Our Homesteading Journey – October 2020 Update

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We have so much to be thankful for this month. Last month, we closed a brief, but difficult, chapter of our lives. It was a season of Landon regularly being gone up north to finish the tiny house. Well, now that our tiny house is complete, we have enjoyed being together each day again!

Our season has shifted to a season of preparing for the baby! More on that to come… We have also focused this month on packing our house here in Lake Geneva, WI area so that we can move everything up north to our Bethsaida Homestead next month and live on the bare minimum until after the baby comes!

But, I have to say the biggest adventure of this month has to be our rabbitry! I can’t wait for you to read what happened…

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Packing and Fixing Our House

Now that we have a place to live after the baby comes, we can start getting our home here in southeastern Wisconsin ready to put on the market!

We purchased several Rubbermaid bins and started packing pretty much everything we own. We can’t use standard boxes because we will be storing our items in our barn, which still has wind drafts and mice.

Next month, we will rent a U-haul and cart everything up to Bethsaida Homestead for permanent storage. It will be a quick weekend trip and we pray that we have more crazy trailer breakdowns!

Third Trimester Midwife Appts and Bradley Classes

Now that Landon is home from building our tiny house on our Bethsaida Homestead, we have turned our focus to preparing for our baby’s arrival!

If you don’t know, we are having a home birth and the baby is due in the middle of January! We are also keeping the gender a surprise. To prepare, I have midwife appointments every month to check in on my pregnancy and now that I am in my third trimester, they have jumped to appointments every other week.

The baby is still healthy, growing a lot, and I am feeling great. I have been so blessed by an easy pregnancy and am very thankful it is not something of stress or worry during this crazy time in life amidst a move.

As part of my midwife’s requirements, we are to attend a class to prepare for labor and delivery. She recommends hypnobirthing and other natural pregnancy methods but is very keen on the Bradley Method and Bradley Classes.

After some research, I loved that the Bradley Method focuses on your husband being your coach throughout the entire labor and delivery. It also teaches wonderful techniques on relaxation to help as natural pain management.

With a home birth, I am praying for an easy, safe, and natural delivery of our baby, but that means we have to be prepared. Landon and I signed up for a local Bradley Class that is held weekly for 10 weeks. It began the first weekend of October and we have been loving it so far!

The class is so informative, and we have an amazing teacher and classmates, another couple about the same age due in February, that share the same values. We have learned so much already – relaxation techniques, simple exercise and positions to assist labor, and lots of information on how to approach labor and delivery correctly.

If you are pregnant or plan on being pregnant sometime in the future, I highly recommend that you attend a Bradley Class in your third trimester!

Also, as required by my midwife, we have been reading a chapter of Natural Childbirth The Bradley Way each night before bed. Landon isn’t super keen on this book, mostly because it can be very long-winded at times, so we make ourselves read it together before we watch an episode of Little House on the Prairie, and it certainly motivates us!

The third trimester certainly means it is go time – more chiropractor visits, drinking lots of red raspberry leaf tea and nettle tea, gathering baby items, discussing our birth plan, and so much more! We can’t wait to welcome our little one into the world.

Bethsaida Homestead Rabbitry

Ok, here is it – by far, the greatest adventure of this month! But first, let me explain our rabbitry a bit more…

If you don’t know, Landon and I are passionate about growing, raising, and hunting our own food. For meat, we want high-quality meat that you can’t find at the grocery store, so animals like rabbits, bison, and deer are on the top of our list.

The benefits of rabbit meat, for example, are amazing. It is high in protein and low in caloric value and fat. There is also less sodium and cholesterol. It’s funny that eating a rabbit is almost eliminated from our culture because it wasn’t profitable to the government. But more on that another day.

Currently, our rabbitry is two females and two males. The females were both old enough to start breeding at the end of September.

Lavender, our New Zealand, bred wonderfully with one of our males (both are New Zealands). We knew she was pregnant and giving birth in about a month. Lemon, our Californian, on the other hand, was not breeding well. I tried re-breeding her each week and still nothing. We were convinced she was not pregnant.

Well, a few days before Lavender was about to give birth we gave her a wood nesting box for her to start building her nest. However, she didn’t seem to be building it until on the 31^st day of her pregnancy. At this point, the rabbit’s cages were still all outside, but temps were below freezing each night. We knew we had to move them to the garage soon but with packing everything up inside, we didn’t have room for them yet!

After I started seeing Lavender build her nest on the 31^st day, I told Landon and he ran to the store for some more hay. As we were giving it to her, she went into labor! In fact, as Landon started trying to help her with the nesting box, the babies started popping out! She birthed 10 in total, a great litter size.

That led to a whirlwind of a morning. We were in a time crunch to save these babies from the freezing cold morning air. We hooked the trailer up to our car and drove it into the backyard, loaded up the rabbit hutch – mama and babies inside – and hauled it up to our garage.

