All right y’all. It’s been a hot minute since I’ve written anything here, but we have been all over the place out here. So all over in fact that I’ll be giving this a title after it’s written, but here are some of our updates:

First of all I wanted to share what suddenly brought us back to Alaska. We had the opportunity to do a mini documentary about our lives! It finally came out and you can find it here; fair warning it was paid for by Marlboro so it is behind an 18+ and login page. There is a blurb, neat pictures, and a little video though if you feel like going through all that to see it!

It was a really cool experience and gave us a good reason to leave all our family visiting and come back home. Kyle would be interested in being filmed again, so much so that we’re hoping to get some gear and start filming ourselves. I found it pretty exhausting, but did enjoy it. The introvert in me could have used a few more breaks between shots though.

In other news, we welcomed another daughter into our lives this spring!

Bellamy is enjoying being a big sister, and Kyle and I are getting in all the baby snuggles we can. I feel we are so lucky we are getting to raise our girls out here. Obviously, being Mom is taking a lot of my time right now, but I’m loving every minute of it.

We also finally got everything together to fish. Got the truck fixed, boat cleaned up, nets, buoys, rope, odds and ends. I even pulled out my 10-year-old welding skills to make us some anchor points (that are holding up, go me!).

Speaking of fishing, whew is the learning curve steep!

We had an issue with our boat and it got swamped the other day! We had to dump fresh water all over the outboard, flush the oil and fuel, get a new battery, and clean out the spark plugs. Luckily it ran for fishing the next day, but we have plans to get new spark plugs before our next fishing day. Our nets even floated away but washed up just down beach! Lesson learned that you always tie everything to the boat.

The good news is fishing is going well enough. We should be able to clear our debts and continue living out here 🙂

Getting started was a bit more expensive than we realized. We put some things on the back burner this year, like the garden. I am secretly glad we don’t have much of one this year, though. We went over a month without rain. I’m not sure I could have kept up with watering if we had a garden the size I wanted!

Other updates:

One big improvement we’ve made to the property is adding to our current cabin. 250 sq ft was just not enough space for 4 people, so we expanded to around 500 sq ft. The new space is now a living room and bathroom, which means our shower is now indoors!

It may not be completely done yet, but it is so nice to be able to spread out a little. While I don’t feel very homestead-y this year, I know we are taking our time and getting everything in place to be able to homestead here forever. Cows, bees, ducks and a H-U-G-E garden…. someday soon, I promise! In the meantime I’ll keep blogging our adventures, and we’ll keep making improvements for a better homestead tomorrow 😀

Thanks for reading our updates!