave you and the rhythm He built into it.

What Your Body Needs

This is a phase for warming, nourishing, mineral-rich food. Your body is losing iron and minerals and needs them replenished from real sources; not synthetic supplements that pass through without being absorbed.

• Focus on iron-rich foods like grass-fed beef, organ meats, and dark leafy greens.

• Bone broth, the real, gelatinous kind made from pasture-raised bones. Not the boxed version. This is one of the most supportive things you can give your body right now.

• Warming soups and slow-cooked meals over raw or cold foods.

• Traditional fats to support the hormonal rebuilding that begins quietly in the background even during this lowest-energy phase. [You can find more about this in my Terrain-Building Shopping List — free for new subscribers]

This is not a phase for fasting. Your blood sugar needs stability. Your energy reserves are already being drawn on. The body is working whether you feel it or not. Give it the fuel it’s asking for.

Honoring the Slowness

Here’s some conviction I’ve felt that I want to invite you into as well. I say this knowing how hard it is to do this with children, stewarding a home, and managing a life that doesn’t pause just because your hormones did:

Let your schedule be lighter during this week if you can. Go to bed earlier than usual. Sit down for your meals. Don’t rush through them or eat over the sink. Save your hard workouts like HIIT, heavy lifting, and long runs for phases when your body is built for them. Great alternatives during this phase include: walking, gentle stretching, even slow movement is enough right now. Trust me, your body will thank you for not pushing it past its limits. It has a limited amount to give right now. (This isn’t always easy for me to incorporate, especially when I’m on a roll with my workouts or following a weekly program, but my body always appreciates when I do.)

This is the phase where the most Type-A among us will struggle the most. The of us who feel behind if they’re not being productive. If that’s you, and it has been me, hear this: the harvest requires a fallow (rest) season. You cannot pull from the field every month without giving it time to rest and rebuild. Think of your body as the field. The Israelites were called to let the land rest every season, so apply this but on a monthly basis.

“He makes me lie down in green pastures, He leads me beside quiet waters, He refreshes my soul.” — Psalm 23:2-3

Rest is not incidental to God’s design. He designed it into the soil, into the Sabbath, and into the monthly rhythm of the female body. It belongs as part of your rhythms too.

Phase Two — The Build & Cultivate Phase

Follicular (Days 6–13)

In this phase, you begin to experience an energy shift – estrogen begins rising. The body is building toward ovulation. Creativity and focus return. This is the phase where women tend to feel the most like themselves and don’t realize why.

What’s happening hormonally? Estrogen has begun rising. Follicles are developing. And the body is preparing to release an egg.

What the body needs:

• Fermented foods for estrogen metabolism

• Cruciferous vegetables for estrogen support

• Sprouted grains

• Lighter whole foods

• Wild-caught fish.

Gentle fasting windows become appropriate as energy rises — but always listening to the body first.

How to steward your body at this time: this is the phase for starting things. New projects, harder conversations, creative work. Your body is giving you an opportunity, how are you using it?

It’s just as Charlotte Mason approaches education: brevity and beauty. Just as a seed needs the right conditions to germinate, so does a new idea, a new habit, a new season of growth.

“There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens.” —Ecclesiastes 3:1.

Phase Three — The Flourish Phase

Ovulation (Days 14–17)

During this phase, you’ll find estrogen at its highest. LH begins to surge triggering ovulation (egg release). Energy and confidence will be at its fullest.

In this phase, your body is primed for connection and generosity.

What’s happening hormonally? The body is at its most fertile and most energetically abundant. A time for deeper connections and when babies are made.

What the body needs:

• Anti-inflammatory foods, raw fruits and vegetables, whole fruit

• Shellfish and salmon for mineral density.

• The critical terrain note: seed oils are particularly disruptive to hormonal signaling in this phase. Just as Dr. Cate Shanahan urges the importance of removing seed oils.

Longer fasting windows are tolerated well here if appropriate for your individual terrain.

In terms of stewardship think on who needs you most right now? This is the phase designed for pouring into others: for community service, deep conversation, showing up fully for the people God has placed in your life.

“She opens her arms to the poor and extends her hands to the needy.” — Proverbs 31:20.

The thriving woman gives from her abundance. This phase is about abundance.

Phase Four — The Steward & Surrender Phase

Luteal (Days 18–28)

This phase is more introspective. Progesterone in the body is rising. The body is preparing for either implantation of a fertilized egg or the next cycle. Energy begins to wane. The need for rest and nourishment increases. Though we women fight this phase the most, it’s also the most needed.

What’s happening hormonally? Progesterone is dominant here. The body is in a holding pattern and blood sugar is more sensitive than any other phase.

What the body needs:

• Complex carbohydrates for blood sugar stability

• Magnesium-rich foods for PMS symptom reduction

• Root vegetables and warming soups

• Celtic sea salt for mineral support

Shortening fasting windows is important here. Blood sugar instability in this phase drives cravings, mood swings, and the symptoms most women associate with PMS. If you use the terrain theory to address the root, working with versus fighting against what your body is calling for, you can reduce these symptoms.

This is the phase where you’ll be tempted to reach for sugar, to push through when you need rest, to interpret your body’s signals as weakness. They are not weaknesses. They are signals.

What does surrender look like for you in this phase? Earlier bedtime, lighter social calendar, more time in prayer and Scripture? These are just a few suggestions. The body is asking you to slow down. Following that call is not weakness, it’s wisdom.

“Cast all your anxiety on him because he cares for you.” — 1 Peter 5:7.

The luteal phase is the invitation to release what you cannot control and trust the One plans the seasons.

A Note on Fasting and Individual Terrain

After understanding what having a high anion gap meant on my bloodwork (my blood is currently acidic), I gained a deeper understanding of why fasting wasn’t appropriate for me. Understanding your own terrain is essential to knowing how to apply nutritional advice to your own situation. What I hope to share here is a framework rather than prescribing a specific protocol. I myself am still learning to apply this knowledge with wisdom and discernment.

There are specific individuals who should not fast or exercise significant caution – if you have a primary care provider it would be good to check in with them. Some of those individuals include: pregnant and nursing mothers, those who are underweight, those managing electrolyte imbalances, adrenal fatigue, metabolic conditions, or a history of disordered eating.

The terrain principle that underlies all of this: you cannot borrow from a reserve you haven’t built. Fasting is a tool, not a requirement. Food is the foundation.

With this, I encourage you to seek out a practitioner who will look at your full picture, examining your entire system to address your symptoms. Finding one who combines root-cause thinking with genuine care is harder than it should be, but worth pursuing.

For years I’d been fighting with my body, attempting to “hack” solutions that would help me survive “that time of the month”. I felt resigned to the awful symptoms I was bound to experience each month. Living hostage to a cycle I was never taught to understand. I now have a framework to give it all meaning: support, rather than suppress.

Your body is not a problem that needs to be “solved”. God created the rhythms we experience. He designed with purpose and intention. Provided us with the foods and rhythms we need to support it. And wrote the pattern of rest and thriving into our DNA.

You don’t have to just “survive” your cycle anymore. No more medicating it into silence. Nor do you have to earn your rest in the phases that demand it.

It’s a matter of paying attention and stewarding what you’ve been given.

