homemaker, natural-living, working-mama
Photo Credit: Micah Cook Photography
About me
This blog is about my busy mama life and my journey to healthier more natural living. I have always tried to prioritize natural living but it didn't become something I was really passionate about until I got married and started my own life and family. I'm not always perfect, I make mistakes all the time (still eating a cup of flavored Chobani yogurt everyday) but I am trying to make small changes day by day as a stay at home/work at home mama.
I have a background in marketing and accounting but my true passion is writing. I currently work from home managing social media content for a local insurance agency, SEO, and agent marketing meetings. In Summer of 2022 I went back to school to pursue my Bachelors in English and had my daughter in November of that same year. I started this blog as a means to have more time with my daughter and hope to share with all you mamas my journey to living a healthier more sustainable life even in the midst of all the busyness.
In June of 2022 my husband and I bought our first home. We have made major renovations and are currently redigning our kitchen! Although it is just another crazy thing to add on top of all the busyness, it has been such a fun experiance making a place our own and watching our dream house unfold! Well, almost dream house, but we love it anyway.
Our Jounrey
From One thing to the Next
Through so many ups and downs, we have learned to try and go with the flow and see what next thing God brings us.
Marriage
Renovation
Baby
STARTING MY BLOG
My husband and I got married the month I graduated from college with my Associate in Accounting. At the time, we were excited to start our life together, hoping to work our jobs, write, publish, and travel all before settling down and having a family. We were saving as much money as we could by paying for rent by renovating the house we were living in. Soon after we got married, we took an amazing road trip out of the back of my Tahoe discovering the backroads of West Virginia and boondocking out of the back of our car - a lifetime bucket list activity I had been longing to do. For a hot minute, it seemed as if we were getting close, but then, 2022 brought new changes to our lives.
When my husband and I got married a lot of new information had been put out about the long-term side effects of traditional birth control and I wanted to remain as natural as possible so I tracked my cycle. One thing led to another, in March of 2022 I discovered I was pregnant. Our whole life turned upside down and instantly it felt like we were twenty steps behind where we should be. We were currently living in a home we did not own as renovators to pay for our rent (with no functional kitchen) and work was slow since we had to wait on materials from our landlord. My husband and I both worked, so all of a sudden it became essential that we find a better living situation. After several months and well into the second trimester, we found and purchased our home (remember this was the time of buy or be left behind, so we had to act fast) and immediately began working on demos and renovations in order to have our bedroom, the nursery, and the upstairs bathroom ready when our little one came. We had approximately six months to get it all together and the sight wasn't pretty. We spent late nights (often until four in the morning) working on projects at the house and drained nearly all of our savings. Gone were the days of careless travel and writing.
Our lives sort of became chaotic and we switched to project mode. I decided then, during the summer we bought our house, to go back to college to pursue my bachelor's to open up my career opportunities. I wasn't quite yet ready to give up my dreams as a writer and traveler, and with everything else going on, it was the only way to be consistently working towards that goal, while also taking care of the necessities. My husband had accepted a job in the maintenance department at a college and his benefits included tuition scholarships for dependants. It was an opportunity I couldn't turn down. The goal was for me to pursue my bachelor's, and as a way to still work towards my dreams as a writer.
After our baby was born, I was able to work out a deal with my current position that allowed me to work full-time from home starting in January of 2023. I got down to business on my baby's nap schedule and worked during nap time, playtime, and during the hours my husband was home helping with our daughter. All the while I continued to take classes. I discovered I was pregnant with number two in April of 2023. In August of 2023, the partner company my employers marketed for went under and I lost my job. I immediately started taking my blogging more seriously, with the hopes of pursuing my goals through a subset of my writing passion: lifestyle blogging.
Through my pregnancy, I discovered so many different things about diet, exercise, the way we live, mindset, and so on. I was so excited to share my knowledge with family and friends, but I became passionate about sharing it with everyone I knew. I attempted to start an Instagram blog about my journey to healthier living but instantly felt overwhelmed with marketing strategies, SEO, social media, and everything else. Besides, I didn't see it as having any long-term financial benefit, and I just didn't have time to focus on anything that wouldn't be helping our family in some way.
It was around when my daughter was four months old that I came across Farmhouse on Boone and discovered the potential for blogging. Instantly I saw my solution to our work dilemma and in a spurt of faith signed up for a free masterclass with Lisa. I discovered so much in that hour and it gave me the confidence I needed. I had been toying with the idea of starting something this year, either a YouTube channel, an Instagram store, or a blog, and this gave me the clarity I had been searching for. I decided then my goal for that year was to start a blog and do everything I could to bring my husband home from his job by the time I graduated with my bachelor's. Now we're working tirelessly, day-by-day to accomplish that goal, sharing the meanwhile our journey of raising our daughter in as natural a way as possible, and altering our lifestyle to be more healthy, sustainable, and natural.
Photo by Micah Cook Photography
HOW WE MET
I met my husband, N when I was about fourteen at the dance studio I had been going to for about five years at the time. He was in one of my classes and the funny thing was, I was actually pretty annoyed about it because I felt like he and the other guys who had joined were holding me and my friends back. Fortunately enough at the time, all the guys were transferred to an easier class so my friends and I could continue on our form, but that was when I first met him.
It wasn't until several years later, in 2018 that we began talking. We had been cast in a group dance together and I had found out that we had some mutual friends outside of dance. After that, we made a connection and sat together during rehearsals talking and making jokes. We both had slightly different senses of humor which helped us form a friendship pretty quickly. We were both cast as farmers in the following performance semester which gave us even more time to hang out during rehearsals and backstage.
