Photos of our journey at home!
Our family farmstand gets its start through our 3 year old’s Self Heal Tea business!
Myka’s harvest of the plant Heal All. At 3yo, she could identify it and make sun tea on her own!
This is what a free life outside of school looks like.
The kids cleaning up our hoop house after the first very fruitful season of gardening.
Myka’s favorite chicken often makes her way into our house!
Michael, Norberto, and Myka hanging out at our stream. Michael made the chairs from trees on our property!
Our wonderful harvest!
With no school to get to in the morning, we get to greet the sun at the reservoir across from our house
Processing a deer at 9 months pregnant!
The tent we lived in off grid
One of our first days living off grid, with faces painted with mud
Inside our off grid tent
Micahel, Norberto, and Marek building the gravity fed water system
Inside our off grid tent
Baby Myka crawling out of our off grid tent
Mana's birth: Relaxing in the birth pool. "The calm before the storm"
Enjoying the first moments after Mana's birth
Marek getting to see his baby brother's birth
Mana helping plant the hoop house (Easter day 2025)
Just hanging out with the chickens
I loved playing in streams as a child and love that my children get this priceless childhood gift
Mana loves four wheeling... sometimes naked lol
Harvesting a salad from the hoop house (Easter 2025)
Testimonials
“Taking Back My Life is a powerful story of Mary’s journey to break free from the constraints of modern society. In a world where we feel bound by the pressures of time management, debt, and the dominance of processed food and pharmaceuticals, we’ve come to accept this as “normal.” But that’s far from the truth. This book is a call to action, a reminder that reclaiming our time, our health, and our children is the only true path to freedom. Do we all want this freedom? Perhaps not. But the decision should be ours to make. For anyone who has ever wondered, “Is this all there is?" this book is a must-read.
—Cheryl Daley, Host of The Homeschool How To Podcast
How many people do you know who lived off-grid for two years and didn’t TikTok the journey? Taking Back My Life is Mary’s memoir of the unconventional choices she and her family made—a story worth reading on its own. Yet the real gift of the book isn’t their actions; it’s the attitude behind them—unflinching authenticity. You don’t have to buy into all her ideas (and you normies probably won’t). What you will get when you read it, is a Kafkaesque sense that being abnormal is normal in our weird little world.
—Brian Huskie, author of A White Rose, https://brianhuskie.substack.com/