I know this feels like a lot. We’re already busy moms trying to keep track of everything AND now I’m asking you to track your hormone phases too?

I offer this only to educate and support, not to add to your load. Stewarding our bodies requires real time and real effort. Understanding them requires a genuine desire to learn. That’s largely why I put a one-page guide together, so you can take what you’ve read here and have an easy reference to come back to.

Start small. Pick a few foods from one phase and see how your body responds. Then try another. You don’t have to overhaul your entire life this week. Just pay a little more attention than you did before.

Come back and tell me how it goes. I’d genuinely love to hear.

I put together this one-page reference guide - initially because I needed it myself and then loved it enough to share. It’s called “Eating with Your Cycle: A Biblical Stewardship Framework”. You can use it as your practical companion to this post. It’s the cheat sheet for your fridge, your meal planning, and your weekly rhythm. You can find it below.

Eating With Your Cycle

3.74MB ∙ PDF file

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This one-page guide helps you know which foods to eat during the four different phases of your cycle. Supporting your body in its natural rhythms.

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This week we go slower. And closer.

Week 2 is called Water as Life and Stewardship — and it asks a question that sounds simple until you really sit with it:

Why does life gather where water is?

Not just plants. Not just animals. People too. Every great civilization in human history built itself near water. The Nile. The Tigris and Euphrates. The Mississippi. The Jordan. There’s a reason the cities are where they are — and a reason the land around them looks the way it does.

My daughter already knew this. She remembered it before I finished asking the question, which is exactly what living books and real observation do that a worksheet never could.

This week’s nature walk takes students to any nearby water source — a brook, a pond, a drainage ditch, even a place where rainwater gathers after a storm. Not to collect facts. Not to fill in a chart. But to notice. To move slowly. To listen before they look.

Is the water moving or still? Quiet or lively?

How long might this water have been here — days, years, centuries — and where is it going next?

How much more abundant is the life at the water’s edge than just a few feet away?

The narration prompt this week pairs what they observe with what Scripture already told us:

“Ho! Everyone who thirsts, come to the waters…” — Isaiah 55:1 (NKJV)

God didn’t just design water to sustain life. He used it as the language of invitation. Of provision. Of Himself.

That’s what Week 2 reflects upon.

The full Week 2 guide — including the complete nature walk instructions, observation prompts, Scripture study, narration questions, and stewardship reflection — is available below for paid subscribers. If you’ve been thinking about joining, this is a good week to do it.

Subscribe to access Week 2 →

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It’s a question I’ve gotten frequently over the past few years — more so in that first year after pulling my daughter from public school. But it still comes up from time to time.

Choosing to homeschool is actually a very nuanced decision. I suppose some people have a specific incident — bullying, a bad teacher, a single moment that made everything clear. For me it was multifactorial. There wasn’t one thing. There were many.

How It Started

My oldest daughter started kindergarten in likely one of the toughest ways a child of her generation could. Her first experience with school — after years of daycare — was smack dab in the middle of the pandemic.

We lived in Washington state at the time, where rules around containing the pandemic were especially strict. My poor firstborn started her school career wearing a mask all day, not knowing what her teachers’ or peers’ faces looked like until halfway through the year.

I didn’t actually have many qualms with her school out there. She had a wonderful, kind, above-and-beyond kindergarten teacher. There were a few kids who picked on her, but I chalked it up to the usual stuff — kids being rude, figuring out the social world. Nothing that alarmed me.

We had one neighbor who homeschooled her daughter, and acquaintances at church who sent their kids to a co-op, but none of it made me feel like homeschooling was a path I was being drawn toward.

And then we moved.

The Veneer Began to Fade

As we made our transition back to the Midwest, school ratings were a major factor in where we chose to live. I wanted a diverse school so my kids wouldn’t feel like spectacles, and I wanted strong educational outcomes. I was still very much in the system, planning accordingly.

We just so happened to be moving during one of the hardest seasons in recent memory for homebuyers. Houses were selling after a single day on the market, with multiple competing offers, going tens of thousands over asking. That was pretty much our story exactly. But we got a home in the school district I wanted, in a quiet neighborhood, on a dead-end street. It seemed perfect.

And then the veneer began to fade.

My daughter joined her new kindergarten class with about two months left in the school year. Nobody offered a tour. No one reached out to ease the transition. The expectation seemed to be: put her on the bus on the first day and let her figure it out. I had to ask for a tour. I had to ask to meet her teacher.

We lived close enough to walk, but we had her ride the bus — it seemed convenient, and I’d ridden the bus from kindergarten on. She’d be fine.

I should have known better. The bus was exactly where I got introduced to all the worst stuff as a kid. I don’t know why I thought it would be any different for her.

The bus, in my experience, is just not a space for kindergarteners or young elementary kids. Fights. Bullying. Conversations about topics my daughter had no business being introduced to yet. It’s a free-for-all in a lot of negative ways — the only upside being the convenience of not having to do pickup and drop-off yourself. That convenience starts to feel a lot less worth it when you realize what it’s costing.

But there was no sudden moment. No dramatic incident that made everything clear. Just God slowly prompting me, quietly laying something on my heart over time.

A Seed Gets Planted

Then one day, driving in the car, my daughter said it out loud.

“Mommy, I wish I could talk about God at school.”

She had a yearning to weave her faith into her days — not just a Wednesday night lesson or a Sunday morning message, but woven all the way through. She wanted to know what God thought about the world. Not a sanitized version of it. The real thing.

I heard her. And something shifted in me.

We have wonderful Christian schools in our area, but tuition wasn’t something our budget could absorb. I was doing sporadic contract work, we were already paying for daycare, and private school simply wasn’t on the table.

But a seed had been planted.

Something Kept Pressing

Then I started hearing about homeschooling everywhere. On the radio. While scrolling through social media. In conversations I hadn’t been looking for.

So I brought it up to my husband. Maybe it was an option. Something we could try over the summer, low stakes, just to see. He was hesitant. He knew that my daughter and I butted heads in the mornings when I was trying to rush her out the door, and he was worried that’s what most of our days would look like. It was a fair concern.

But something kept pressing.

When I brought the idea up to my daughter, she started to open up. Things she had never mentioned before. She told me her teacher here yelled a lot. That an art teacher had made her cry over a project she didn’t know about — because she was a new student and no one had told her. She told me about kids on the bus acting like animals, biting her. About a bus driver cursing in front of the children.

These things didn’t sit well with me. I knew I wanted something different for her. Something better.

Over the summer I researched as best I could. I’m a biologist — I know how to dig into information — but what I found online was genuinely confusing. So many options, so many philosophies, and no clear sense of how to execute any of it well. I kept landing on unit studies. I didn’t love the idea — it felt too forced for my personality, and my daughter was indecisive — but that’s where we started.

She decided she wanted to learn about sharks. So I found as many library books on sharks as I could, and we began.

It felt clunky. It felt sporadic. I felt like I was missing structure and had no idea what I was doing.

We gave it a good go. We made it through the summer. We enjoyed our time together.

And I still wasn’t sure.

An Answer From God

I wanted a clear sign from God. Not a nudge — a sign. So I prayed, simply and directly: Lord, give me something clear. Show me if this is what you want for us.

I don’t remember exactly how long after that prayer it happened. Not long.

