Continuing Growth and Nurturing Spirit for Rural Families

Kody: Hi everyone, and thank you for tuning in to season three of the Homestead Education. I can’t believe that we are coming up on a year of this podcast. Season three is going to be really amazing. I’m actually going to be recording two episodes a week. One will be devoted to homesteading, personal growth, and small business, while the other one is going to be devoted completely to homeschooling. I’m really excited about this because over the next six months, I’m going to be traveling to all of the major homeschool conferences in the United States, as well as several homesteading conferences. So I really hope that you guys take an opportunity to go to my website. I will link it in the show notes, but it’s www.thehomesteadeducation.com/events, and it lists all the events that I’m going to be at and whether I’m going to be a vendor or a speaker. I’m just so hoping that I get to see so many of your faces at these events. Come and introduce yourself and tell me that you’ve been listening to the podcast. Tell me what you love and hate about it. I’m not even worried because over the last year of this podcast, it has hit the top 100 home and garden podcasts in three countries.

Kody: Can you guys believe that I am being listened to in the United States, Canada, and Australia? And it’s just such a blessing to have so many of you tuning in and listening to me each week. I just want to remind you guys of all the homeschool curriculum that I have created for preschool all the way through high school on learning homestead science. Throughout the year, make sure you’re following the website because I’m going to be releasing a lot of new products this year that are going to enhance your homestead homeschool experience. Now I want to go ahead and start our year, or this season, off to a really powerful start. And with that, I have a guest, Emily Reuschel, which I’ll be introducing here in a moment. The reason I am having her on is because she just has such an amazing mindset on how to really embrace an amazing version of yourself. I’ve recorded this episode in advance, so I want to say that her and I talked about a lot of really great books and programs that I think that everybody should take a moment to go check out.

Kody: I wanted to tell you before you started listening that down in the show notes, I’ve listed all the books that she and I chatted about, so I don’t have to say that each time when we are interviewing. So without further ado, I’m going to go ahead and move on to my interview. All right, everyone, I have Emily Reuschel here today. She is a farmer’s wife, mom of two, entrepreneur, sought after motivational speaker, podcast host, and the leader of retreats and masterminds across the Midwest that inspire and propel rural women toward their truest, most aligned goals and priorities. So, hi Emily. How are you today?

Emily: Hi. I’m so good and I’m so looking forward to being here. Thanks for having me.

Kody: Yeah, thank you. So, you know, I was telling you before we started recording, I came across your podcast recently and I was just so blown away by what you’re doing. So do you want to tell us a little bit about that?

Emily: Yeah, absolutely. I’ll rewind it just a little bit to give some context.

Kody: Yeah. I guess tell us a little bit about yourself too,

Emily: It’s all part of the story to explain how I got to where I am today, because it’s certainly not where I ever expected to be. I grew up in what I thought was a small town in southern Illinois, just outside of the St. Louis, Missouri area. I always knew that I wanted to live more rural than where I had grown up. I loved the community that I was in, but I just have always been deeply rooted or attracted to the wide open spaces. So always kind of knew that that was in my future. I just assumed that it would be a little bit more out of St. Louis. But as fate would have it, I found myself a husband who is a farmer and as I’m sure a lot of your listeners can relate to, farms don’t move, so people do.

Emily: In 2016, I found myself back on his family farm here in West Central Illinois. Professionally, I have my undergrad degree in elementary education. I thought I was going to be a classroom teacher for the rest of my life. How cute, right? Like, a teacher and the farmer, the all-American dream. After five years in the classroom, I hadn’t been assuming that anything else would come about. Like I said, I thought I was going to be in the school I was teaching in for the rest of my career. I had a kind of leap of faith moment where I happened to see an ad from our local YMCA, – a rural branch that serves our greater community – pop up for a program director position. On a whim and a total leap of faith, I took that position and was so blessed to be able to serve our community in that way.

Emily: And being at a small rural branch kind of started learning the ins and outs of, of business and HR and fundraising and all of these things I would’ve never had experience with in the classroom. So that’s really what opened my eyes to this world of thinking I would always be a teacher. I went from that’s the only thing that I was good at to wow! I am learning and doing so many different things. And so I was pushed into all these professional growth opportunities and along the way started my own personal growth and health journey, which prompted me to start sharing online because I wanted to connect with other farm wives or rural women who are also interested in personal growth. Fast forward, a few years later, I left the Y M C A last year to pursue entrepreneurship full-time.

Kody: Good for you.

Emily: I am not gonna lie, I had no game plan. I knew some things that I wanted to do, but the little ladies at the Y would be like, “What are you gonna do?” And I would try to explain, but I didn’t really have a plan. And they’re like,”You’re going to work for the internet?” I’m like, “Yeah, kind of. I’m going to have a podcast and I’m going to start speaking.” And they were like, “How do you get into that?” I’m like, “I don’t know. I think I just say it and then it happens”. And that’s basically what it did.

