Adding a Preppy Touch to This Rustic Mountain Cabin

When we bought this cabin near our farmhouse a year ago, we knew there would be plenty of work to do to make it aesthetically pleasing for guests.  It served as a hunting cabin for a couple of older gentlemen for decades.  It was dirty, incredibly cluttered, and smelled like it had been closed up for a very long time.  Additionally, there were layers of various carpets throughout, bare concrete walls in spots with insulation and wires showing, a paneled ceiling with holes that had been patched with duck tape, and different sized windows in every room.  Oh, and did I mention the cracked pipes that had frozen over the winter?  Probably the ugliest thing in the cabin was the shower.  Mostly concrete and brick, it looked like it had a rusted tin base.  I thought it would be the perfect shower for A Nightmare on Elm Street.  Before any company could stay there, the shower would have to go.  Once my husband started hacking away at it, we learned that the floor of it was not tin after all but concrete painted a rust color.  Who would have thought?  Unfortunately, it cracked into pieces when we started working on it, so we had to purchase a new shower that took some work to install.

We were blessed to have the help of our eldest son who recently moved nearby.  It took a couple of weekends, but I am so happy to report that a new shower is in place, and it was tested by family from out of town this past weekend.  Everything works, and it doesn't leak.  I had my eye on a woodsy shower curtain in Kohl's since last fall, and I couldn't wait to run out and finally get it.  It works perfectly in our mountain cabin.

Kohl's has quite a collection of various decorative items for a cabin or lodge.  Since our nineteenth century farmhouse needs constant maintenance in addition to our cabin, we can only tackle about one project per year for each building.  This is frustrating for me since patience is not one of my strong virtues, but I do what I can by adding a little decorative touch of rustic preppy wherever I go.  Since Kohl's is having some great sales right now, I perused the cabin/lodge sections last evening and snapped pictures with my phone so I could think about the selections later.

For the bathroom, they have towels, rugs, shower hooks with bears on them, owl cup and toothbrush holders, bear soap dispensers, and that little boat soap holder.  I didn't buy any of those, but they are too cute.

There were so many moose, bear, and deer towels and shower curtains.  I haven't decided yet if I'll purchase any of these or not.  The cabin came fully equipped with linens, but none of them were of a mountain forest theme.

I love this moose waste basket for the bathroom, but it needs to come down in price some more before I can justify buying it.  The bathroom floor is currently concrete, and I think we should probably take care of that first before I go crazy on bathroom accessorizing.

One more towel.  If it said "cabin" instead of "lodge," I might have bought it.  I definitely can't give our cabin the name of lodge though.  It's far from that.

For the bedrooms, Kohl's has these woodsy comforter sets that I really love.

They have cabin/lodge sheets, coverlets, and pillow cases.

And they have lots and lots of throw pillows.

Then there are all these curtains.  It's so tempting to get some of these, but since every window in our cabin is a different size, and I'm not sure what we're going to do with the walls, it would probably be unwise to purchase any window treatments at this point.  Right now there are blinds and curtains up in every room (although none of them match) so I can't deem new curtains a necessity.  I'll have to wait on those.

Finally, there are so many kitchen items for the cabin: trivets, charcuterie boards, coasters, bottle openers, and more.  Our cabin came fully equipped with more kitchen gadgets than I have in my own house, but these would be nice to put on a wish list.

I love these dish towels.  I'm still contemplating picking up one of these because you can just never have enough dish towels, right?  Not sure which one I like best.  I think I'm leaning toward the tan with pinecones.

You know how much I love plaid, so when you combine plaid and cabin, I cannot resist getting something.

I ended up getting these bowls a few weeks ago, but they never made it up to the cabin because the children have been using them for their cereal in the morning.  It turns out they hold twice as much cereal as the bowls they had been using, which means that a typical box of cereal doesn't even make it through all five of my children in the morning.  Which also means the last person up is grouchy because the best cereal is gone as soon as it's been opened.

There is an entire aisle in Kohl's devoted to cabin placemats, napkins, and tablecloths.

Since the cabin didn't come with enough placemats, I did justify buying five of these last night.  I really liked the plaid moose variety, but there were only two of those left.