I went to my Wednesday night class at church. For whatever reason — God — I didn’t go to my usual back corner spot that night. I sat down next to two women about my age. Women I hadn’t really talked to before.

After class we got to talking, and I mentioned that I’d been asking God whether we should homeschool.

Their reply: “We both homeschool our children.”

That was all I needed. God had made His sign clear. We would be homeschooling that fall.

When It All Fell Into Place

I was locked in. But I still didn’t have a philosophy.

The women from church mentioned a homeschool program their children attended one day a week, which helped — but I still wasn’t clear on curriculum, or how to actually structure our days. I needed a person, not a search engine.

So I texted our pastor and asked if he could connect me with a homeschool mom. Someone who had done this and could talk me through it. He said he’d passed my information along to two women and to wait to hear back.

One reached out.

We talked for about thirty minutes. I came with my concerns — most of them things other people had planted in me more than worries I’d actually had myself. The big one: “But what about socialization?”

She laughed. I understand why now. It’s the number one question every homeschool family gets asked, and once you’re on the other side of it the concern almost doesn’t make sense anymore — because homeschooled kids can’t not socialize. What homeschooling actually gives you is the ability to choose who your children socialize with. Families whose values align with yours. Not to shelter them from the world, but to connect them more intentionally to it.

Then I mentioned my curriculum problem. I didn’t know where to start or what I was looking for.

That’s when she said the name that forever changed our homeschool trajectory.

Charlotte Mason.

She talked about her love of the approach, the beauty of the philosophy, the way it treated children as whole people rather than empty vessels waiting to be filled. I wrote the name down and that night I went home and started researching — but this time with direction.

Everything fell into place. I found Ambleside Online. I found their Facebook community. And I loved that we could jump in without dropping hundreds or thousands of dollars on a packaged curriculum.

Where We Are Now

That was the beginning. We’ve followed Ambleside Online from the start — Year 1 all the way through Year 4 now. And somewhere along the way I became the one sharing Charlotte Mason’s name with friends who were just starting out, the same way that mom (now a dear friend) shared it with me.

The short lessons designed to hold a child’s attention. The time outside in nature. The rich, living literature. The fundamental belief that children are not empty vessels for us to fill — they are born persons, naturally inclined to learn, creatures of God to be stewarded by us as parents and educators.

There is so much beauty in this educational philosophy that I can’t do it justice at the end of a blog post. It’s something I’m still learning and growing in myself. And honestly, that might be my favorite thing about it.

If you’re a homeschooler, what brought you to homeschooling?

I was sitting inside starting my morning when she burst through the door.

“She finally wrote me back!”

An opened letter in hand. Joy written all over her face.

I already knew what she was talking about. She had been waiting for weeks — checking the mailbox with the kind of anticipation that children raised on instant everything rarely get to practice anymore.

Three weeks earlier my nine-year-old had sat down and written a note to a friend she hadn’t seen in almost a year. They no longer crossed paths at their homeschool program and she missed her. So she did something most children her age wouldn’t think to do.

She wrote her a letter. And then she waited.

In a world of same-day delivery and read receipts, my daughter waited four weeks for a reply — and every day of that wait meant something.

A Moment in History Preserved

Centuries ago, a seemingly ordinary woman wrote letters almost every day of her adult life.

Today those letters offer one of the most intimate glimpses into a critical turning point in American history that we have.

This year, as part of our AmblesideOnline Year 4 studies, we have been reading the biography of Abigail Adams — wife to one president and mother to another. Her efforts to stay connected to her husband across long separations, her passion about the state of the young country she was watching take shape, her love, her worry, her struggles as a mother — all of it preserved in the simple act of sitting down and writing.

An act we have nearly forgotten.

What stops me in my tracks is this: Abigail wanted her letters destroyed.

Gone. Private. Not to pass on. Not for history books or school curricula or homeschool families reading them two centuries later.

But they didn’t listen.

Because of that decision we have two hundred years of insight into a marriage, a revolution, and one woman’s interior life that would have been lost forever if her wishes had been honored. Thoughts and feelings that felt ordinary to her, feel extraordinary to us. Moments she considered too private to share became the record we now call history.

And I find myself sitting with a question I can’t shake:

What are we writing — and not writing — today?

My Great-grandfather’s Letters

Recently, while going through our own family’s historical records, we came across letters my great-grandfather wrote to my grandmother while he was stationed in the Navy.

He described his sightseeing from different ports. The people he encountered. His work conditions. The small details of a life being lived far from home.

There were others — letters he had written to my great-grandmother. But she had requested they be destroyed.

No longer available. Because my grandmother honored that request.

I will never know what was in them. What he thought about the war he was living through. What he said to the woman he loved from a ship in the middle of an ocean. What kept them both up at night — her waiting at home, him somewhere at sea, weeks or months between the sound of each other’s voices.

I suppose it will remain a longed-for mystery until I’m reunited with them in heaven.

But from what I did find — the letters he wrote to my grandmother, his daughter — I saw a man who loved her dearly. His only surviving daughter after the loss of her older sister. Even as a young adult she was still his little girl. You could feel it in every line.

And then there was the letter he and his wife wrote to his sister.

Humorous, yet poetic, a tad inappropriate. A side of my great-grandparents I never saw as a small child and never expected to find in an old envelope.

Now I find myself wondering if that’s exactly why my great-grandmother wanted those letters destroyed. Not because they were painful. Because they were private in a different way entirely — the kind of private that belongs only to two people who loved each other.

I can’t say I blame her.

But I do wish she hadn’t.

What We’ve Lost and What We’re Losing

There’s something about the art of letter writing that I’ve been reflecting on.

Writing letters is a lost art. A bygone era. We say it almost nostalgically now, the way you’d describe a covered bridge or a phone booth — something charming that we’ve collectively decided we no longer have time for.

Writing to our friends and family is no longer a common practice. Stamps are expensive. Handwriting is hard to decipher. If you write someone a letter there’s a reasonable chance they won’t write back — not because they don’t care, but because the habit is no longer there. It’s simply not a valued tradition anymore.

And the beauty of writing has diminished with it.

We know what our friends had for lunch. Where they’re vacationing. The thought that crossed their mind at 7am. We are more connected to the surface of each other’s lives than any generation in history.

And yet.

We don’t see the struggles. Their quiet worries that can’t be fully expressed in a caption. Their daily motivations. The interior life that doesn’t photograph. We get fragments — curated highlights, careful performances, the version of a life someone was willing to make public on a Tuesday morning.

The art of expressing what we truly think and feel – in beautifully articulated sentences, with context, leaving a lasting impact – has become rare enough to feel remarkable when we encounter it.

Will we leave behind our social media accounts? Sure. But it won’t save us from being forgotten – the true sense of who we are. It’ll be a highlight reel of a curated life that our future generations will reflect upon – and learn what about us? About themselves?

What will your great-grandchildren find when they go through the things that captured your memories?

Screenshots. Memes. An Instagram grid frozen in time. A camera roll of tens of thousands of photos with no captions and no context — beautiful moments that don’t carry as much weight without the story around them.

Or.

Letters. Blog posts. Words written with intention about what it actually felt like to be alive in this particular moment in history — building a homestead on a former cornfield, homeschooling through a cultural unraveling, trying to feed your family well in a world that stopped caring what it was feeding them.

