OUR STORY

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I grew up in a small town in the Pocono Mountains in Pennsylvania.  Homesteading and living off the land was not a part of my life growing up.  My parents were very much of the "convenience" era, those who bought into the idea that they did not have to do any growing, canning, hunting, making because you could just drive to the grocery store.  

My childhood definitely taught me skills that I would need later on in my life to live my current lifestyle.  Because I was the last of the Gen Xers, I was a true latchkey kid.  The majority of my time was spent in the woods with my black lab.  We had endless amounts of it via the trails behind my house.  I would disappear there for the entire day, observing and tracking wildlife, paying attention to every aspect of the woods, pretending I was in the wilderness all on my own and I needed to figure out how to survive.  These skills have come in handy many times in my adult life.  

One thing my father did teach me was how to plant and grow things.  Our yard was always one that the neighbors envied.  Every year a huge pile of cow manure would be delivered to the left front part of our yard and I knew it was time to get to work.  This skill of mine most likely came from my grandfather.  To this day, I have never seen a tomato garden in someone's residential garden that was as impressive as my grandfather's.  

I also had an "aunt" who had horses and taught me how to ride, care for livestock and then also got me involved in 4-H as much as someone with absentee parents could be involved.  This part of my life put a fire in me which would always draw me to livestock.  

I had always wanted to hunt.  Hunting was something where I grew up that was part of life.  The first day of deer hunting was considered an unofficial holiday.  You could take off from school and it was not questioned, businesses were closed or had light staff.  I wanted to hunt so bad that I went to the local junior high school on the weekends and took my hunter safety course and was so happy when I "graduated"!  I thought getting my license meant I would be able to go hunting.  My father met my excitement with "I don't want to take you hunting", and that was it.  Not until my husband did I get in to hunting.  One of our first hunts was a duck hunt on Thanksgiving morning, one of our first dates, and I was hooked.  

Our journey through IVF and what it did to my body really threw us into the whole lifestyle.  My need for an emergency hysterectomy at 39 due to the human growth hormones turning my uterus into painful version of omnicron opened our eyes.  Being more aware of what we put in and on our body and healing our bodies from years of toxins has been our motto since then.  Now that we have a child, we are even more aware of it. 

My husband and I have fostered children since we began our IVF journey.  Friends of ours were taking in a friend of their son's every weekend and this was the only time that they child got a shower, clean clothes and a meal that was not made my someone wearing a hair net at school.  This broke our hearts and we wanted to help.  That started our journey to getting licensed to foster.  Three days after we were licensed we received our first placement.  

It has been a journey that is for sure.  This journey will be detailed in our book that will be coming out in 2025 titled "But there are so many kids that need good homes".  During the summer of 2023 we were about to give up on fostering.  The morning that we were closing the door we got a call from our foster agency. "Wait, wait, wait!  We just got the infamous Safe Haven baby call!"  That phone call would change the trajectory of our lives in so many ways.  

About a month later we brought home a second baby straight from the NICU.  He had only been placed with a foster family after 28 days in the NICU on feeding tubes and oxygen for some very sad reasons.  Having two babies from the hospital and one with some very special needs and needing therapy 3x a week and many doctor's appointments, meant that one of us needed to stop working to appropriately care for them.  That was me.  The corporate world had not been kind to me since our move to Colorado so I was no where near heartbroken of this.  Instead of being just an employee number to a money hungry corporation, I would be the world to two abandoned babies.  

As my mother-in-law says, "Moss never grows under your feet".  With that mindset of mine, I couldn't just stay home and take care of babies, I needed to DO something!  After several conversation with my husband it was decided on Hunt & Homestead.  I started with a very basic and homemade booth at the local Arts & Crafts market selling goat milk soaps, homemade laundry detergent and beeswax wraps showing people they could live a healthier lifestyle and saw the interest.  I dug in from there and from taking in those two little ones Hunt & Homestead was also born.

My love for goats started in my teens.  I had been working for my parents, neighbors at the flea market we went to on the weekend, all of my life but my first REAL job was at a horse stable in Shawnee, PA.  This business took tourists on trail rides along the Delaware Water Gap and I was a barn hand.  I was mucking stalls, grooming horses, feeding horses and taking care of the other animals that frequented the barn.  One of those animals was a goat named Sammy.  Sammy and I had a love-hate relationship.  I would be mucking a stall and Sammy would run up behind me and ram me in the butt.  When it was time for everyone to get locked in the barn at night, Sammy would find a way to get out and run circles around the barn with me always trailing not too far behind him.  There were times that I would be exhausted and sit down on some stairs to enjoy my lunch and a well-rewarded break, and Sammy would unexpectedly find his way over to me and nuzzle against my leg, and spend a moment being loving and cute.  I absolutely adored Sammy's personality.

After I did not work there anymore, I would find myself drawn to goats whereever I went.  State fairs, zoos, homes I visited that had goats.... I loved GOATS!  Some 4-H girls loved horses.... I loved goats!

Fast forward to to several years ago.  We had fostered a baby during the post COVID formula shortage.  It was a part time job practically just to track down his formula.  Knowing that we were just going to continue on our journey to adopt a baby, I started making my case as to why we needed goats.  Goat milk is the closest thing to breast milk and was used in all of the old fashioned recipes.  My husband, surprisingly was not too hard to convince of this.   We soon had 4 goats added to our our little homestead with chickens and a garden.  I soon found many fun new things that I could make with goat milk including soaps, hair conditioner, shampoo bars and lotion for our little baby who had horrible eczema.  Now we share this all natural and homemade goodness with so many.  The biggest reward is hearing feedback from customers like Arvid, an older gentleman who has a skin issue that his doctor hasn't been really been able to figure out and no prescribed medications have worked but my goat milk lotion is clearing it up.