Kody: I think there’s some truth to that.

Emily: Yeah. So many people will be like, “How did you do this?” or “How did you get into that?” I’m like, “I kind of just decided and then started doing it.” Like, it’s crazy. So now over the past year I have, like you said in my bio, I travel to speak, and I love emceeing events. I have my own podcast called Gather and Growth, all about personal and professional growth and development for rural women. I bring together rural women in masterminds on a virtual basis and then now also in-person retreats. And so really my heart lies, in what sounds like your listenership of women who are in rural communities who are pursuing goals and dreams in a lifestyle maybe outside of what they’ve always known. That’s really the passion for me. So many of us did all of the things, checked all the boxes, went to college, got the degree, was president of all the clubs, married the farmer, had the babies.

Emily: I woke up and was like, “Is this it?” I did all the things that they said was going to make me happy and something’s not right.

Kody: Right.

Emily: So there’s just this inner knowing of exploration, and personal growth is such a huge part of that. So what I’m so passionate about is helping women, specifically from rural communities, tap into their inner knowing and figure out what they actually want and pursue that. You know, big dreams, obviously we think business, running a marathon, climbing a mountain. But whether it’s, “I want to be home with my kids and I want to homeschool,” or whether it’s “I want to have chickens in my backyard,” or, there’s such a broad range of what these dreams and goals that you set out for yourself look like. And what’s important to me is helping women really listen to, “What do I actually want my life to look like for me?”

Kody: You know, I love everything that you just had to say. You jumped right into what I was going to tell. What I was going to tell the listeners is, I think that us rural women are underestimated because we are a force to be reckoned with. But we’re so busy doing all the things, that I don’t think that we grow like we should. I forgot to grow myself. I was so busy just being a mom that after my last pregnancy, when I had really bad postpartum depression and stuff, I put out my flame. I know where my flame needs to be and that’s what led me to where I’m at.

Emily: I agree, and obviously, everyone is unique and different, but I think that there’s this call to service that so many of us have. We want to make the world a better place. We want to raise our kids well. We want to give back to our communities. We love being part of our small towns and our families and these generational farms. But what happens before we realize it is that we are giving everything to everyone else, which eventually puts ourselves last. And it’s not on purpose. We know self-care is important, but when, how, what does that even mean? It’s not just a spa day.

Kody: One of the things I’m actually teaching and speaking on this year is raising self-sufficient kids so that we aren’t spending our time chasing the kids around and doing and doing and doing for them and everybody else. Everybody is a part of the home. Everyone is a part of the farm, and that it’s not just our job to handle and manage everybody.

Emily: Yeah. How much of it is expected of us and how much of it is expectations we create in our mind for ourselves? Does anyone actually think we need to do that? I don’t know. Not always.

Kody: You know what? I think it’s because of social pressures. It comes from the outside and it’s not really needed and you’re not doing anybody any favors by doing it all for them.

Emily: I don’t know about you, but I’m an Enneagram three, so I’m an achiever. So if I do anything, I want to do it gold star. Whether it’s mom, being president of the club, being involved. I want to do all the things and I want to do them awesome. So I am learning how to let go of that.

Kody: My business coach is just constantly like, “You need to do your personality tests”. And I’m like, “There’s no time because I’m too busy doing all the things.”

Emily: The ‘Road Back to You’ is the book you need to read, don’t take the test.

Kody: Road Back to You. Okay. I’m going to write that down.

Emily: If I had a dollar for everyone I’ve convinced to read that book, I would have, literally like $10. But yeah.

Kody: I’m the same way with the Four Agreements. I think everybody needs to read that book.

Emily: I just started that book this morning. I literally got like 12 pages in.

Kody: You’ll probably be done by the end of the day. I mean it is a short read, but it changed my world. I was like, “Oh my gosh, I thought I was the only one who thought this stuff.” Oh, I’m so excited for you right now. In fact, I have a podcast episode, it’s called Finding Confidence in Your Homestead Journey or something like that. But it’s basically a book review of that book.

Emily: Okay. I need to go listen to it.

Kody: Go check it out. It was one of my earlier ones, so I was a little scared, but the content was still great.

Emily: It’s okay. Hey, my first podcast was called Do It Scared and I’m pretty sure my voice was shaking the whole time, so I feel it.

Kody: I totally understand. So ‘Road Back to You.’

Emily: ‘The Road Back to You. ‘ Yep.

Kody: Okay. So I’m having you on early in the year because everybody is excited about the new year, new me stuff. I actually came across your program a little bit later, but I want to talk about it as the bigger picture. So do you want to tell us a little bit about YoudoYou?