Words that might help your great-grandchildren understand something about themselves. About why they are the way they are. About the people who came before them and what they were reaching toward.

Abigail Adams didn’t write for posterity. My great-grandfather didn’t write for an archive.

They wrote because someone they loved was far away and words were the only bridge.

Maybe that’s still enough of a reason.

Why I Blog and Why I Teach My Children to Write

In a world of constant connection, I found myself feeling increasingly disconnected.

Especially from friends from my past. From family members who saw what we were doing but didn’t quite understand the heart behind it. Our choice to homeschool. Our counter-cultural decision to become first-generation homesteaders. To swim against the current of a society moving in one direction while we quietly turned around and started walking the other way.

People could see what we were building. They just couldn’t see why.

Over the past year I felt a pull back toward long-form writing. Not for followers. Not for notoriety. But to be understood — and to share what I was learning rather than keeping it to myself, which started to feel like a kind of selfishness I didn’t want to practice.

And to record.

For my children to look back someday and know that every decision we made was saturated with love — for them, for their futures, for the children they haven’t had yet. That we wove Christ through all of it. That when God called upon us we said “Here I am, Lord” — regardless of the discomfort it brought, regardless of what it looked like from the outside.

That kind of faithfulness cannot be preserved in a story that disappears in 24 hours.

So when my children sit down to write a letter to a friend they miss, I want them to understand that it is not busywork. It is the practice of attention. Of articulation. Of learning to say what you mean wholly and thoughtfully — to reach across distance and time and put something of yourself on a page that will outlast the moment it was written in.

It is Charlotte Mason’s living ideas applied to communication itself.

And for my nine-year-old, the lesson is already taking hold.

Inspired — perhaps without even knowing it — by the letters of Abigail Adams, she sought out the friends she hadn’t seen in too long. She is writing with more intention than before. Replying promptly. Taking it seriously in the way children do when something has genuinely captured them rather than been assigned to them.

That is the whole point.

So as my daughter sits down to write her friend back, I smile to myself…

Knowing there is something being preserved in that exchange that no text message can replicate. No online message. No voice memo. Nothing instant.

It’s more than words on a page.

There’s weight to someone’s handwriting. The stamp they chose. The fact that they sat down and thought about one specific person long enough to fill a page for the person waiting by their mailbox.

That is history being made in real time.

In a tiny home. By a nine-year-old with a pencil and something she wanted to say.

We just have to choose to make it.

Do your children write letters? Has your family found old correspondence that changed how you understood someone you loved? I’d love to hear about it in the comments.

This week is free for everyone.

Consider it an open door into how our family does nature study — unhurried, wonder-driven, and rooted in the belief that God’s creation is one of the richest classrooms available to us.

A NOTE BEFORE YOU OPEN THE GUIDE

A few things that will help you get the most out of this week:

You don’t need to complete every enrichment. They are invitations, not obligations. Charlotte Mason herself emphasized short lessons and focused attention over exhaustive coverage. Do what serves your family this week and leave the rest without guilt.

The nature walk is the heart of the lesson. Even a simple observation of rainfall from a window, dew on the grass in the morning, or a puddle in the driveway counts. The goal is attentiveness, not an elaborate outing.

The journaling page is for every age. Younger children can sketch freely while older children label and narrate. There is no wrong way to do it.

Read the Bible verse aloud before you begin. Let it sit for a moment before moving into the lesson content. This sets the tone for everything that follows.

THIS WEEK YOUR FAMILY WILL:

• Explore the concept of the shared water cycle and what it means that every drop of water on Earth has been on an endless journey since creation.

• Learn three vocabulary words through narrative context — watershed, reservoir, and evaporation.

• Take a simple nature walk to observe your local water cycle in action.

• Draw the water cycle in their nature journals.

• Narrate what they learned in their own words.

A GLIMPSE AT THIS WEEK’S SCRIPTURE:

There is something quietly profound about beginning a study of Earth’s waters with these words. The same water cycle we’re about to trace — evaporation, condensation, precipitation, the endless return — points to a deeper thirst that no watershed can satisfy. Begin there. Let your children sit with that before they ever pick up a pencil.

WEEK 1 IS BELOW — FREE FOR EVERYONE

Download your copy, find a good morning, and begin wherever the water is closest to you.

The Living Water Cycle Week 1

18.2MB ∙ PDF file

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Explore the concept of the shared water cycle and what it means that every drop of water on Earth has been on an endless journey since creation.

Download

I really hope you enjoy it!

Weeks 2 through 12 are available to paid subscribers as they release each Tuesday. If Week 1 resonates with how your family learns, I’d love to have you along for the full journey.

Annual subscription: $35/year — full access to the complete series plus all wellness resources and guides. Founding Member: $50/year — for those investing in this from the ground up.

Unprompted nature walks.

Last-minute video searches, that weren’t pre-screened.

Missed connections between a lesson and time outdoors.

Lack of time for preparation.

This is what nature study used to look like in our house. A book here. An article there. It never felt fluid or purposeful and was oft forgotten because of the aforementioned. I felt I wasn’t doing Charlotte Mason justice by completely overlooking the beauty of God’s creation around us without some guidance of how to tie it all together.

I remember one afternoon last fall trying to pull together an outdoor observation with no real plan — we ended up at a brook nearby and I stood there thinking, this is actually beautiful, and I have nothing prepared to do with it. We walked around for a while and went home. Another missed opportunity to actually go deep with what was right in front of us.

What I Was Looking For

For years our nature study felt like it was always one step behind. A video here, a library book there, a nature walk with no real connection to a deeper understanding. I wanted something that unfolded the way a good story does — one lesson flowing naturally into the next, each week building on what came before.

I wasn’t looking for a workbook. I wasn’t looking for flashcards or fill-in-the-blank diagrams. I was looking for something that recognized my children were capable of real ideas — the kind of resource Charlotte Mason herself would have recognized.

I wanted three things that I couldn’t find together in a single resource:

• A sequential narrative structure that built week by week rather than jumping between disconnected topics.

• Faith and science living in the same room — not a Bible verse tacked onto a science lesson, but a genuine integration where observing creation invited us to know God more deeply.

• Something open-and-go that an overwhelmed mother with a busy day could actually use without two hours of prep.

To be clear, I did find some resources out there that helped. I found mom’s who had created one-pagers linking to videos (often more scientific-detailed than what held our interest), Mom’s who put together resource pages geared more towards boys, and beautiful living-book curriculums that offered hand-on experiments that I felt guilty about never completing.

Why Start with the Water Cycle?

I decided to start with Brooks, Rivers, and Oceans because that was the second term rotation for Ambleside Online this year. After another pieced together term (where I did make a genuine effort, we visited a snake observation after all – it was a reptiles unit), I decided why not build my own to address the gaps I felt were missing in other resources I’d attempted to use.

As I’ve built this study, the water cycle has stood out to me as one of the most profound entry points into understanding creation. Every drop of water your child encounters on a nature walk — dew on a spiderweb, water flowing in a local brook, rain sliding down the window — is the same water that has sustained civilizations, carved canyons, and filled the great oceans since creation.

