Hey there! I’m Brenda. I’ve been married to my husband for twenty five years, and we have six kids. We live on a small farm in Virginia, we eat mostly healthy, and I have been homeschooling forever.
I have merged four sites on this one website! I used to write about Health, Nutrition, Homesteading, and the GAPS Diet on The Well Fed Homestead. I wrote about Adoption, Foster Care & Adoptive Parenting at The Adoptive Mom. I wrote Charlotte Mason-Style Homeschool Reading Plans at The Gentle Learning Co., and I wrote about our local Homeschool Community and nonprofit at STAR Homeschool. It’s all here on this site, and I’m continuing to write here, as well.
What This Site is All About:
When I was homeschooling our three boys, I felt overwhelmed by homeschool curriculum that divided my kids into different grade levels, like a public school. Our boys were 13 months and 10.5 months apart, and I liked keeping them together for as many subjects as possible. It’s possible to do this even with bigger age gaps of children, but it isn’t always easy to find curriculum that works like this.
Our boys have all graduated from our homeschool, and I am homeschooling our three daughters (17, 14, and 9). I still like teaching my children together for as many subjects as possible (I call this Whole-Family Homeschooling), and so, I created FREE homeschool reading plans with this in mind.
I’m obsessed with good books and spreadsheets, and I have combined both of these passions to create Christ-Centered, Charlotte Mason-Style, Chronological, Whole-Family Reading Plans, and I offer them for FREE on this website. It blesses me tremendously to share this work with you!
You can read a lot more about the Reading Plans and the Four Cycles here. You can find the reading plans for each of the cycles here:
I’ve been homeschooling since our oldest (23 year-old son) was two (I was a little ambitious!). Over the years, I have learned SO much, and I love sharing the things I have learned with other moms. I currently lead a Homeschool Community in Lynchburg, Virginia, and I speak at a variety of Homeschool Conventions.
I LOVE God’s Word, and I want it in my head, my husband’s head, my kids’ heads, and in your family’s heads, too! I have been working on this super-fun Scripture Memory Project to share every song I can find that is word-for-word Scripture.
I have had quite a few health issues over the years, and our oldest son was born at 26-weeks gestation. I have Celiac Disease, but I didn’t know it for the first thirty years of my life. This led me to research and write about Health and Nutrition.
Our family ate according to The GAPS Diet for almost three years. It was SO healing for me! Back in 2010-2012, there weren’t many people blogging about GAPS. I started sharing the recipes I was creating & found a community that way.
I enjoy cooking and creating Recipes. You can find several of my recipe creations on this site. They’re mostly GAPS Diet-friendly, which means that they will work for people who eat Paleo, grain-free, and sometimes Whole 30.
We owned an almost 30-acre farm in OR, and now we own an 8-acre farm in VA. We’ve raised our own laying hens, meat chickens, ducks, turkeys, geese, pigs, beef cows, dairy cows, and bees over the years. You can find my Homesteading posts here.
We have adopted three out of six of our kids. In addition, we’ve fostered eleven children. We have parented kids from hard places & I’ve written some posts about Adoption, Foster Care & Adoptive Parenting here.
We’ve been on three cross-country road trips and one time we spent a month in an RV, traveling through California. I haven’t written a lot about these trips YET, but I plan to add them to this page about Road Trips.
STAR Homeschool is a 501(c)(3) Nonprofit
I offer lots of ad-free content on this site in order to bless you. Please consider supporting this nonprofit ministry.
Let’s Connect!
Join the Email List on Substack here!
Recent Posts:
- Cycle 2 History Form 1a+
- Cycle 1 History Form 5+
- Cycle 1 History Form 4+
- Cycle 1 History Form 1a+
- Cycle 1 Read Aloud Form 1b+
Our Family
Here’s an updated photo of our family, from Christmas 2024 (minus one of our sons, who lives in another state):
Blessings to you!
p.s. You might want to come hang out with me on Facebook, Instagram, Threads, Substack and Pinterest.
Hi Brenda
I wanted to let you know that you have totally inspired me to start GAPS with my family. I have been putting it off for a while as it always seem so daunting but after reading how you are doing it with your 8 children and I only have 2, well I thought if you can do it with 8 than I can certainly start with only 2.
Thanks again.
Simone
Australia
Simone, I am so glad that me sharing my story has inspired you to do GAPS! You will feel better & get healthy! YAY! Blessings! 🙂
Bravo Brenda for the courage to do what you are doing. May the Lord continue to bless you and your family on the farm! In His Love, Pastor Jim in Montana
Brenda,
It brought tears to my eyes to hear your story of sickness and then finding the GAPs diet. I started to have pain in many places, swelling in my ear with ringing, and terrible fatigue. I was finally diagnosed with fibromyalgia, auto immune disease of some variety, auto immune thyroid, tmj, etc. I was doing a little better with a pretty healthy diet and mostly gluten free, but then 6 weeks ago, I got terribly sick with severe abdominal pain, diarreah, etc. The doctors have checked a lot of things, but are currently waiting for results from a celiac test. I was so discouraged on Friday, I couldn’t even believe that God was going to help me. Friday evening, a friend told me about the GAPs diet and I knew it was an answer from the Lord. I started right away and that night the pain was gone! I still feel week and a little naseous even as I am struggling to eat so much broth! I really need help in how to go forward with this diet! I also home school three kids who need me to regain my energy soon! Thanks for sharing your story and any help you can give!