Emily: YoudoYou82 is a habit challenge that I created actually back in January of 2021, which means it’s been two years now, which is crazy. So basically, how this challenge was born is, the prior fall I had decided I wanted to help some friends and family through a habit challenge I had done the previous year, in 2019. In 2020 I’m like, “Hey, this particular popular, last 90 days challenge is coming up again. It really made a big difference in my journey. If anyone wants to do it with me, sounds great.” I’m expecting five friends or something. And it snowballed into more and more and more people. By January, there were a couple hundred people in this Facebook group.

Kody: Oh, that’s awesome.

Emily: Yeah. I’m like, okay, we’ve got to continue the momentum, but I’ve already done this challenge. So we looked at some different things and nothing made sense. Inclusivity is one of my core values and I just wanted something where everyone could do it no matter whether they were a stay-at-home mom on the farm or a 20 year old, or an intern at a big city or whatever. I wanted something that everyone could take and make it their own, but we could be together. And so that’s where YoudoYou82 was born. Basically it’s an 82 day habit challenge where participants choose six habits to intentionally build or break for 82 days, through the lens of progress over perfection. So the thing that makes this unique compared to a lot of habit challenges is, first of all, you get to choose what it looks like for you. So some people take this super professional or really health focused or some people spin it towards pouring into their relationships or different parts of their business.

Emily: It does also challenge you to get really clear on what you actually need. This isn’t like, “Oh this girl’s doing this six habits. That’s what I’m going to do” because that doesn’t necessarily work. Our lives are so different, our bodies are so different, our priorities are different. So it invites you to get intentional and clear with yourself on what actually serves you in the season. It’s not what you used to do before you had a baby. It’s not what you wish you would be doing. It’s what makes sense right now? And then secondly, we do it through the lens of progress over perfection. There are other programs that exist where you start at the beginning and if you miss one thing on one day, you fall back to the beginning, you’re trash. And that just isn’t sustainable because even if you do it, most people end up sliding back to where they were in the beginning. That’s not how life happens..

Kody: I do my progress trackers with lots of colors so that just at the end I get to see all the bright colors and that feels good.

Emily: Yeah. But life happens. A kid gets sick or it’s harvest or whatever. And the best thing that we can teach ourselves is to let go of the need for perfectionism – like I said, this is something I’ve been working on – and to learn how to stand back up and try again, to not look at that and be like, “Oh, I’ve missed three days. I stink. I’m gonna tear this up and throw it away. There’s one more thing I didn’t do.” Okay, well maybe these habits aren’t aligned with what actually makes sense. Maybe this isn’t what I actually need. I’m going stand back up. I’m going to try again. I’m going to evaluate and I’m going to keep pushing forward. So instead of looking at what days or things we didn’t do, we just at the end celebrate everything that we have accomplished and all of the growth of an intentionality that we had throughout the way. So it’s a totally free challenge. Absolutely anyone can start anytime. Obviously there’s a lot of people jumping into it right now being the new year. But my favorite time to start this challenge is at the beginning of harvest or planting because that’s when everything goes crazy and I need a little bit of focus.

Kody: I like to do these types of things in the spring because everything’s fresh and new.

Emily: Yeah. Yeah. Winter’s a wacky time to start anything.

Kody: Right. Plus I always listen to my happy podcast when I’m starting my seeds and stuff.

Emily: Yeah. Absolutely. Then I will say back in, let’s see, November or so, I was kind of going through a lot. I had started therapy, I was kind of on my own healing journey and I’m going to be honest, 82 days just felt like forever. So I created a little baby sister to YouDoYou82 called YouDoYou32. Same concept for when either 82 days kind of feels impossible or you need a little jumpstart. So I actually started a round of YouDoYou32 yesterday, for January mostly, just because we traveled so much in December. I needed a recentering.

Kody: Well and I love that you practice your own preaching because sometimes that’s the hardest. I have all these great ideas, but I can’t do it in my real life.

Emily: Yeah. Absolutely. So, it’s definitely grown and evolved over the last two years, but it’s just been such a blessing in helping women from so many walks of life, but especially the rural women in my community learn what it means to really put themselves at the top of their priority list in small ways and in big ways. But at the very least, putting themselves up there versus the “I do everything for everyone and I’m lost” place. Honestly it’s not sustainable and it’s not good for us.

Kody: It’s really not. And I love that you can just pick up your program and just start. I could start right now. I could print it out and get going. I downloaded it but I haven’t printed it yet because we were shipping this morning. But I’m kind of excited about it. I have a habit tracker in my planner, but I feel like if this one is just sitting right up front, it’ll make me see it every day. And like I said, I like that you can pick it up.

Emily: Yeah. I’ll have a whole workbook with some more tips and tricks and a kind of explanation of the why behind different things. There’s a page in there with ideas for habits. Again, this isn’t a copy and paste, but sometimes we’re like, where do I even start?

Kody: Right. And some great book recommendations that went on my list.

Emily: Yeah. Atomic habits.

Kody: Now my favorite part about your program is that they need to be measurable things.