And the Scripture connections jumped from the pages as I searched accompanying verses. John 4:13-14. Psalm 104:10-13. The waters that God called into being and still holds together.

I wanted our children to see that every current, every creature, every cloud speaks of His sustaining power and purposeful design.

What You’ll Find Inside

Each of the twelve weeks includes:

• A Bible verse anchoring the lesson in Scripture

• Living book recommendations your library likely already has

• Vocabulary introduced through narrative not definition drills

• A nature walk with specific observation prompts — not just “go outside and look”

• Watercolor nature journaling guidance

• Oral narration prompts so your child processes what they’ve learned in their own words

• Optional enrichments for families who want to go deeper without overwhelming those who don’t

I was surprised at all the scripture that pointed to the greatness of the oceans. It’s not something I had taken much time to consider before. Nor about the thoughtfulness of God as he created every drop at the beginning of time to sustain us over the eternity of our time on Earth. Bringing God into our nature studies more intentionally really drove home the beauty of our world and the attention to details our Creator has.

How This Works on Substack

Starting this upcoming week, I’ll be releasing one lesson per week here on Substack for paid subscribers. Week 1 is free for everyone — consider it an open door. If it resonates with how your family learns, a paid subscription gives you access to the full twelve weeks as they release, plus all the wellness resources, printables, and curriculum materials I’ll be building throughout the year.

A note before we begin — because some of you have been here since the beginning, and I want to be thoughtful about this.

Everything I write here — the wellness posts, the homeschool stories, the real-life homestead updates, the faith reflections — will always be free. That is not changing. You will never hit a paywall on my words.

But over the past several months I have also been quietly building something else. Curriculum resources. Nature study guides. Wellness frameworks. Printable tools. Things that took real research, real time, and real craft to create.

These resources are what the paid subscription supports. Not my writing — my work.

If you have been here from the beginning and a paid subscription isn’t the right fit right now, that is completely okay. You will never lose access to anything you have today. But if you have found value in what I’m building and want to go deeper — into the nature study guides, the wellness resources, the curriculum materials — this is how you do that.

Either way, I’m so glad you’re here.

I knew I was on to something when my children were begging to do the next week of nature study. When friends I brought in to test how the curriculum for their children would work sent me pictures of them intentionally spending time outside for their nature walks; indicating that the study gave them purpose and direction to their walks. This reaffirmed that I wasn’t only building something beautiful for my own family, but for others who want to experience nature study in the same way.

My prayer is that this becomes a gentle companion in your home — one that helps you slow down, look closely, and see God’s glory in the waters He made and holds together.

Annual subscriptions are open now at $35/year — full access to every paid resource, nature study series, and wellness guide I build throughout the year. For those who want to invest in this from the ground up, Founding Member subscriptions are available at $50/year. Week 1 of The Living Water Cycle is free for everyone.

I was the girl who cared about her health before she had the language for it.

In high school I ran track, researched nutrition, and made deliberate choices about what I put in my body. In 10th grade I cut out soda entirely — no small thing during the Mountain Dew Code Red era when every gas station had a new flavor begging to be tried. I swapped it for Gatorade, proud of myself, not yet realizing I’d just traded one sugar-heavy habit for another with better marketing.

I was trying. I just didn’t have the right map yet.

Because despite everything I was doing “right,” my body kept breaking down. Seven stress fractures across my high school and college career. Seven. My track season became a predictable cycle — train, fracture, sideline, heal, repeat. I spent half of every season watching from the infield, wondering what was wrong with me, wondering why my body was failing the sport I loved.

What I didn’t know then was that my body wasn’t failing me. It was telling me something. I simply didn’t have anyone in my life yet who knew how to listen to it — or who understood that a teenage girl eating processed food and drinking electrolyte sugar water wasn’t actually building bone no matter how hard she trained. My body’s inability to absorb and utilize calcium wasn’t a character flaw. It was a terrain problem.

I just wouldn’t learn that word for another decade.

The Academic Pivot: From Dental Dreams to Public Health

That relentless curiosity about the human body eventually pointed me toward Pre-Med. I wanted to understand what I’d lived — and I wanted to help other people find the confidence and vitality that comes with actually feeling well in your own skin.

I graduated with a Biology degree and a Chemistry minor. But my path wasn’t linear, and I’m grateful for that now even though it didn’t feel like grace at the time. A freshman year where I prioritized people over morning labs, combined with advisors who offered more confusion than direction, left my GPA short of what hyper-competitive dental school admissions required.

When dental schools told me to go back for two more years of expensive undergraduate work, I made a different choice. I chose a different kind of stewardship of my time, my debt, and my calling.

It was a cancer and emerging diseases course that changed everything. Sitting in that classroom, I heard the word “prevention” used as something more than a pamphlet — as a genuine framework for influencing health before it broke down. It lit something up in me. I applied to a Master of Public Health program at an Osteopathic Medical school and got in. For the first time in years, I felt like I was exactly where I was supposed to be.

The Limits of the Establishment

Prevention was woven into everything in my MPH program and I was hungry for all of it. The idea that health could be shaped upstream — through policy, community, systemic change — felt like the work I was made for.

The dissonance didn’t arrive all at once. It crept in slowly, over years.

In school I drank it all in. I believed in the framework I was being handed and I was genuinely energized by it. It wasn’t until after having children — navigating my own health in a new way, watching how the pandemic was handled through the lens of everything I’d studied — that the cracks started to show.

After years of fatigue that no one could explain, a diagnosis finally came: Celiac disease. On paper it was an answer. In practice it opened more questions than it closed. Because even after removing gluten, the exhaustion didn’t fully lift. The brain fog lingered. The sense that my body was working against me didn’t go away. I did everything the diagnosis asked of me and still didn’t feel well.

And then more recently, a naturopathic doctor ran a fuller blood panel than I’d ever had before. Several markers that should have been flagged years ago — including indicators pointing toward MTHFR — had simply never been ordered. Not because the information didn’t exist. Because nobody had thought to look.

That’s when I stopped waiting for an institution to hand me the answer.

The medical run-around is a particular kind of loneliness — the appointments that end with a referral, the labs that come back “normal” while you still feel anything but, the prescriptions that manage the symptom while the root keeps growing. I knew it intimately by then. And I knew enough from my own training to understand that the system wasn’t designed to ask the questions I needed answered.

So I started asking them myself. Digging into research outside the textbooks I’d read. Seeking out voices not funded by the industries they were evaluating. And underneath all of it, returning to the oldest framework I knew: the Bible, and the belief that God designed these bodies with intention and provided everything we need to steward them well.

The girl who swapped soda for Gatorade and wondered why her bones kept breaking had finally found the right map. It just didn’t come from where she expected.

The Paper Trail of Grief

My skepticism of the medical establishment didn’t begin with a textbook. It began before I was born.

My older brother died at six months old. Medical malpractice — the kind that could have been prevented if someone had listened sooner. My mother had brought her concerns to the doctors early. She was told she was an anxious mom and sent home. By the time anyone took her seriously, it was too late.

That loss shaped everything that came after. It shaped how my mother raised me — taking me to appointments, asking questions, always telling me to get a second opinion and to trust my gut. She called it intuition. I now understand it as something more: the Holy Spirit, available to every one of us if we’re quiet enough to hear it.