Several weeks ago there were quite a few signs and wall hangings for cabins in the woods.  Last night I could only find a handful.  I really liked this one, and I think I might go back and get it.  Do you think it would do well on the outside next to the door?  Or maybe it needs to be in away from the wind, snow, and rain.

I've also found a number of crafty cabin creations on Pinterest that I'd like to try.

Any ideas from you readers?  I am open to suggestions on incorporating some rustic preppy into this mountain cabin.

And just in case you're wondering if I'm receiving any kind of kickback from Kohl's for this post, they have no clue they're mentioned in Preppy Mountain Farmhouse.  I just happen to really love their cabin/lodge selections.  Although, it would be great to get a discount on the above items. ;)

Going Kelly Green for St. Patrick's Day

I couldn't stand it any longer; I had to return to blogging.  I just missed it too much to take a longer break, and I missed sharing our life with all of you.  Over the past couple of weeks I have discovered that there are more of you visiting from all around the world than I originally thought, and that is encouraging and exciting to know.  To all of you readers who sent me emails, messages, or comments since my last post, I thank you.  Your opinions and words mean so much to me, and I appreciate that you took a few minutes out of your day to drop me a line.

With St. Patrick's Day coming tomorrow, I thought I'd share with you some of the things we're doing at our farmhouse to celebrate this feast day.  I whipped up some Mint Chocolate Chip Cookies the other night as an experiment.  I saw on Pinterest that you can simply add green food coloring to your regular chocolate chip cookie recipe to get the above effect.  I added about 15 drops to the 2 sticks of melted butter before adding and mixing all the other ingredients.  Once I did that, it seemed only natural to add some peppermint extract because who doesn't like mint with their chocolate?  A little goes a long way, so I only put 3 drops of the extract into the wet ingredients.  They turned out great; although, I would have preferred a darker shade of green.  Once you add all that flour and sugar, it lightens up the butter quite a bit.  I also had to add an extra 1/4 cup of flour since the peppermint extract and food coloring added more liquid to the recipe.  Oh, and I found the napkins in the top photo on clearance at Party City.  That place has everything!

Last evening, I treated the children to Rainbow Sherbet Floats.  I couldn't find any lime sherbet in the grocery store, so I had to settle for a gallon bucket of rainbow sherbet instead.  I decided that I actually like the looks and taste of these even better.

Simply put a couple of scoops of rainbow sherbet in a mug (we like ours frosted) and add 7-Up to the brim.  That's it.  The kids loved them.

All St. Patrick's Day items were 50% off at Kohl's this past weekend, and with my Kohl's cash I was able to pick up this wall hanging for only $5.  It's on our front porch this year.  There's not much Irish blood in our family, but I was able to find one Irish ancestor in my lineage from the late seventeenth century.  Regardless, I've always loved Celtic jewelry, music, poetry, and home decor.  My husband and I even had our wedding bands custom made into Celtic love knots.

Not one of my best chalkboard designs for the porch, but I was in a hurry so I used shamrock cookie cutters as stencils to make this.  With Easter coming in just a little over a week, I'll be changing over to all new decorations this weekend.

The best green of all is the one found in nature.  Our grass and pastures are already turning a lush emerald green.  This is such a treat for us because the past two winters brought so much snow that we didn't see green grass until well into April.  Our goats and sheep are very happy.

Our banks are also full of clusters of daffodils getting ready to open.  I think it's possible they'll be blooming by Easter, which is remarkable for us since Easter is so early this year.  We didn't have daffodils or tulips in bloom until the latter part of April last spring.

Tomorrow evening I'll be making corned beef for the first time in my life.  I saw an easy recipe on Pinterest where you just put the corned beef, cabbage, potatoes, and carrots in the crock pot with some water and beef broth for the day.  That sounds quick and easy enough.  I'm not sure if the little ones in my house will like it, but we're going to give it a try.

Happy Saint Patrick's Day, Readers.  And thanks for coming back to read Preppy Mountain Farmhouse over and over again.

Taking a Break: The Real Reason

It's spring break for our kiddos, so it seems like a good time for a break from blogging as well.  Plus, it's Lent, so I could use that as an excuse to take a blogging sabbatical too.