Emily: Yeah, because I think it’s pretty easy for us to be, just for example, I’m going to eat healthier. Well, what does that even mean? You get to the end of the day and you’re like, well, I was kind of healthier. I ate six Oreos instead of 14. But is that actually healthier? So yeah, this comes from me being a teacher and having smart goals drilled into my brain. You have to be able to say definitively at the end of the day, I did it or I didn’t do it. So again, it forces us to get intentional and get clear on what it actually means. If you’re talking about nutrition for example, is it following a certain plan? Is it eliminating a certain thing out of your diet for 32 days? Is it adding a vegetable with dinner every night? I think the more clear we can get, the more precise and measurable, the more likely we are to stick to it. Gray areas don’t hold us accountable in the same way. Yes or no.

Kody: I completely agree. Last year my word or phrase of the year was positive personal growth and I loved it. Whenever I fell behind I could just jump right back in because that was part of that growth journey. At the end of the year I reflected back on it. My business grew, and my health got better. All these great things and I was like, “Well I don’t want to do the same thing this year but I want to keep on that track.” It feels really good. So yeah, my theme for this year is intentional growth.

Emily: I love that.

Kody: I spent all week after Christmas downloading Goodreads so that I could track how many books I read this year. And I did a Conquer challenge so that I could track how many miles I ran and got a reward for it and love it. But I did it with the kids too. I sat down with the kids and I said, “Everybody pick a goal for the year.” And I was so excited. My dyslexic daughter wants to work on her spelling. So we downloaded IXL for her. One of my boys, her twin brother, put on a little bit of weight. He’s just going through that chunky 14 year old stage, you know? And he’s like, “Well, I really wanna work on that and work on training my dairy calves better.” I couldn’t, couldn’t think of an app for that, but I got him a fitness app for his phone so he can track his calories and just be more aware of what he is eating. He is going through that carb phase, too. “I’m just going to eat, like, a loaf of bread for a snack . . .” I just wanted him to actually start seeing what he’s eating rather than actually being on a diet.

Emily: I’ve had so many parents do YouDoYou82 with their kids so maybe you could do a family affair.

Kody: I’m thinking about doing that so they can check it off and see it. Then the best one was when I asked my five year old what he wanted his to be, just to give him where he can join in and be part of it. And he’s like, “I don’t know.” And I was like, “Do you want to learn how to read? And he’s like, “No, I want to be better at catching chickens.” I was like, “Let’s do it.

Emily: Valid. That’s valid.

Kody: Our fair every year is very “Charlotte’s Web” and we have a family fun night where the kids do gunny sack races and greased pig contests and all that stuff. One of them is, they let 300 chickens go in the arena and let all the kids chase chickens. He caught one last year. So it’s a big deal. He has to be the best chicken catcher in town, you know.

Emily: You know, you’re listening to a podcast geared towards rural women when the side chance is about catching chickens. I love that. I love that. And that’s what makes YoudoYou82 or 32 so cool is that it can be any age, any goal, any habits.

Kody: I’m just totally imagining my kid trucking up to the barn in his muck boots to practice catching a chicken and coming back and marking it off on his list.

Emily: Yeah. But it teaches them to be accountable to something. Whether its brushing your teeth or going outside to run around, it’s showing them how to develop these goals and intentions and stick with it, and give themselves grace and celebrate their progress.That would’ve been so nice if that was the way so many of us had been raised to think about these things.

Kody: I think you mentioned in your bio that you’re a box checker. I love box checking. It makes me feel so accomplished at the end of the day or the end of the week. I think there’s not enough credit given to that. My husband doesn’t understand the lists. I get everything done and then I get to mark it off and then I feel good about myself and if I did something extra, sometimes I add it to the list.

Emily: I was going to say, do you ever write the thing you already did just to cross it off, because that’s for sure me.

Kody: That was really important, but I didn’t put it on my original list. So it’s going on there now.

Emily: I can definitely relate to that.

Kody: When I downloaded Goodreads to do all the books that I wanted to read this year, I entered all the books I read last year, because it was still in 2022, so I could get credit for them.

Emily: I actually just re-downloaded that app and updated it. I got into fantasy books for the first time in my life since I was probably 12, at the end of 2022, at the prompting of my therapist because she said I was reading too much personal growth.

Kody: It Happens.

Emily: She said, “Do you ever read anything not related to work?” And I said,” No, I don’t understand.” And she was like, “Hmm, maybe you should try fiction.” So anyway, I have to download Goodreads so I can update everything I’ve read in the fiction.

Kody: I’ve actually made a deal with my husband when he’s like, “Stop working,” I can switch to reading. Usually, I do have a business book sitting by the bed, a homeschool book on my phone, and another business book on my audio. But if I read, even though I’m working on a history thing right now, if I’m reading history books, he lets them count as not working. I enjoy reading them and then I talk to the family and the family enjoys hearing about it.