My mother’s instinct couldn’t save my brother. But it taught me never to outsource my discernment entirely to someone with a white coat.

My grandmother was one of those people who made you believe seventy was just the beginning. Active, vibrant, endlessly giving — she was riding bikes and hiking and volunteering well into her seventies. She was the kind of woman who filled every room she walked into.

Dementia took her slowly. Seven years of watching someone you love disappear piece by piece while her body stayed. If you have walked that road with someone, you don’t need me to describe it. You already know the particular grief of losing a person before you lose them.

We lost her physically not long ago.

What haunts me isn’t just the loss. It’s the question I can’t stop asking — what did we not know then that we know now about neurodegeneration, about inflammation, about the terrain of the brain?

What might have been different if we had understood that the food we eat, the minerals we absorb, the toxins we accumulate over decades all speak directly to cognitive health? I don’t ask that question to assign blame. I ask it because it’s the reason I do this work.

And then there is my own story.

I have been turned away. I have stood in exam rooms and heard doctors in the hallway debate my diagnosis — describing them as something only seen in medical textbooks — and then walked back in with nothing to offer me. I have been told I look healthy. Told my labs were normal. Told there must not be anything wrong.

I have had labs lost. Been offered procedures that would have been life-altering. Been handed prescriptions aimed at silencing symptoms with no interest in what was causing them. I have been misdiagnosed. I have been managed.

And in the gaps between those experiences — the rare practitioners who slowed down, treated me like a whole person, and actually helped me find a thread worth pulling — I caught glimpses of what medicine can be when it asks better questions.

I want to be clear: there are good doctors. Gifted, careful, genuinely curious practitioners who are doing the hard work of root-cause medicine within a system that doesn’t always make it easy. I have met some of them and I am grateful. Doctors are needed and I am not writing this to tear down a profession.

But I have also sat across from enough dismissal — and heard enough firsthand accounts from people around me who were failed in ways that should have had consequences but didn’t, because legal action was too expensive or it was easier to just move on — to know that the system was not built with people like me in mind. People whose symptoms don’t fit the algorithm. People whose bodies are asking questions the standard panel doesn’t answer.

So I stopped waiting for permission to look elsewhere.

I lean on God and on the researchers and clinicians before me who dared to ask different questions. I check everything I learn against Scripture and against the biological design of the body God made. That combination — faith, science, and a healthy refusal to accept “normal” as the final word — is the foundation everything I share here is built on.

The Search

By the time I found what I was actually looking for, I had already spent years looking in the wrong places.

I had tried paleo. Primal eating. Sugar detoxes. I eat gluten free out of necessity — Celiac doesn’t give you the option to experiment. I had seasons of serious physical training: kickboxing, distance running, HIIT, weight lifting. I have a sauna. A vibration plate. A shakti mat. Red light therapy. I have, at various points, owned nearly every tool the wellness industry told me would fix the way I felt.

And I want to be honest about what that costs — not just financially, though the investment over the years has been significant. I mean the cost of energy and hope. The cost of committing fully to something, feeling a little better, and then watching it plateau. The cost of doing everything right by every standard available to you and still not feeling the way you watch other people feel without trying.

I just wanted to operate. To get through a day without my body being the loudest thing in the room.

One summer, during a season of prayer, God prompted me to do something I wasn’t expecting: put down social media entirely. No Instagram, no Facebook, no Snapchat. Thirty days. A friend came alongside me and we deleted the apps together.

What I found in that silence surprised me.

There was so much time. Time I hadn’t realized I was hemorrhaging in small increments a dozen times a day. I started writing poetry. I exercised more consistently. I listened to podcasts during chores instead of scrolling on the couch. The anxiety that I had accepted as background noise began to quiet. I had more patience with my children. I felt, for the first time in a long time, like I was living inside my own days rather than watching everyone else’s.

God moved in that season in ways I’m still tracing.

It was during one of those podcast sessions that I heard Jordan Rubin speaking on Culture Apothecary about his new book with Dr. Josh Axe.

What he said stopped me mid-chore.

Wellness rooted in Biblical principles. Health through the lens of Scripture. Foods mentioned in the Bible applied not as historical curiosity but as daily practice. The body as something God had already given us instructions for stewarding.

I remember thinking: why had I never put these two things together?

My faith and my health had always lived in separate rooms. I knew God heals — I had prayed for healings more times than I could count. But I had never opened my Bible looking for answers to why I felt depleted, or what God might have already said about how to nourish the body He gave me. I had handed that question entirely to the medical system and the wellness industry and gotten back a rotating list of protocols and products.

The idea that the answer might have been in Scripture all along felt, in the truest sense of the word, revolutionary.

My friend and I talked about it for weeks on those walks. We kept circling back to the same observation: the church offers such beautiful, practical guidance on so many areas of life — finances, parenting, grief. But wellness? The body? We had never once heard a sermon on what it means to steward physical health as an act of faith.

We had certainly never heard one on gluttony — which is a hard conversation, I understand why it gets avoided. But our bodies are the dwelling place of the Holy Spirit. That is not a metaphor or a Sunday school answer. It is a biological and spiritual reality that has implications for what we eat, how we move, how we rest, and what we put into and onto our bodies every single day.

The statistics Dr. Axe and Rubin cited about chronic, preventable disease within church congregations weren’t surprising to either of us. They were just finally being said out loud.

If we are called to carry the gospel, to show up fully for the people God has placed in our lives, to take as many people to heaven with us as we possibly can — then the stewardship of these bodies is not a vanity project. It is mission-critical.

That was the moment this stopped being a personal health journey and started becoming something I felt compelled to share.

The Church Potluck Conversation

There was one more thing my friend and I kept coming back to on those walks, and I’ll be honest — it’s a tender one.

If the church is largely silent on the theology of physical stewardship, it’s also, unintentionally, undermining it in the fellowship hall.

I say this as someone who loves her church. Who understands a tight budget. Who has personally grabbed the free donut at the welcome table at 10am because it was there and it was free and willpower has its limits. I am not standing outside throwing stones. I am standing inside, donut in hand, wondering if we can do a little better.

Because the snack tables at Sunday school, kids ministry, teen events, and church outreach are, by and large, a parade of seed oils, synthetic dyes, and sugar. Goldfish. Veggie Straws. Packaged cookies. Free donuts. Hotdogs and pizza and ice cream at outreach events. I don’t list these to shame anyone who planned those tables — I have planned those tables. The budget is real. The logistics are real. Organic, dye-free, whole food snacks are not cheap or easy to source at scale.

And yet.

We are feeding these things to our children in the house of God. To the kids we are simultaneously teaching that their bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit. There is a quiet contradiction there worth sitting with.

I’ve already seen our own church begin to make small shifts — swapping candy with dyes for cleaner options, offering applesauce alongside the usual snacks. Nobody announced it as a health initiative. They just quietly made a better choice. That’s all I’m talking about. Not a complete overhaul. Not a budget crisis. Not legalism or fear or turning every church potluck into a wellness seminar. Just a growing awareness that what we feed people — especially children — communicates something about how we value the bodies God gave them.

This isn’t about having a perfect snack table. It’s about asking the question at all.