But the truth is, I need some time to reflect, pray, and ponder the future of Preppy Mountain Farmhouse as it approaches its one year anniversary late next month.

I have loved blogging.  I actually get excited when I compose a post and hit that publish button sending it into cyberspace for the world to see.

But then I start checking my stats, and I realize that most of the world isn't reading it.  Installing Google Analytics in January to more accurately track traffic to my site has been a harsh eye opener.  While Blogger stats have been showing steady growth in pageviews since I began last April, Google Analytics has revealed that most of that traffic is coming from bots.  For those of you non-bloggers, that means most hits on my blog aren't from real people, but from web crawlers and spammers either indexing my site for search engines (not a bad thing, but not real humans) or trying to get referrals and links back to their own sites.

This has been a devastating blow to my self-confidence as a writer/blogger.  Although I began this blog to learn a new skill, have a creative outlet, and to share parts of our outside-the-norm life up here on the mountain, I also hoped for an increase in readers as well.  What writer doesn't want to hear that his audience is growing?  If no one reads our stuff, we might as well just keep a journal and scrapbook...which I already do.

So I am taking a bit of a break to figure out my next move and decide if I love Preppy Mountain Farmhouse enough to keep pouring my heart and energy into it twice a week for a handful of daily readers or if it's time to move on to another creative venture.

For those of you who are live human readers, I would love, love, love to hear from you.  What do you enjoy about this blog?  What would you like to see more of?  What might be lacking?  Do you continue to come back to be entertained, informed, inspired, or just to see what we're up to?

Feel free to send me an email (address on "Contact Me" page), leave a comment here, or send me a Facebook message.  And while I am on hiatus, I'll probably still be posting pictures on Instagram.  So you can comment there too.

Enjoy the final weeks of winter, Everyone.  We've got temps in the 70s here this week.  I am on my way outside to hike with some little ones and our beagle.

10 Fun Snacks for Children

My children are always famished after we return from school, so I'm forever on the lookout for healthy snacks that we can put together quickly.  The more fun and interesting I can make them, the more eager they'll be to try something that isn't from a shiny package full of artificial colors and preservatives.  If it's something they can participate in making, that's even better.  I share below 10 of the most fun snacks we've tried over the past year.

1. Owl Bagels: This one was Pinterest-inspired.  I spread pumpkin cookie butter on toasted bagels, but you could use peanut butter instead.  Simply slice up some strawberries to use as the beaks and wings, then slice bananas for the whites of the eyes.  Finally top the eyes with fresh blueberries.  These would be great for breakfast as well.

2. Honey Balls: Just 4 ingredients are used: peanut butter, honey, oats, and dry milk powder.  Kids love to make these.  For the recipe, click here to link to my blog post from June.  No cooking or baking is required so you can cut your kids loose in the kitchen to measure, stir, and roll.  It is a bit messy and sticky though as you can see in the photo.

3. Fruit & Veggies Spelling Out LEGO: If you recall, we made this for our son's 9th birthday party last summer.  I used baby carrots, sliced strawberries, chopped cantaloupe, and maraschino cherries, but you could use whatever fruits and veggies you have.  I did discover that the cherries "bleed" all over the tray, so that wasn't the best choice.  I found this idea on Pinterest and adapted it based on what we had in our refrigerator.

4. Banana Chips & Nutella: Absolutely no prep time required for this snack.  Just let the kids dip dried banana chips in a bowl of Nutella.  Simple, relatively healthy, and delicious.

5. Heart Shaped Cucumbers & Cheese: We made these for Valentine's Day.  Slice up a cucumber and use a metal cookie cutter to cut out the hearts.  Do the same with a block of cheese and place on top of heart-shaped pretzel crackers.  I've never seen my children so eager to eat cucumbers.

6. Yogurt Pops: Simply stir together plain or vanilla yogurt with some honey and berries or other fruit.  Either place in disposable cups or plastic popsicle containers and put in the freezer.  We made these last summer after purchasing many quarts of locally grown strawberries.  So much better than store-bought.