Emily: Yeah. Oh, that’s so cool.

Kody: So that’s my compromise. I don’t think I’ve read a fiction book in probably two or three years and I used to love them. I had bookcases full. I have one sitting on my desk or on my bookshelf right now that’s calling for me. It’s called “Hell’s Half Acre.” It’s actually not a fiction book, it’s a fictional documentary about a serial killer family in the old West.

Emily: It’s too scary.

Kody: I heard about it and I was kind of intrigued. I think I need to read this. It’s not exactly fiction, but it’s definitely not for work, it’s just for me.

Emily: I love it.

Kody: So let’s talk a little bit about building community with rural women.

Emily: This is one of my favorite things to talk about ever. I think it’s so interesting because we’re in these small towns, these rural communities that we love. What I am finding is that so many people may or may not have connections to their local community, or the people around them, but oftentimes it’s hard when you feel like you’re the only person that’s on the path that you’re on or that you’re thinking about the things that you are. A lot of the women that I work with are maybe building businesses or sharing online or really just starting to make choices for their family that are different than the way that they were raised or what’s “normal” for the people around them or who are just starting to challenge the notion of, why am I even doing this? Is this making our family happy? And I think that that can take what is already prevalent in the isolation of living rural and make it feel even more isolated.

Kody: It really does, especially when you’re working in this online space, you feel like all of your friends, the people that you really connect with, are somewhere else. I grew up in a really small town, like 1700, and I had these two best friends that I did everything with. Even into our twenties, we had kids and we grocery shopped together. Now I live a thousand miles from nowhere and sometimes I just want somebody to grocery shop with, that isn’t my husband, asking why everything costs so much.

Emily: For real, for real. Oh my gosh, that’s a whole other tangent, right? I think it’s really hard, especially when you’re stepping into something different. I know with homeschooling or pursuing a path in homesteading or just building a business, whatever, it looks like when you’re doing something that no one in your proximity is familiar with, it elicits this level of questioning or fear. A lot of times it comes from a place of love because people want to protect us and keep us safe if they care about us, especially family members and friends. Are you familiar with the bucket of crabs analogy?

Kody: Gosh, I’ve heard it and now it’s totally just went, but let’s talk about It.

Emily: Okay. So basically in a bucket of crabs, literally a bucket with crab animals in it, if one tries to get out and is close enough to the edge that they can pull themselves out, the crabs will always pull them back in. Instinctively, humans are actually the same because anyone stepping outside of the societal norm creates a sense of fear or insecurity in the people around them. So people are going to ask questions, or pull back, or be salty in their own way when you’re trying to do something that’s outside of what they know. It can be very scary for them and very threatening because sometimes it can even shine an insecurity on what they don’t have, whether it’s the bravery to do something different or the mindset to see something else being possible.

Emily: That can feel even more isolating. I know for me what has been so powerful is leaning into a community even online, of just finding other women who maybe are doing similar things or not, but at least who understand what my life is like. Let’s be honest, living on a farm in the middle of nowhere is different than how those people live. Great friends from college who are so endlessly supportive of everything I do, but they just don’t know what harvest is. They can be as supportive as they want to be, but they just don’t know. Or, like we joke about, it takes me 45 minutes to go to town to get groceries, but people who don’t live that lifestyle don’t understand the 8 million domino effects that come with that reality.

Emily: Not to say I would trade it for anything, but to find women who not only get that, but also have the expansive mindset of wanting to be intentional with their lives or do something different or chase big dreams, whatever that looks like, has been so powerful for me. In the work that I’ve done over the last year and a half, bringing those women together from literally across North America, like Canada, Mexico, like all over the country in these masterminds and in these retreats, it’s like there’s this wave of relief that it’s not just me. I thought I was crazy. I felt like the only person within a hundred miles that has anything going on like this in my brain. Whether that’s real or imagined, it’s the reality. . . .

Kody: It feels like it

Emily: It feels like it. And so then you start to question yourself. You’re like, am I crazy? Is this a bad idea? Am I doing the right thing for my kids?

Kody: I am a little lucky that I live in a hotbed of online people. So there is, and probably off the top of my head, I think of 10 huge influencers that live in my town. There’s literally 15,000 people in my whole county.

Emily: That’s wild.

Kody: There’s a lot of respect for that, but it’s because a lot of people can’t work up here unless they’re online. So whether that’s working remotely or creating their own businesses with what they’re doing, we’re just so rural.

Emily: I think there’s just so much power in finding, whether it’s with the people physically around you or online, of just being intentional about putting yourself out there to connect with people who are on parallel journeys with you or even further along. I would love if you could speak into this more with the community that you’re connected to, but I’ve just seen that have such a big impact over the last year.

