welcome to plain living
Hey y’all. I’m Kim!
I’m a wife, homeschooling mama of five, serial entrepreneur, chronic learner, and what I like to call a Jill of all trades.
I love fresh bread, old-fashioned skills, sewing machines, big ideas, family adventures, diesel trucks, quiet mornings, and learning how to do things I probably could have just paid someone else to do. But Plain Living is about more than sourdough and sewing.
Our family has walked through some really hard things. There was a season when the life we thought we were building started falling apart, and eventually we found ourselves doing something I never expected to do in the middle of our lives: Starting over. Not starting over without God. Not throwing away everything we believed.
Just stepping back from the noise, the pressure, the expectations, and everything we thought our life was supposed to look like—and learning how to build a life that is actually ours.
These days, we’re rebuilding one ordinary day at a time on the South Dakota prairie. I think there’s something beautiful about that.
THE STORY BEHIND PLAIN LIVING
This wasn’t exactly the life plan. My husband, Scott, and I have been building a life together for more than sixteen years. And I really do mean building. Our first year of marriage was hard. Then somewhere in the mess of figuring out how to be married, raise babies, pay bills, work, move, dream, fail, try again, and keep choosing each other—we keep falling in love for real.
We’ve been a police family. A military family. We’ve worked for family. We’ve built businesses. We’ve raised babies. We’ve homeschooled. We’ve served in ministry. We’ve moved. We’ve made money. We’ve lost money. We’ve lived through seasons of abundance and seasons when we had to get very creative. We’ve also spent years trying very hard to do everything the “right” way.
Eventually, I got to a place where I wasn’t always sure I knew the difference between my own convictions and the expectations other people had for me. Our family went through a season of crisis that changed almost everything. It affected our home. Our finances. Our family. Our future. Our understanding of faith.
And me.
For a while, I felt like our whole life had fallen apart. But lately I’ve started wondering if maybe some things have to fall apart before you realize you weren’t the one holding it all together anyway. So this is where we are now. We’re not going backward.
We’re building something new. And I’m sharing what we’re learning along the way.
learn to sew
We’ll talk about fabric, thread, patterns, sewing machines, mistakes, and all the things experienced seamstresses forget that beginners don’t already know.
raising capable kids
You’ll find homeschool resources here, but you’ll also find the practical life skills we’re teaching right alongside reading, writing, history, and math.
Cook from Scratch
Around here you’ll find the meals I actually feed my family, sourdough experiments, fresh-milled flour, homemade pantry staples, casseroles, family favorites, and the recipes worth making again.
revive the hope chest
We’re filling our hope chests with useful things, handmade things, meaningful things—and the skills to actually use them.