7. Meat, Cheese, & Crackers Displayed in Animal Shapes: We designed this for Thanksgiving, of course, but I might try another animal sometime soon.  The kids enjoyed helping arrange this, and they devoured it within ten minutes.  I used sausage and pepperoni because I knew my children would eat that, but any thinly sliced meat would work as long as it was the right geometric shape.  I had to improvise and use black decorating icing for the eyes, Miracle Whip for the nose, and matches for the legs because I ran out of toothpicks.  Pinterest-inspired.

8. Pretzel Treats: I'm not sure I would classify these as healthy, but they're bitesized, so eaten in moderation, they're not too much sugar.  We used butter flavored square mini-pretzels, topped with zebra striped Hershey's Kisses slightly melted, topped with M&Ms.  These were made for Valentine's Day, but you could easily change the color of M&Ms to suit any season or holiday.  This was also inspired by Pinterest.

9. Vegetables in Shape of Christmas Tree: I'm always trying to find a way to make vegetables more appetizing for my kiddos.  I saw this idea on Pinterest, of course, and decided to try it out on Christmas day.  Mine doesn't look nearly as pretty as the Pinterest pin, but it still turned out fairly well.  It still didn't entice my children to eat cherry tomatoes, however.  If I make this again, I'll use a larger platter because everything was squished together.  I used pretzel sticks for the tree trunk, and the yellow pepper slices at the top are supposed to be a star, believe it or not.

10. Apple Mouths: We finally tried these Pinterest designs yesterday afternoon.  It was messier than I anticipated.  Spread peanut butter on thin slices of apples.  Place mini-marshmallows (the teeth) on the bottom slice and place another apple slice on top.  We tried to get creative by adding chocolate chips as cavities and sliced up chocolate licorice for braces (photo at top of blog.)  I also purposely left a big gap in the middle of the one mouth above because our youngest has lost her two front teeth.  These were fun, but gooey.

So the next time you're looking for a quick, healthy snack to make with your little ones, instead of reaching for the box of fruit snacks, give one of these a try.  The only ones that require more than about 15 minutes are the yogurt pops since they need time to freeze.

What's Happening Around Here

The month of February just flew by, didn't it?  After a freezing cold spell over Valentine's Day, we have had temperatures in the sixties the past two Sundays, necessitating several hikes through the woods.  Last weekend, our woods looked like this with the snow turning slushy and the ice starting to thaw.

The children were actually sliding around on ice patches while wearing t-shirts.

Over the past week, we received a lot of rain and wind, and everything melted completely.  

Today no snow remains anywhere, just mushy grass and lots of mud.

The only downside to this is that the melting snow and heavy rain meant lots of water rushing down the mountain...and into our basement.  So our rustic farmhouse cellar is now covered in water yet again.

 Along with getting more exercise now that everything has thawed, I have also been on a quest to lose a few pounds this year.  This has proven to be way harder than I ever would have imagined.  I am trying to eat more healthy foods and cut back on desserts, but I'm not sure if the above combination of Nutella and dried banana chips counts as a healthy snack or a dessert.  All I know is that I was looking for something sweet to eat one day and there was not a cookie or dark chocolate in the house, so I dipped a banana chip into the jar of Nutella when no one was looking, and I thought I had just discovered the greatest thing ever.  This is now one of my favorite treats, and I've decided to include it in my healthy foods category.

While I'm on the subject of sweet treats, our teen daughter spent Sunday afternoon baking and decorating fudge marble cupcakes for a poetry reading party her English class is having Monday.  We won't be getting any of those, but I suppose I should be thankful.  I'd love to go to a poetry party and eat cupcakes though; how about you?

Friday night our youngest daughter and her daddy went to a Father/Daughter Dance at her school.  She returned from it late that night all hyped up on sugar, chocolate, and excitement about dancing for hours and doing the Hokey Pokey with her dad.  I think Hubby was just relieved he didn't get dragged onto the karaoke floor to sing a duet of some song from the Descendants movie.

