My husband is experimenting with letting pigs be free range. It's a difficult experiment because he doesn't have a lot of other farms as a model. Most farmers think the pigs need to be confined so they are manageable to the farmer. There are so many pigs and only one farmer, so most of farming…

When I moved to the farm with my children, it never occurred to me that I would be raising farm kids. But it happened quickly that my kids did things I would never have dreamed of doing in my own childhood. They spend the day with no shirts. They chop wood with axes. They pee…

I have received about ten emails from people who are outraged that the Obama administration is proposing that kids be banned from doing farm work. People who grew up on farms are posting comments all over the Internet about their farm nostalgia. And I get it. I understand that kids run wild on a farm…

I am tortured by my youngest son's need to be social. We have had a really hard time finding playmates for him. Sometimes I wonder if it's because parents read my blog and are scared to let their kid hang out at our house. But mostly I think it's that we live in Darlington, WI,…

When I lived in New York City, hoarding was never an issue. I lived in a 500-square-foot apartment with my husband and two kids, and I want to tell you that it was really small, but for an apartment in a coveted school district New York City, it's not that small. We had a rule…

One of the topics I write about most frequently on my other blog is happiness. I am sort an encyclopedia of the research people have done in the past twenty years about what makes us happy. The most surprising thing is that happiness has to do with outlook. If you are positive and you feel…

We went to visit my brother in New York City when his baby was born. My kids loved holding her. Finally. There's been a lot of lead-up to this. For example, the last time we visited, as we were going up to the apartment, in the elevator, my six-year-old said, "If Aunt Kristen is pregnant,…

I've been homeschooling for about two months. I remember when my first son was born, and I thought, after five days, "This is crazy. How could I possibly do this for eighteen years?" Of course it gets easier. And the same is true of homeschooling – the first few weeks I thought I would never…