Kody: I know that for myself, that bucket of crabs analogy. . . Oh my gosh. Like I said, I grew up in a town of 1700, actually Northern California, which nobody thinks of California is this rural tiny area. But northern California is not Los Angeles. I grew up on an 1800 acre cattle ranch. My dad was a hunting guide, I was an Ag major. It was all farming around me. On the weekends we weren’t going to the beach or into the malls. We were up in the woods four-wheeling and playing in the river and stuff. That was our life growing up. When I left, even when I left for college and then came home and then left again, everybody was like, what are you doing? Why are you just leaving this? I actually get some backlash now that I left because I thought I was better than people. I don’t think I was better than anyone. I just knew that I wanted something different for my life.

Emily: Yeah.

Kody: And we live different paths now and that’s okay. But yeah, coming to the community that we’re at now is another really small community and we’re really happy with it, but we are completely surrounded with like-minded people.

Emily: That’s amazing.

Kody: I can feel comfortable talking about whatever I want to talk about. I can feel comfortable, well I don’t wear very many political shirts, but my husband does, and I don’t have to worry about people not being happy with us for his views that he very loudly portrays. Everybody I talk to, my whole community, is great. When it’s canning season, or harvest season, everybody’s working together.

Emily: I love that

Kody: It’s a really big Mennonite community and everybody works with the Mennonites really well. We’re all very interconnected. Like I said, it’s 45 minutes from town, and sometimes you just literally need pig feed. You can go to the neighbors and get it and I think that’s really great.

Emily: Now is your husband from the area where you live now?

Kody: Nope.

Emily: I would be interested in what that experience was like.

Kody: When we first left California, we moved to Oregon first to be near his dad.

Emily: Okay.

Kody: But that was the only person we knew in the area. That was a little easier to integrate at first because our kids were still going to public school. We started meeting people at church right away. We started meeting people at the school drop off line, sports. My kids still do sports, but when they’re doing sports with their best friend versus a kid they’re meeting for the first time because we’re homeschooling now, that’s a big difference. One of my friends from college, her parents, had a hunting cabin up in this area. After college they decided to move into the hunting cabin because it was free rent while they figured out what they wanted to do and they got married. So my husband and I came up here for the wedding. I had been to this area before because I had gotten headhunted for a job in this area but ended up not taking it, but I’d come up and visited.

Kody: So he and I came up and got to looking around and we were just like, this is it. This is where we need to be. So I think it took us another year, year and a half, and we came up. I was pregnant when we moved here and so right off the bat, we’re trying to set up the farm and I couldn’t even go to church because I was so sick. I actually had blood clots in my lungs with this pregnancy. I couldn’t even walk to the kitchen. I gained an obscene amount of weight, which has been hard on me. It is one of my personal goals this year so I’m actually working with a doctor on it. They’re like, “We don’t know why you’re gaining it all.”

Kody: It stemmed from this horrible pregnancy. My body attacked itself afterwards and stuff. So we just didn’t get integrated in our community right off the bat. We weren’t going to church, the kids weren’t doing sports. And then Covid hit while the baby was in the NICU. The way we actually met most of the people we know is while the baby was in the NICU. I went into labor eight weeks early and we had to go three hours away to the closest intensive care unit. I had told one of the ladies that I had met, another homeschool mom, what was going on and she put together a meal train. My five kids were home alone basically, and my husband was back and forth checking on everybody, but he had to be in both places.

Kody: My kids had a hot meal every night. The mom would call me while she was in the house and let me know, like, “I’ve walked the house and nobody’s on fire.” We live right by border patrol for Canada and the mom, all the wives of the border patrol guys put together breakfast and lunch food for the kids. They would drop that off in the mornings for the kids. We had a big wind and rainstorm and our fences went down. The volunteer fire department came over and got our horses back and got the fences back up. I asked the kids, “Everybody that comes to the house, will you get their name and phone number?” And they did. I called each one of those people afterwards and we went to their house and brought them food and thanked all of them. And that’s how we got to know our community here.

Emily: That’s so cool. I have chills, So cool.

Kody: It was amazing. And so ever since then, we raise hogs and so every time there’s a fundraiser, someone gets sick or something, we donate pork or we donate a whole hog and people can raffle it off and make a lot of money for whatever program and then we just donate the hog to it. And you know, it makes it where our farm supports itself, gives us a little bit of cash flow during certain times of the year, but really is just paying us back for what we’ve put into it all year long.

Emily: Yeah.

Kody: We’re able to really support our community through this. And also, we raised 4-H pigs too. That’s where a lot of our income comes from, but it makes it where we can connect with all of the kids that show in three counties. So that’s really nice.

Emily: How cool. Oh, what a beautiful blessing of a community. Gosh.