Jenny
I just found your blog via cheeseslave. So cool and L-O-V-E your kitchen, the stainless counter tops are the bomb! I am a sahm of four children, we homeschool, and eat real food! I am from the Pacific Northwest. It has been our dream for acreage and mini farm, yet we keep doing other things, like living in an rv in Florida (currently). We’ve moved about 7 times in our 11 years of marriage (intentionally). We’re ready to settle, hopefully back in Spokane, WA. where our sticks and bricks home is. In a development…..thats the only bummer, but it is still quite rural, we’ve got a wheat field directly behind us, and the devlopment is quite new and not filled with houses due to the down economy. Hopefully we can sell someday and move out to the hills. I own Stories Basic country Skills,the Encyclopedia for Country Living by Carla Emery, Nourishing Traditions, and many others like it. I am also what you call a “Prepper”and an avid Ron Paul supporter in ’08 and ’12! Anyway I totally dig your website. My oldest child is 10 and is on the autistic spectrum, so we’ve skimmed through just about every diet there is. SCD has been the most helpful but we are currently doing more of a primal/paleo diet, I should research GAPS more as I really want to add more fermented foods to our diets. I have heard of it over the years but was more into researching other things, chelation therapy, gf/cf/sf/ _f/_f/ (just kidding) diets….etc. Health in general. Looking forward to visiting your blog. There are SO MANY AWESOME BLOGS OUT THERE!!!! I am totally relating to yours though, I LOVE FIESTAWARE TOO (no lead in the glaze!) I only have 2 white FW coffee cups currently though. Bless you for adopting and foster parenting, there are so many here in the USA that need good homes. Take care & Shalom (peace) Hope in Jacksonville, FL.
Hope, thanks for stopping by to comment! I hope that your family *can* settle down on land someday soon! It’s a wonderful life! We moved a lot before we found our farm, also. I think RV life (for a short while) sounds fun, too. I think you and I have a lot in common. 🙂
wow. you sound so much like my dreams! lol! I am in the process of trying to get our house up for sale, start GAPS for me and then the whole family (momma needs the energy to serve all!), trying to move to GA, looking for land there, have two kids (one will start homeschooling this fall) and are looking forward to settling down and adopting (I have 3 younger adopted siblings!) I will be following your blog and rejoycing with you in your journey!
Do you have any tips for starting such a huge diet for a whole family?
Hi! I too have been to Nancy Thomas camp, in fact, I hosted one – I live in Port Angeles WA and am just starting GAPS – I would love to connect with you in private message – is that a possibility?
Thanks
Tiffany Sudela – Junker
I just found your page today and am so saddened to hear you are selling your farm. I live in Texas and my husband and I have the same dream to own our own farm…someday. I wanted to make a donation but did not see a place to do it so I purchased a few of your ebooks. Thank you for what you have done and I look forward to reading through more blog posts in the next few days.
Staci
Can you do farm tours for schools for a small price? I hate to see a good family hurt so much.
God BLESS you! Such big hearts and dreams. Love reading about it! We will be moving next month, onto our future homestead, of almost 100 acres in beautiful Tennessee. It is being lovingly “provided” by my great in-loves, who will live on the land with us. My parents hope to join us too, come Spring. Talk about crazy! We actually all get along that well ;-p Anyway, your blog is a blessing so far..thank you, thank you!
May God pour His blessings all over your family.
Hello!
I have visited random pages of your blog before, just through google searches of GAPS recipes. I have now FINALLY gotten to read a bit of your story and blogs posts! Thanks so much for sharing! My husband and I have attempted the GAPS diet on and off for the past 5 months. I say my husband and I, but it is really my husband – I’m pregnant (due in 4 weeks though!) – he has ulcerative colitis, and we have been working to keep him off medication and have healthy bowel movements. It’s been difficult, and in the beginning I didn’t know what I was doing; but now that I am finally reading Dr. Campbell’s book and reading more stories (such as your’s), we are looking forward to really setting this off. At the same time, I’m very excited about your blog because it is our dream to have a homestead, or at least a small scale homestead.
Thanks for sharing! I’m excited to read more!
Hi Brenda,
I saw your “Fighting For Access to Local Food: My Interview with an FTCLDF Attorney” article today and thought I’d write to introduce myself and our project- http://eatlocalgrown.com.
The eatlocalgrown project has two primary missions-
1) To create awareness about the dangers our food system is facing
2) To support small local farms and farmers markets that are practicing sustainable agriculture
I wanted to reach out to see if you would be interested in having us re-publish some of your existing articles on eatLocalGrown.com as a guest author. Some of our guest authors include Dr. Lissa Rankin, Dr. Amy Myers, Dr. Sara Gottfried. Marc David, Danielle Nierenberg and many more.
We provide full credit on all articles with links back to your site/blog. Guest authors receive a dedicate bio-page where we can also add links to your Supporting Small Farms and Meal Plans.
Our base is growing pretty fast so I am confident that we can get you some great exposure. We currently have over 500,000 Facebook and Twitter followers.
To see some examples of how we give you author credit and links here’s some articles we recently published:
http://eatlocalgrown.com/article/11266-wheat-gluten-the-culprit-for-so-many-ills.html
http://eatlocalgrown.com/article/11904-live-to-100.html
http://eatlocalgrown.com/article/12288-the-real-truth-about-sugar.html
Our ‘About’ page will give you some background on why we started the site and what our goals are: http://eatlocalgrown.com/content/about-us.html
We’d love to have you on board. Please contact me if you are interested.
Thanks,
Jessica Davis
916-847-7932
http://eatlocalgrown.com
http://facebook.com/eatlocalgrown
http://twitter.com/eatlocalgrown
Wanting to try the fabric softener recipe, does the essential oil leave any spots on the clothing be “oil”?
Sherlene, nope, no spotty oils, if you’re using good quality essential oils. Feel your essential oils, they should absorb into your skin quickly and not leave an oily residue on your skin. That’s one way to test for good oils!