We did our best to set up a makeshift nest with a heater and heat lamp. Unfortunately, the babies started slowly dying one by one. They had been too chilled before we provided them heat. Each hour we would check on them and often find another one dead. It was heartbreaking and definitely a few days of anxiousness. We could both hardly sleep as those little babies were on our minds!

After 48 hours, we would know if the mother, Lavender, had nursed them at all because they could no longer survive if she had not. At this point, we had three remaining kits. One more died but two little kits were still alive! We checked on them in the morning and saw plump little bellies, meaning the mother had nursed them at night!

Now the kits are 6 days old and they are growing fast. We prayed that one or two would stay alive and are so grateful that we were able to save some of their lives.

On the other hand, we had more baby rabbits die than expected. Yes, Lemon, our other female was in fact pregnant the whole time Lavender was! The following morning after our day of trying to save Lavenders litter, I went down to the backyard to feed the other rabbits.

As I started to feed Lemon, I noticed something on the ground. When I looked closer, I saw eight frozen and dead babies that she must have birthed sometime that night. I felt completely horrible and devasted. I had given her no supplies or box to build her nest. She had no choice but to birth them on the cold frozen ground and watch them die.

We certainly could not save any of the kits in her litter. Landon and I were both completely dumbfounded that she was pregnant and given birth. We had never witnessed her breed successfully but one of the first times we bred her must have been!

While it was devastating, Landon continues to remind me that this was our first time. With the first time comes lots of learning through experiences and mistakes. Our mama rabbits are both still healthy and strong and we will be rebreeding Lemon very soon.

Some of the many lessons we have learned:

You can touch the babies. The mother will not abandon them like some other animals.
The mother cannot pick up her young and move them. That is why a nest is so important.
The nesting box we made did not work so we will have to make some more adjustments.
You will hardly ever see the mother nurse her young. She stays away from them, so predators won’t find them and only comes back to nurse late at night.
Be proactive in providing the mother everything she needs. Rabbits give birth usually on the 31^st day and both of ours did almost like clockwork. We can now know what to expect and provide for them when we breed them again.

Whew! This was an experience we will never forget. If you have questions or comments don’t forget to drop them below.

Salmon Fishing

Landon and I, well let’s be real, Landon especially, love this time of year! The salmon start coming into the rivers from Lake Michigan into Kenosha and we have a blast catching them.

Landon is very focused on filling our freezers this time around so that we have plenty of stock to last us until we can find more salmon streams near us in the UP after we move to our Bethsaida Homestead full time.

One weekend, Landon and I went and caught a whole bunch. Being pregnant and less mobile in my waders, I mostly helped with the pictures and videos. Landon had some really fun fights. Be sure to follow us on Instagram to see some of them!

Landon has been going in the morning during the week and on the weekends as well. Our freezer is very full right now and I am so thankful! We also love sharing the filets with our family, friends, and even my midwife as well. So, if you want one and you are local just let us know.

Trailer & Side Hustles

We have been on Rover, the dog-sitting/dog-boarding app, for quite a while now and have not had any bookings. Well, this month we received our first booking!

It was so fun to watch two little beagle puppies during the day while we worked and make some extra cash too. Brook and Brown enjoyed the company! It was definitely a blessing in our lives for a few weeks. If you are interested in signing up for Rover, you can check it out here!

We also have been selling pretty much all of our furniture to prepare for the move and are grateful for those who have purchased some of it on Facebook marketplace. Not going to lie, we can use any spare penny we find right between everything needed for the move and baby.

The Lord provides!

Chicken Scare

Last but not least, we can’t forget about our chickens! We have been collecting about 9-12 eggs a day and it is a huge blessing in our lives. We also love to share them with others.

However, earlier this month as Landon was working on home projects we saw a neighbor dog that was loose run into our backyard and start attacking them. It was a horrifying DeJa’Vu moment of the last time our chickens were attacked.

Thankfully, we were home and able to scare the dog away, so it didn’t kill or injury any of our chickens too badly. Only some plucked feathers.

Our chickens’ free-range throughout the day and we no longer keep them fenced in because we are moving our fencing up north. But, now we are worried this could happen again.

In fact, it did happen again. Not one, but twice. Still no deaths, thank goodness, but when our chickens retreat to the woods for safety we miss out on eggs and have to spend quite a bit of time calling them back out and into our yard.

Landon and I deeply want to protect what is ours, like anyone does! But it is a tricky situation to be in. Neither of us enjoys confrontation and we want to show the love of Christ and dwell in unity at the same time. We have confronted our neighbor regarding the issue and pray it does not happen again or that there are any further repercussions.

Well, that’s it for the October update on the Bethsaida Homestead! Thank you so much for reading and your prayers. Don’t forget to connect in the comment section below. (:

-The Adventuring Alberts

Landon, Kelsey, and baby

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Kelsey at GoodPointGrandma

Hey there, I'm Kelsey! I'm so glad you are here. I'm a 20-something helping you live your most fulfilling life. I hope you'll join me in this old-fashioned & simple lifestyle!