Kody: It’s a really wonderful community here, and so every opportunity I get, I really try to jump in. I actually worked in the community for a while. I did real estate, but like I said, after the baby and how sick I got, I knew that I wasn’t igniting my flame anymore. I thought back to when was the last time I felt on fire and that was when I graduated from college and was working in ag. I was like, I gotta go back to that. We live right next to a hop farm for Budweiser. They’re looking for people doing what I used to do, which was the food safety and quality control. I was the pain in the butt, you know, and I thought about it and I’m like, “That’s going back to work 60 to 80 hours a week.” I want to be home with my family and even real estate I could do part-time or the kids could ride with me to go do shows and like I was still part of my kids’ lives. That’s how I kind of ended up going down the path of writing, starting my website and writing my curriculum on the podcast. And I’ve actually been able to leave real estate at this point. It completely replaced that income.

Emily: That’s incredible.

Kody: And my community, like I said, is really supportive of this type of entrepreneurship as well because they know what we do to give back to the community.

Emily: Yeah. Wow. That’s incredible.

Kody: Now I still need to find a church, but that’s a whole other thing when we live 45 minutes from town. Now that we’re out of the routine of going to church, we haven’t been back in three years and this is just got us but you know. . .

Emily: It’s life right now. That’s nice.

Kody: Most definitely. There’s a church a little closer to us. I think we’re going to get that on the list. But we got to where we really enjoyed our Sundays at home.

Emily: Yeah. Well it’s just hard. There’s just all the things to do. And not to say that that’s not a priority, but there has to be a moment of what gives. We only have so much bandwidth and so much time and so much energy.

Kody: I look at it with our location, you know, we do devotions every morning for school and we are actively involved with many of the people that would be part of our church community. If we went to church and we donate to the churches, several churches. I don’t feel like I belong to any church. So any church that comes to us and asks “do you have anything you can donate for this family,”  we always try to jump in. I feel like we have our own ways of doing that. With the farm, and the kids, and the businesses, and the farm business and. We’re 4-H leaders and my husband’s in the volunteer fire department and I teach at our co-op. Yeah. And then my business has taken off where I’m going to be speaking in a different state almost every weekend from February through July.

Emily: That’s amazing. Yeah. Nice for you.

Kody: Thank you. I’m super excited. You talked about how sometimes you just put it out there and it happens. That was something that for me, I knew where I wanted to be but I didn’t go into networking type situations: “I’d like to be a speaker, so if you could get me in for that.” I just put myself out there as the person that I wanted them to see me to be. I started getting requests to speak at events. Then the podcast I started going on, I started getting requests to talk about topics that I didn’t even realize I was putting off.

Kody: I write the homeschool curriculum for teaching kids common sense and self-sufficiency and those types of things. I started getting asked to come on podcasts and talk about motivating homestead kids and raising self-sufficient kids and next thing I know, I’m getting asked to come and speak on raising self-sufficient kids. I had to take a step back and be like, when did I say that? Then I realized that what I’m offering to teach and the programs I’ve put in place for our family and what I’ve talked about on our podcast is reaching people.

Emily: Yeah.

Kody: I’ve had, after some of my interviews on other podcasts, people calling me or messaging me and being like, “I’m in tears right now. I didn’t know anybody else was going through what I have gone through.” And I was like that, that’s where I need to reach people. I still want to keep doing my curriculums. I think they’re amazing. They fill a niche that was not out there before. But to be able to reach people . . . I have always hated when I felt alone and to be able to put myself out there so that you’re not alone and I want to help you. That feels even better.

Emily: Yeah. Isn’t that what we all want? To be seen and understood at a deep level. It’s one thing to have a surface level conversation, but when you feel like someone really understands what you’re walking through and has been there or is in it with you, there’s no greater comfort than, “oh you too. Thank goodness.”

Kody: I talked to my kids and stuff and I said, “Hey, we’ve got some unique situations in our home, you know, my kids and my husband. Do you guys care if I basically put that out there for everybody?” And they’re like, “No, that’s fine.” They actually like it, because then people go, “Oh, are you the kid with dyslexia? It’s so great to meet you.” But we have a kid with dyslexia and she helps me run my whole business. We have a kid who’s autistic and he raises and trains dairy heifers to the point where there’s purebred farms selling him animals that would never sell before, just so he can show their heifers. We have a son with ODD – I don’t know if you’re familiar with that one – but holy moly! It’s oppositional defiant disorder.

Emily: Yep.

Kody: And they are defiant against everything. There are so many people out there that don’t want to tell people that their kid has a diagnosis for something that’s about defiance. That’s something that society basically says you’re supposed to keep secret. If your kid is being defiant, that’s a taboo subject or it’s your fault. Whichit is not. Not with ODD. Holy moly.

Emily: I know. I was a teacher. I know.

