Haha, not quite, but almost. Because she's funny and smart and lives on the prairie and cooks amazing food in an amazing kitchen and takes photos of cows and cowboys and, ahem, Wrangler-clad rear ends. Oh, and she married into farming/ranching money, that would kinda be my dream life.
Ok, enough about the Pioneer Woman (aka, Ree Drummond, blogger extraordinaire, for those who are unfamiliar), I'm far more interesting. HA! I crack myself up...
My name is Regina, though my best online friends call me Reg or Reggie. I'm 25, pretty happily married to my Farmer Man for 5.5 years now (sometimes we fight just so we can make up- name that country song, lol), crazy momma to 4-year-old Deere Boy and 2-year-old Tractor Girl and 9 weeks pregnant with Cricket. I've been on HB since January, so I guess I'm still fairly new.
I grew up a little all over the place, spending time in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Peru (yep, the one in South America), and Michigan, but I always say I'm from Michigan. Buuuuuuut, for various reasons, including my insane and dysfunctional family, we'll never live there. DH was born and raised in SE PA, but we're completely crazy and are putting down roots in SW North Dakota. We've lived here for almost 4 years and have been in what will probably be our forever home for almost 3. Because of the crazy dysfunctional and sheltered way I grew up, Mott, ND will probably be the closest thing to a home town I'll ever know and I fully plan on my kids having a place to come back to and call home. I love that I see someone I know every single time I'm in town. Except for when I'm buying condoms or pregnancy tests, lol.
DH works for another farmer and together they farm well over 8,000 acres of small grains. Thanks to the Boss Man, we have the opportunity to farm a quarter of our own and will hopefully expand that over the next few years. Besides our cash cropping, we have a bunch of chickens, a milk cow named Betsy, 2 dogs, and a few barn cats on the 15 acres of land we own with our house. We never run out of eggs and milk, lol. We plan to gradually build up a small cow/calf operation to keep our freezer full of beef and to also supplement our income by selling freezer beef.
Anyyyywaaaayyyys, what else... I'm a birth junkie, had a home birth with Deere Boy when we lived in PA, unmedicated, physiologically-friendly hospital birth with Tractor Girl here in ND, and am planning another midwife-assisted home birth for Cricket. I am training as a birth doula (attending my DONA doula workshop this weekend- WHOOT!) and hope to begin attending births on a regular basis within the next year. Once I'm fully certified as a doula, I intend to become a certified childbirth educator and teach classes (there are NO childbirth classes in our part of the state). I'm also in the slow process of starting a photography business. I'm kinda too busy with my kiddos to make it go any faster, but I'm ok with that. Portrait photography is not my first love and I would love to eventually only do maternity/birth/newborn shoots, but I do ok with it and it supports my photography habit, teehee. Also, photographers in such a sparsely-populated area can't really afford to *that* specialized, at least, not at first.
Besides all of that junk, I don't really have time for a whole lot else, but I love to read, am working on a novel that shall NEVER see the light of day, crochet, watch TV, bake, shop, be online, um, yeah. I kinda forget what I like to do in my spare time, lol. I get great pleasure out of doing our budget twice a month and handling the finances, although that can be pretty stressful too. And I love it when my house is clean, but I'm not a great housekeeper. But those are the kinds of things that make me happy these days. Oh, and cloth diapers make me happy. Seeing them flapping out on the clothesline under the prairie sky makes me very happy indeed.
Ok, and now I've written a novel. Oofta. I swear, I'm not a narcissist! Really, really, I'm not. Just sometimes once I get started, it takes awhile to shut me up!