Biblical Wellness: Bringing It Home

I’m teaching a Biblical Wellness class at our church soon, and the most common question I’ve heard in the weeks leading up to it is simply: what do you mean by that?

It’s a fair question. And I love it, because it means the door is open.

Biblical Wellness is, at its core, the most ancient approach to health there is. It means taking the lens of Scripture and applying it to the most practical, daily decisions we make — what we put on our plates, how we move our bodies, how we handle stress, how we rest. It means treating the body not as a last priority or a source of frustration, but as something entrusted to us. Something to steward with the same intentionality we’d give anything else God has placed in our care.

We would not neglect a garden He asked us to tend. We would not run a car into the ground that He provided for our family. How much more, then, should we care for these bodies — the ones He knit together, the ones that house His Spirit, the ones we will need to use until He calls us home?

We cannot be the hands and feet of Jesus if we are too sick and tired to move.

That’s not a guilt statement. It’s a calling.

God did not leave us without instruction. He gave us food — animals, fruits, vegetables, herbs, fermented things, traditional fats — and He designed bodies with systems perfectly suited to use them. When we understand nutrition through that lens, through what He actually provided rather than what industrialization replaced it with, the confusion starts to lift. The contradictory headlines, the rotating diet trends, the supplements that work until they don’t — they lose their grip when you return to the source.

Scripture doesn’t change with the news cycle. God’s design for the human body doesn’t get updated every five years by a new study funded by the industry it’s evaluating. That stability is not a limitation. It is the whole point.

This is what I want to offer people. Not a protocol. Not a perfect diet. Not another thing to feel guilty about or overwhelmed by.

Just a return.

A return to the way of eating and living that honors the Designer. A framework that makes sense of the confusion because it was never built on the confusion to begin with. A community of people who are willing to ask — gently, curiously, without fear — what it might look like to steward their bodies as the gifts they actually are.

If anything in this origin story resonated with you — the stress fractures, the years of searching, the moment on a walk when something finally clicked — then you’re exactly who I’m writing for.

Welcome to the table. I’m so glad you’re here.

I came in from evening chores — boots muddy, hands cold — and found my daughter on the couch. Notebook open. Laptop pulled close. Notes filling the pages like she’d been there for hours.

She didn’t look up when I walked in.

That is how you know she’d been pulled in.

The Spark

In homeschooling, you never know when inspiration will hit — for you or for your children. This week it came for my 9-year-old in the pages of The Secret Garden, which we’ve been reading together for our homeschool book club.

She turned to me one afternoon and said, “Mom, you know how Mary is taking care of her own flowers and garden? I’d like to do that too.”

That was an easy yes.

I loved that a book — a living book — could awaken something that no educational screen time ever quite could. Rich literature doesn’t just fill a mind. It inspires a life.

Narration in Action

Taking advantage of a rare mid-60s February day, I headed out to clear the garden beds. She followed, asked which one she could claim as her own, and I pointed her toward the bed we’d amended last year — stubborn clay before we got to work on it.

Without a single word of instruction, she dove in. Cleaning out old stems. Raking the soil. Getting her hands completely dirty. She is so much like me — once she sets her mind to something, she is all in.

I suggested she think about the foods she actually loves to eat so she could harvest and cook her own meals this summer. She lit up. We landed on a Salsa Garden — tomatoes, jalapeños, cilantro, onions — and she claimed it as entirely hers.

Stewardship at Age Nine

That’s when I came in from chores that night and found her already researching.

She wasn’t just looking at pictures. She was looking into companion planting and soil requirements. She had discovered — entirely on her own — that planting marigolds near tomatoes could help keep the harmful insects away. A perfect, living lesson in natural terrain management.

Giving her this space is about more than vegetables. It’s about accountability.

If the garden goes dry and the plants die, she’ll understand what a lack of care costs. If it flourishes, she’ll know that her stewardship brought forth something nourishing. These are the skills our grandparents carried seamlessly — the ones I believe are essential for a resilient, grounded life.

Tending the Terrain

“He makes grass grow for the cattle, and plants for people to cultivate — bringing forth food from the earth.” — Psalm 104:14

I keep coming back to that word. Cultivate.

It isn’t passive. It isn’t accidental. It requires you to show up, pay attention, and keep showing up even when nothing visible is happening yet. It’s the opposite of the drive-through, the microwave, the Amazon delivery. It’s stewardship lived out in dirt and patience and time.

And here was my nine-year-old — without anyone telling her to, without a worksheet or a lesson plan — already doing it. Already asking the right questions about soil and companions and what her plants would need from her. God wired the impulse to grow things right into us. Sometimes it just takes a story to wake it up.

The terrain of the body is so much like the soil in a garden bed. Both require a well-tended, lovingly stewarded environment to truly thrive. You cannot rush either one. You cannot neglect either one and expect a harvest. And both will tell you — quietly, through symptoms and signals — when something is missing.

She is nine years old and she is already learning this. I’d say I’m a little jealous, but honestly, I’m just grateful I get a front row seat.

Resources for Young Stewards

If you want to spark this same interest in your children, these are the living resources currently on our table:

• The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett — a beautiful edition of this classic belongs in every homeschool library.

• Roots, Shoots, Buckets & Boots — a wonderful guide for children filled with theme garden ideas, including the Salsa Garden my daughter is planning.

Free Download: My First Salsa Garden Planner

If your children have been inspired to start their own garden this year, I recreated the planning sheet my daughter wrote out — the one spread across the couch that night. It walks young stewards through companion planting, soil observation, a harvest goal, and a simple prayer to open the season. Download it free below.

Salsa Garden Planner Gca

623KB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

If your pet fish got sick, would you treat the fish with medicine, or would you clean the tank? The answer to that question reveals the difference between the modern medical “war” on germs and the biblical call to steward our internal terrain.

A Historic Rivalry

If you took a science class back in high school, you probably learned about Louis Pasteur (1822–1895). He was the founding father of Germ Theory—the idea that microbes, bacteria, and pathogens are the primary cause of disease. His work revolutionized public health by encouraging practitioners to clean their instruments, saving countless lives.

But Pasteur had a rival: Antoine Béchamp (1816-1908) (and his contemporary Claude Bernard). Béchamp believed that the internal environment of a person’s body—the soil—is what truly dictates health. He argued that we are in a constant dance between good and bad bacteria. When our internal scales are balanced, we are healthy. When the terrain becomes toxic or depleted, the “bugs” move in.

While Germ Theory focuses on killing the invader, Terrain Theory focuses on cultivating the host. How? Through nutrient-dense eating, balanced sleep habits, functional movement, and removing toxins from your environment that can interfere with your body’s ability to function optimally.

I wasn’t even aware of how deep the rivalry between these two men went; they were both French scientists in the same circles, yet their legacies couldn’t be more different. The Weston A. Price Foundation has a fantastic piece on the history between the two here if you want to geek out on the science history like I did.

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The Fish Tank Metaphor

If I were to put the difference between these two schools of thought into visual terms, I’d use a metaphor so simple even my children had an “aha!” moment when they heard it.

Imagine you have a pet fish in a bowl, and that fish gets sick. Germ Theory would say the fish is the problem; it would suggest “vaccinating” the fish or dropping medication into the water to kill the invader. Terrain Theory looks at the environment. It asks: Is the tank dirty? What is the water quality and pH? Is the fish getting the nutrients it needs to be resilient?