Kody: Yeah, that one is exhausting. And you know, he even pushes back against societal norms. He won’t wear tennis shoes. He wouldn’t wear tennis shoes for P. E. He would only wear cowboy boots. I have a whole podcast episode about that one. It was just a disaster. School wasn’t for him so now he’s training to be an electrician’s apprentice and he’s doing wonderful. But at the same time, like last night, he got in trouble for losing his brand new AirPods and went right into like ODD mode and it was an hour long process of just getting him out of that mode when we were just trying to reach him on, “Hey, you need to spend some time to find your AirPods and get them connected to your new cell phone.” It’s one of those battles, you know, like having a husband that’s a veteran. That is a whole other process.

Emily: Yeah. Yeah.

Kody: He’s trying to think of a business name for himself for a little project he wants to do and he’s like, “Maybe it should be The Obnoxious Vet.” I’m like, “No, I don’t condone that behavior.”

Emily: Yeah.

Kody: I think just being out there and being raw.

Emily: Yeah. Absolutely. And I think it comes back to knowing your family and doing what’s best for your family. Like you said, it’s an area where previously people weren’t having these types of conversations. What we’ve gone through with our son and the anxiety and different forms of therapy and then my journey with mental health and therapy and diagnosis. I’m an open, confident person. We exist in an era where we have information, we have books to read, we have the internet, we have podcast listening and conversations. I can’t imagine what it was like walking through this a generation or two ago when first of all, no one knew what was going on and no one was going to talk about it even if they did.

Kody: I even remember I was the only kid in my really big high school – because even though I grew up in a small town, we went to high school in another town, so it was like 2000 kids in our high school – I was the only one with Tourrette’s and nobody understood it. Of course now it’s almost like a TikTok thing or whatever, but I’ve since eight years old have had Tourrette’s and it’s a constant. There, there was no internet for us back then, no social media to know what else everybody was going through. I think that sometimes some of the things our kids are exposed to aren’t always positive, but if they can channel that the right way, that it’s such a blessing.

Emily: Yeah. Well just to see more people like them. Absolutely. I mean, social media for adults and teens, that’s a whole other topic. And of course there are negative ramifications and a whole host of issues, but I think, especially when we think about teens and the way that they have social media, they have access to feel seen in a way that no other generation has been able to at their age. And I think that’s a really incredible thing.

Kody: I think it could be really powerful.

Emily: Yeah. There’s just this openness and inclusivity. Gen Z and even what’s below them gets a bad rap, but they’re my favorite because they are just like, they don’t care because they just see everything, they know so much and there are just so much of these societal bounds that they’re not phased by or buying into because they’re like, “That’s, that’s made up. Who cares?”

Kody: Oh, I love that.

Emily: I think that generation’s pretty awesome. I think they’re going to turn the world upside down and I’m here for it.

Kody: Awesome. I’m noticing time’s starting to wrap up and I think we could probably talk forever.

Emily: Always, every podcast interview I’m like, “So do we have three hours?” because get me on the phone with someone interesting, we’re not getting enough.

Kody: My husband says podcasting was the perfect job for me because I get to talk to somebody else all the time.

Emily: Literally! For myself, the best thing ever, ever. I love it so much.

Kody: I love everything you’re doing and I’m going to link all your stuff in my show notes because I really hope that my listeners go and follow you and learn from you and continue with your journey. One question that I ask everybody I interview, which I think is going to be a really easy one for you, is, what does ‘keep growing’ mean to you?

Emily: Ooh, keep growing. I love this because I ask everyone on my show, what does personal growth mean to you? And this is, I feel like a very similar question. It’s interesting because I’d say if I would have answered this question a few years ago, it would be in the constant pursuit of being the best version of yourself. But recently I think more to me growing means becoming more in tune with yourself and constantly tuning into your inner knowing and shedding the expectations or opinions of other people and just getting really clear on what is truthful, what makes sense for you, and taking in new information and constantly being in the pursuit of evaluating what place different things have in our lives and just building our life and our existence with intentionality.

Kody: I like that. It’s so important because I think even when people are growing they don’t always have a path. And doing it with intention is so important, even if it’s the smallest intention.

Emily: Yeah. And one thing I’ve really been sitting with, I read the ‘Gap in the Game’ last year, another great book, and for me, being an achiever, the best version of myself, I’m always reaching, always, always got to do the next thing. I found myself not able to really even appreciate how far I’ve come. So it’s like this balance between gratitude and celebration of accomplishment in the ways that we have grown, while also intentionally seeking ways to continue our growth and nurture our spirit. It’s so important to me now.

Kody: Well, that’s awesome. Thank you so much Emily and everybody, please go follow her and listen to her. She’s going to light the world on fire.

Emily: We all are together. That’s why we’re here.

Kody: Awesome. Well, thank you for joining me today at the Homestead Education and I hope that I have given you something to think about this week. To help others find me please comment and leave a review on your favorite podcast player. You can also follow me on Facebook and Instagram, The Homestead Education. Do you have questions that you’d like answered or just want to say hi? Please email me at hello@thehomesteadeducation.com. Until next time, keep growing.