It’s been a very long time since I’ve updated this blog! A lot of life has happened in the mean time, and I just didn’t feel the desire to write much about it on here over the years. Facebook kind of took the place of this blog since it is just so easy to post pics and short tidbits during the day directly to friends and family.
Now that life has changed so much recently, I’ve decided it’s time to get back to blogging. There are quite a few things going on that I think will interest others and hopefully be informative and helpful as well!
So what are the big changes? Well…. it’s a long story, but I’ll try to keep it condensed!

Over the last few years, I’ve been homeschooling, trying to take care of my family (still working on the organization thing!), and slowly getting my home business off the ground. I am happy to say that I have been making some money the past 4 years from it.
I’ve been making an income online, mainly from my ebook, The Soy Candle Making Book. I had closed my candle business down in 2012, since it was just too much work making, selling and shipping candles,and had me pretty stressed out. Instead, I turned the website into an informational site. Now I teach others all about soy candle making, and I have also started getting into adding information about other types of candle making. I have a few other websites that I make some money from as well, but I’ll get into my online business stuff in another post.
Now for the even more exciting changes! We moved onto some property! This has been a dream of mine for a long time, (I mentioned it here in this post from 2012). We now have a 12 acre farm with my parents. We didn’t move too far, just 15 min. away from our old home. I’ll do another post showing some of the work we did remodeling our old house to get it ready to sell.
I really love our new home, and I have lots of plans for it! We have 16 chickens now! There are 6 hens of laying age, 1 rooster, and then we just bought 9 more chicks 2 months ago. I have been enjoying our chickens and our farm fresh eggs so much, and I want to start selling eggs by the end of summer. I’ve found that between 5 or 6 hens we get just enough eggs for ourselves and occasionally enough to give away to family and friends, so the 9 more chicks should give us plenty to start selling once they begin to lay.

We have my horse here with us now, which makes me happy! My dad bought a horse last year, so that makes 2. My plan is to get an outdoor arena set up this summer. We already have a place we’ve been riding last summer, but I need to get some good footing down so it’s not so mucky during the winter, or too hard during summer. Once I’ve got the horses working well this year, I will start advertising riding lessons. Eventually I would like to start offering boarding and build a large indoor arena. The arena may be a fairly long term goal though unless we somehow get rich lol.

Along with riding lessons, I am also coming up with a plan to make one (or maybe both!) of our fields into one big trail course practice area. I’ll have lots of natural obstacles, and I think it will be a great place for riders to come practice in a nice big area, but not so large that it’s too intimidating. It would be a great place for beginning riders as well as green horses. There’s just so many ideas in my head for this one, but that will be for a future post!

We also just bought a dairy goat about a month ago and will be getting another one in a week or so! A few years ago I decided I wanted to get a dairy goat if we ever got some property. I love goat milk, and I figured it would be easier than a dairy cow since they are so much smaller. Well, a couple months ago I found one!  I am loving it! We’ve been enjoying the fresh milk, cream and I’ve even made some goat cheese. Getting up to go milk in the morning has been a great motivator for me each morning.

So our little farm is growing! I’ve got so many ideas it’s pretty overwhelming at times, but one thing at a time! I am so thankful to the Lord for this incredible opportunity.
Our boys are loving it out here, and it is so, so nice that they have so much room to roam and play outside.
Well, I hope you enjoyed this update and the pictures! You can follow more of our farm life at www.AnkenyHillFarm.com and follow us on Facebook @AnkenyHillFarm