Instead of just treating the fish, you clean the tank.

A Note on Wisdom

Now, a quick caveat: focusing on the terrain is not a license for recklessness. Stewardship requires wisdom, not just optimism. Just as you wouldn’t intentionally pour sludge into a clean fish tank to “test” the fish, we don’t seek out filth or ignore basic hygiene. We still wash our hands and tend to our wounds.

The difference is our focus: we aren’t living in a frantic, sterile bubble of fear; we are simply making sure our internal defense system is strong enough to handle the world we live in. In fact, as the Weston A. Price Foundation often points out, what we call “symptoms” (like a fever) are often just the body’s way of cleaning the tank. It’s the terrain doing exactly what God designed it to do.

Stewardship vs. Warfare

God does not call us to live in fear. He is a loving Father who invites us to bring Him our burdens and trust Him with what we cannot control. When I look at the Germ Theory framework applied to daily life, it doesn’t feel like peace. It feels like constant warfare — an endless cycle of antibiotics, antivirals, and obsessively “sanitizing” our world. [Note: Kills 99.9% of bacteria is not the flex we think it is—our bodies actually need those microbes!] I think many of us felt that fear in a very concentrated way over the past several years. That’s not the life we were designed for.

Terrain Theory gives you something different: agency over the controllables. Your food. Your habits. Your environment. Your sleep. You get to foster the conditions for health. You get to steward your body the way God has called you to — not out of fear, but out of faithfulness. You aren’t a victim of every passing germ; you are a steward of a temple.

That doesn’t mean perfection or legalism. Legalism is also fear-driven. It means building a life where nutrient-dense, intentional choices are the foundation — and there’s still room at the table for joy, for celebration, for grace.

God has filled this world with what our bodies need. Yes, centuries of industrial farming have depleted our soil and stripped nutrients from our food - but starting with the foods He provided, honoring the body He gave us, and allowing our innate immune systems to function as designed is a way of living that aligns deeply with our faith.

The 4 Pillars of a Healthy Terrain

Biblical wellness accounts for the whole person — body, mind, and spirit — not just isolated symptoms. As I continue sharing what I’ve learned and am still learning, everything I write here will flow from four core pillars:

• Nutrition — Fueling the temple with what God designed our bodies to use

• Detoxification — removing what interferes with the body’s ability to function as designed

• Mental and Spiritual Peace — the nervous system cannot heal in a state of chronic fear or stress

• Physical Environment — Creating a home that supports, rather than hinders, health

These pillars don’t stand alone. They’re built on a foundation that holds when everything else feels uncertain.

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The Rabbit h0le: Imagination You Can Touch

If you’ve been following our journey for a while, you know we’re pretty protective of our kids’ childhoods—especially when it comes to screens. We want them to have “boredom” that turns into brilliance, and The Rabbit h0le felt like a reward for all those quiet afternoons at home. The museum is basically a screen-free parent’s dream. Instead of flashing lights, its immersive exhibits are based on classic children’s books.

It’s an immersive narrative museum, which is a fancy way of saying you get to literally walk into the pages of classic books. Seeing the kids walk through the world of Goodnight Moon or Strega Nona reminded me why we prioritize “living books” in our homeschool. There’s a physical weight to these stories that a tablet just can’t replicate; it stimulates their brains in a different way.

It was so refreshing to be in a space that celebrates high-quality art and literature without the overstimulation you find in other kid-dedicated spaces. The way that the Holy Spirit shines through the creativity of the authors and the artists bringing the space to life was refreshing.

**One thing I will warn parents about that did throw us off is that the entrance to the bathrooms was an open space for anyone to use and had open-air sinks. This may or may not bother you, but if it does, I would suggest a bathroom trip before going. They may have had other bathrooms throughout, but I wasn’t keeping an eye open for them.

We spent about two hours at the museum.

Billie’s Grocery: A Win for the Body (and the Cook)

By the time we hit mid-day, the “traveler” in me was ready for a change of pace, and the “wellness” side of me was ready for fuel. Since we’re pretty intentional about what we put in our bodies, eating out can sometimes feel like a minefield of seed oils and gluten.

Billie’s Grocery is basically my love language. Everything is stunning, but more importantly, it’s a gluten-free haven. We sat down to a meal that felt like a celebration—fresh, vibrant, and actually nourishing. I love the homestead life, but I’ll be the first to admit that being served a meal that I didn’t have to plan, prep, or clean up after felt like a total luxury. It’s so rare to find a restaurant that aligns with our wellness goals without feeling like we’re sacrificing flavor.

(Yes, gluten-free cheesecake is wellness in this case. Mental health wellness)

I wish I would have brought a tin of our Tallow Balm. City air and the transition from the farm always makes my skin (and the kids’ hands) feel a little stripped. Rubbing that in while we waited for our food would have felt like a small act of stewardship for ourselves. It’s funny how a simple, clean meal and a little bit of intentionality can make a quick day trip feel like a full-blown vacation.

The Kansas City Museum: Architecture, Ancestry, and Discernment

Our final stop was the Kansas City Museum, housed in the old Corinthian Hall. As a lover of travel and history, I was floored by the architecture. But even more than the stunning views of the city, I loved learning about the original owner, Robert A. Long. He was a man of deep Christian faith, and you can almost feel that foundation of stewardship in the way the home was built. Learning about his family felt like a bridge to the past—a reminder that we are all building legacies for the generations coming behind us.

We spent a good chunk of time in the basement billiard room. In a world that wants to hand our kids a tablet the second they sit down, there was something so grounding about sitting over a low-tech game of checkers. We followed it up with a stop at the basement soda shop—it’s designed like a speakeasy and serves local sodas. It was the perfect “city treat” before the long drive home.

I’ll be honest, though: as a homeschooling mom, discernment is always “on.” We did run into a few exhibits that leaned into a more liberal agenda that doesn’t align with our values. We simply chose to skip those. It was a good teaching moment for the kids—that we can appreciate beauty, history, and art while still being guarded about the messages we consume.

Back to the Hearth

On the drive home we enjoyed reflecting on our favorite parts of the day. We each shared our favorite Rabbit Hole exhibit, favorite part of the meal we enjoyed together, and what our takeaways from the museum were. It’s a great way to seamlessly incorporate narration into our day and I enjoy hearing what my kids’ favorite things were. When we weren’t chatting, both girls enjoyed listening to Railway Children by Edith Nesbit on their Yoto. It’s an Ambleside Year 4 free read we hadn’t gotten around to yet.

By the time we pulled back into our driveway, the sun was low over the pastures and the “to-do” list of homestead chores was waiting for us. The chickens didn’t care that we’d spent the day in a speakeasy or a storybook world; they just wanted their evening scratch.

Coming home to the responsibilities of the land always feels like a bit of a “thud” after the excitement of the city, but it’s a good thud. I realized that while I love the escape of travel, the reason it feels so good is because of the life we’ve built here.

I made sure the girls got their magnesium spray and bedtime routines in before hitting the hay —city driving takes a different kind of toll than farm work! We’re tired, but our “idea banks” are full, and our hearts are grateful for a day of seeing God’s creativity through the lens of a new city.