It's the beginning of Summer and it has been RAINING!!! We had a drought last year, but it's looking like this year might be different! One thing I can say with utmost assurance is that living in a yurt brings you VERY close to nature! I take comfort in knowing that round structures handle wind better than square buildings, but hail on a canvas roof feels a little nerve-wracking ...

WOW!!!!  It has been four months since I have written! I took two college courses during the last four months and got my Associate Degree in Liberal Studies. My youngest daughter turned 3, in April, on the 1st anniversary of my older brother's passing. Also in April, my oldest brother moved home from Oklahoma after 25 years! In May, my older two girls finished Kindergarten and 2nd Grade, and construction on the spiral staircase for the loft progressed!  We also celebrated my mom's 70th birthday, my parent's 50th wedding anniversary, and my niece's High School Graduation!  It's been a busy four months, but especially in May!

One Year!!  We have been in our Yurt Home for one year ... and a few days!  My how time flies!  We moved in last year, on January 6th, 2023, and never looked back!  Okay ... maybe we looked back a little bit.  We have found ourselves asking if we've made the right decision many times over.  Quickly followed by, "but this was really our ONLY option!"  We've had our challenges, but we are learning to get used to our Yurt Home.  Dare I even say that we are getting comfortable?  There is still A LOT of work to do, but slowly and surely, we are making it feel more and more like home.  Our dreams (that felt like they were in the VERY distant future after having to give up our farmette) are starting to look a little clearer.  Things are slowly starting to come into focus.  And by slowly, I mean S.L.O.W.L.Y!  We can only do things as time and money allow, and we are short on both, so things don't happen as quickly as we'd like them too!  Most days, we still feel like we are merely surviving, but we are getting closer to the life that we have been hoping to create for ourselves.

It's upon us!  Christmas is almost here!  It is my favorite season, but also my busiest.  Aside from holiday planning and shopping, we also have our oldest daughter's birthday and our wedding anniversary to celebrate ... all in the month of December, with my birthday following shortly behind, on January 7th!  We did a lot of simplifying this year!  I'm finally doing a nutritionist lead detox, to start to heal from mold illness, and all food indulgences are out of the question.  So no crazy birthday cake, big Christmas meal, or anniversary dinner.  When you simply can't even try to do it all, it makes things a lot less stressful!  It forces you to slow down a little bit and enjoy what this time of year is really all about.  For our family it is about celebrating the birth of Jesus Christ our Lord and Savoir.  Without his birth there would be no reason to celebrate!

It is true that Thanksgiving is the time we are supposed to be focused on all of the things we are thankful for.  There is no lack of things to be thankful for: healthy kids, a warm house, friends and family that care about us, but this Thanksgiving was different.  Dare I say, "hard".  The last time I saw my brother was the Sunday after Thanksgiving.  November 27th, 2022.  My parents had Christmas with Jeff and his girlfriend, at their place, and we had obligations with Matt's family.  I spoke with Jeff briefly, on the phone, Christmas Eve when we were at my parent's and his younger daughter called.  He texted me, "Happy Birthday" in January, and I texted him, "Happy Birthday" in February, but by the end of February, he was using again, and so then I didn't have a lot of communication with him after that.  The next thing I knew, along came April ... and my brother was GONE! 

It has been almost a half a year since I wrote anything!  My brother's passing really took it out of me for a LONG time!  I'm still struggling with his loss.  I've never been so heartbroken in my life!  If I'm being honest, I've really been struggling to write.  I feel like I need to stick to the topic of Yurt living, but it's not really what's at the core of my thoughts and feelings.  Honestly, the Yurt was our last ditch effort to help with my health issues, and get out of mold.  It was also the only option we could afford in the way of building new.  It was not our dream to live in a Yurt Home, and it hasn't been easy!  There have been a lot of challenges, from the seams leaking, and having dripping in our hallway to the dome building up a lot of condensation in the Winter, and then when it melts, it drips right down into the middle of our living space. We finally have a loft that is now mine and my husbands "bedroom", but it is kneeling space at best.  We are a bit crammed up there!   When the wind blows hard, in the night, the sound of the canvas creaking keeps me awake, and it was sweltering HOT inside in the heat of the summer!  I think we reached about 90 degrees INSIDE our yurts!

Honestly, when I look back at my Instagram post and blog post from April Fool's this year, it almost makes me sick to my stomach!  To think that being dumped with snow was the real joke the universe was playing on me that day!  In just over 24 hours, on the evening of April 2nd (my Evelyn's birthday of all days), I'd find out something much differently!  The most cruel joke ever played on me was on April 1st, 2023, but it wasn't the snow ... it was the day that substance abuse took my older brother's life!  It's hard for me to look back on that day knowing that I thought everything was okay, and that the worst thing happening in my life was that we had WAY too much snow.  In reality my brother, Jeffrey Allen Olson, lay dead in a hotel room, from a heart attack, after inhaling one too many cans.  It is three weeks, to the day, that I found out about his death and now my life will never be the same!  

This year Wisconsin played a cruel joke on us for April Fool's!  The snow was finally starting to melt, and it seemed like Spring was FINALLY here, but alas, we woke up to several feet of snow this morning!  The good news is that the sap is running, Matt has finally gotten the driveway plowed (at 10:30 at night), and hopefully our guests, for Evelyn's birthday tomorrow, will be able to get to the house!

Don't get me wrong ... we are happy for the opportunities our homestead brings, but some days, it just feels like more than we can handle!  We have big dreams, not so well laid out plans, and children that keep us up all night!  We've been talking a lot about all of the things that we want to do, and we want those things to happen RIGHT NOW!!  However, those things take time, and quite frankly, more money and energy than we have RIGHT NOW!  

Winter anywhere in the North is hard, but Winter in Wisconsin, on a Yurt Homestead can pose quite the challenge! When I last wrote, which was awhile ago I know, I wrote about our cold snap and how we successfully made it through!  Well, we have now also made it through several snow storms, as well, and I have to say, we are continuing to stay comfortable ... HOT in fact!  Also, with the consistent temperature, in the big yurt, after the addition of the pellet stove, and more trouble-shooting with the outdoor wood boiler, we no longer have a ton of condensation along the upper walls/roof of the yurt.  This has been a huge relief!  

Sunday night was a bit chilly here in the yurts.  Our outdoor wood boiler wasn't circulating properly, and kept overheating, so Matt had to flush the system several times.  This meant that we didn't have our in-floor heat for several hours!  We were on the tail end, of January, in Wisconsin!  Sunday night's weather was predicted to be wind-chills of -30 degrees, and wouldn't you know it ... Wisconsin delivered!  

It's a process, but we are slowly settling in.  It seems like we've been groomed for this.  We've moved so much, and had bigger spaces to work with, as well as, smaller spaces to work with.  I'm not sure if it's the circular space, or the fact that we designed the yurts before building, but it feels like this space is far more functional than others!  Every single, little space is usable.  As you can see, in the picture of our kitchen area, even square things fit nicely around the circle.  There was some dead space at the end of the counter, that Matt  split in half to make a pantry, in the kitchen, and towel shelves in the bathroom.