Holly Hester

Hi, I’m Holly. I’m a mom with three kids and I write about everything you want to know about fashion and eco-friendly living and everything you didn’t want to know about farming.

Family, Kids

Inside the mind of a homeschool mom

Homeschooling is hard. I’ll just say that right up front. And it’s not hard for the reasons you would think — like never having time for yourself or figuring out how to teach your kids about fractions. Those things are actually easier than you think. Like for example, I just avoid fractions altogether. Problem solved. The real hard part about homeschooling is all the doubt and second-guessing that comes with it. You’re going against the grain and anytime you do…

Family

I’ve prepared my children for the 1800s

“You can’t see the forest for the trees” completely sums up parenting for me. You read books, you obsess over balanced meals and proper bedtimes, you try and watch your (fucking) language, and yet, somehow you miss gigantic weird things you’re doing. I realized one gigantic weird thing I’ve been doing when I took Emerson and August to Los Angeles with me. (Buck wanted to stay in school. Seriously, what’s up with that?) I realized my children don’t know how…

Kids, Random

Oh yeah, I almost died at 7-11

Wow, I’m going to die holding a bag of powdered donuts and a vitamin water.… This is what I thought last week as I was taking a road trip to Los Angeles. It was about one o’clock in the morning. I had been driving for hours and I was so tired I could barely see. I was listening to a book on tape — All Creatures Great and Small — which didn’t help at all because the soothing voice of…

Farm

The pig has changed

For years, our pig Hogan has refused to come in the house if we changed ANY RUGS. Welcome mat. Throw rug. Area rug. He wouldn’t put a trotter on anything he didn’t know and recognize. And since I want Hogan to be a part of our family, I just left all rugs exactly the same for years so that he would continue to grace us with his presence. That is, until I couldn’t stand it anymore. The inside of our…

Family

Bad parenting in the snow

Last week I took my kids to Tahoe and most of the time I would grade my parenting skills on an A-/B+ range, but one moment in particular stands out as a giant F to me… and it went something like this… The kids and I had been playing in snow for hours. I couldn’t feel my hands anymore. Snow had fallen inside my boots, melted and then frozen to my socks. My face was windburned and I was starving,…

Random

Why we need the Bern more than ever…

I am totally horrified by the notion that Hillary Clinton appears to be pulling ahead of Bernie Sanders. It gives me the shivers. It keeps me up at night. I rant to my children about it until their eyes glaze over. So we finally have Bernie Sanders, a candidate that is totally funded be the people and he’s seems to be losing to candidate that’s funded by corporations and Wall Street? And Hillary Clinton is such BFF’s with corporations! If…

Random

How to fix the Supreme Court

When we started this crazy country a bunch of years ago, (I have no idea how long because I’m bad at American History) the dudes that wrote the constitution intended it to be a malleable document — meaning, if something doesn’t work along the way, they wanted future Americans to fix it, or in constitution speak, amend it. So I’m taking these guys at their word and proposing an amendment — The President and Congress are no longer allowed to…

Random

I totally blew it

Do you get a ton of emails every day from places that you ignore? Like if you buy one single thing on a website, then you constantly get emails from them every day? I bought cigars for my dad over a year ago and if you looked at my inbox you’d think I was a chain-smoker cigar addict. Then, of course, the cigar website passed my info to other smoking sites because I gets emails for pipes now. But not…

Family, Farm

How to avoid doing laundry…

Every parent knows that when one child comes down with a fever, it’s only a matter of time before everyone in the house gets sick. It’s like Russian Roulette with germs — everyone staring silently at each other, eyes darting around, wondering who’s going to go down next. This week it was August who was patient zero, starting with a cough on Monday night. Next to get hit was Emmy, who puked on Wednesday and now, as of yesterday, I…

Animals, Family, Farm, Kids

Hello from the other side

I’m back! I took a much longer blog break than I thought I was going to take… like months longer. For a while after I stopped blogging, I really felt like I would probably have nothing to say ever again, so I might as well stop. But then I thought about all the posts I’ve written over the last couple of years and realized that I’ve never had anything to say and that never stopped me before… ….So here I…