In June 2019, N ended up leaving the studio to join a traveling ministry group and I said goodbye to what I thought would be good. What I didn't know, however, was at the time our studio was having financial troubles and would end up closing its doors before the fall semester. When I found this out, N and I ended up talking at length about the studio, our friends, and everything else. Because of this, we maintained contact even after he left.
Eventually, N and I began talking on the phone every day. I had discovered from our times at dance that he really enjoyed writing, which I also had an ambition for. We decided to co-author a children's fantasy book series, which we are still working on until this day and started becoming obsessed with writing, talking, and plotting. We would talk on the phone for hours at a time about book stuff. Despite our busy lives, even then, we managed to write a first draft of the first book within a month, although things started slowing down after that.
On September 21st, N asked me if I would want him to ask my parents to date me when he came back off the road for his Christmas break. My family had never met him, but they certainly knew about him and already had their suspicions. When he returned we started dating in November 2019. There is a whole side story about how between when he asked me that and when we started dating that I had a concussion and short-term memory loss, but that's another story for maybe a future blog post.
We continued dating even as N returned back to life on the road. In March 2020 however, he came off the road due to Covid, and we began making plans about our future. We both got jobs that same year and made plans to get married. Almost exactly a year later, I walked outside to my car and it was missing and replaced with N's car. Through a stressful (but somewhat sweet when looking back) game of hot and cold, I found N with my Tahoe, parked outside the place we had our first official date with a picnic setup and all sorts of sweet things there. As you might have expected, he asked me to marry him and we planned our wedding for October but got married on July 31st of 2021 due to family reasons.
Getting Married, Loss, and Growth
There were so many things going on at that point, but we decided to have a wedding ceromony at home with my family and N's family. My mom was present and very much aware of our wedding that day and said, "Congratualations Mrs. Sage" which was the last time she was cogitive. We had the wedding as planned on the following day with everyone who had traveled, and then we stopped by my parents house one last time before going on our honeymoon to say goodbye to mom. It was clear however that the day before was our last goodbye. She passed away two days later, and a day before my parent's aniversary.
Of course looking back there are all these things you wonder. Was it right for us to go through with the wedding? Should we have waited? Was this a sign? But it was her last desire to see us get married, and although she couldn't be at the actual wedding, at least she got a private intimate ceromony before she passed. But with grief, there was also the celebration of marriage. I would not have been able to go through the loss of my mother without my husband by my side. Getting married was the very best thing I have ever done in my entire life, and even despite the hurt, I look back on that day with a sense of longing and lasting happiness. Losing my mother was probably one of the hardest things I will ever have to go through, but I know one day I will see her again and she will be thankful that we had that last memory together here on earth.
Photo by Micah Cook Photography
Something a lot of people don't realize is my husband and I had two wedding cerominies. As I said, our intial plan was to get married in October, but my mom was battling cancer at the time. She had been diagonsed with breast cancer in 2017 and had a mastectomy in 2018. However in 2019 she started having issues again. It seemed she had bone cancer and had surgery in May of 2021. N and I had already decided to have our wedding in July at that point. All seemed relatively fine at after that. My mom's surgery was a hip replacement that was supposed to have removed the cancer from her hip. She seemed to be on the mend, but a week (literally the Saturday before) our wedding she took a fatal turn for the worst. She was fully cognicent about one day after that and told me that whatever happened to her, she wanted me to go through with the wedding. After that she rested quite a bit and it was like she was not fully present most of the time. She had a doctor's appointment the Friday before our wedding (one day before) and it was clear she wasn't going to be able to come to the wedding.
Photo By Micah Cook Photography
From that expeirance I have grown a lot, but one thing I have learned is treat every day like your last - and take pictures! I could never have enough pictures of my mom, and still to this day I wish I had taken more pictures with her for the keeping.
Pregancy was probably the second hardest jounrey. My husband and I weren't expecting to get pregnant, but one thing led to another and now here we are. Without my mom I felt kind of weird doing all the "new mom/pregnancy" things without her but it grew me in so many ways. I look at my little girl now knowing how much my mom loved me and understanding that she would want me to be happy and live my life to the fullest.
NATURAL BIRTH JOUNREY
The first thing my husband told me when we talked about my positive pregnancy test was, "Well we aren't having it in the hospital." I knew nothing about natural births (only that crazy people went that route) and didn't even know that it was legal to have a baby outside of the hospital! I literally thought a midwife was the same thing as an OBGYN! Needless to say, I learned quite a lot in a short amount of time to then be having a natural birth in a birth center out of state only nine months later. The first thing I looked into was where: where can I have a natural birth? I discovered several birth centers in our area, spoke to a lot of midwives, but I actually ended up going with the facility that my husband suggested out of state. Now I say out of state, but it was only two and half hours away. They specialized in waterbirth, and from what I read that is what I wanted to try. It gave me some consulation to know that I would have "some" pain relief.
Everyone had concerns about us driving all the way to North Carolina to have our child of course. People thought I was crazy for wanting a natural birth and I got so many comments about me being crazy and that my plan wasn't going to work. However, I did copious amounts of research. I enrolled in Bridget Teylor's Built to Birth online course and got my hands on as many Blog Articles, YouTube Videos, and Podcasts as I could to get prepared. And I won't go into detail about my actual birth story (that's for a future blog post) but lets just say I ended up with a natural birth at the birth center just as I envisioned. Well, almost just as I envisioned, but thats a story for a later day.
Now I'm in love with natural birthing and I definitely hope to continue on my natural birthing journey with our following children. Who knows, I might even try a home-birth!
Blog Life
Focusing on natural living and mom-life. Our family is learning how to live a healthier happy life everyday. Join us along the way!
Natural Living
We do all the "things": natural birth, breastfeeding, co-sleeping, cloth diapers, elimination communication, and more!
Renovation Project
During my pregnancy my husband and I purchased our first home and started renovating from the ground up.