Now that we are in Lent, I have finally put away my snowmen and any remaining winter decorations.   I have also given up checking my blog stats until Easter.  Since I'm trying temporarily to not look at them, I've realized just how often each day I had been studying them.  This is not a good use of my time, and as you can see, Google Analytics reveals a rather small number of users, sessions, and page views---much lower than what Blogger stats show.  This just depresses me, but I'll save that monologue for another time.  For the next four weeks, I will be fighting the urge to check out how popular or unpopular Preppy Mountain Farmhouse actually is and turn my attention elsewhere...

...Like starting a new cross-stitch project.  This time instead of a Christmas ornament, it will be a baby bib.  And you know what that means!

And while I am working on my own projects, my husband and eldest two sons have been working on finally installing a new shower in our cabin.  God willing, it will be up and working and not leaking for our next round of out-of-town guests.

This morning after returning from Church, I noticed these snow drops blooming in the flower bed next to our driveway.  They let me know that we are definitely coming to the end of another winter, and spring will soon be here.  Yeah!

What It's Like to Raise a Few Chickens on a Preppy Farm

Who can resist the little fluffy chicks peeping at you at your local Tractor Supply store a few weeks before Easter?  They're soft, clean, fluffy balls that you can hold in the palm of your hand.  I know.  We're about to order another batch of chicks through the mail for the fourth time.  We've taken a few years off, but I'm now finally excited to get a new flock of spring peeps so we'll have our own jumbo brown eggs again by early fall.  Chickens seem to be the trendy animal to have in your own backyard if your neighborhood doesn't prohibit them.  They not only give you eggs, but they eat up bugs and food scraps, and they give your gardens great fertilizer.  Everything is not picture perfect with poultry, however.  I'll share with you our personal experiences with chickens over the past six years.

About a year after our last child was born, I finally conceded to getting a dozen chicks. I was hesitant for so long because I had a feeling that once we started with chickens, there would be more livestock to come.  I was right. We chose golden sex links because they were supposed to be dual egg layers and meat birds.  We figured we'd keep the hens and butcher the roosters.  The neat thing about sex links is that you can determine the sex of them right away by their color.  The girls are brown, and the boys are white.  As they grow, the differences are even more noticeable.  We knew the day the freshly hatched chicks were to arrive at the post office, and my little ones were bouncing off the walls waiting for the postmaster to call and let us know they had arrived.  We could hear them peeping over the phone.

The thing about chicks in March is that they are nowhere near ready to live outside, especially if you live in the northern part of the U.S.  We kept them in our basement under a heat lamp for many weeks until I couldn't stand the smell of them wafting upstairs into the main part of the house any longer.  The employees at Tractor Supply keep those metal washtubs meticulously clean, and you'll notice the chicks aren't very big there either.  The truth is that chicks grow quickly, and they fill their container before you know it.  Oh, and they poop a lot.  You'll end up cleaning out their shavings often or you end up with a smelly mess, and then the chicks and their feed and water containers are messy too.  That first year, we only had a dozen chicks, but they still outgrew their initial storage bin within a few weeks.  By late May, they were finally big enough to move outside to the portable chicken tractor my husband and children built and painted.  Once outside, all we had to do was fill their water containers once a day and toss in some feed and scraps in the morning and in the evening.  My husband moved the chicken tractor every other day so they would have fresh pasture to scratch in, and by four months of age, there were eggs to collect up in the nesting boxes.

One of the first things we learned about egg layers and dual-purpose chickens is that they don't have much meat on them.  If you hope to eat your chickens, don't waste your time on any type of poultry except meat birds.  When we butchered the cockerels, they were only about 1 1/2 pounds after they'd been cleaned and were ready to be cooked.  We also realized that butchering chickens is a gruesome, time-consuming, messy job.  Even after we became experienced and rather efficient at doing so, we still came to the conclusion that it just wasn't worth our time.  Although we loved knowing that the meat we were eating was natural, healthy, and fresh, it was hours of our day spent on only a few pounds of meat for dinner.  We haven't butchered any subsequent chickens in years.  They now either start free-ranging and migrate to our Amish neighbors' farms or they live out their old age here long after they've stopped laying eggs.

Although none of our hens or roosters have ever been aggressive toward us, we were enlightened to the horrific fact that they will be aggressive toward each other.  Once you have a flock of chickens, especially if they are confined in any sized pen, you understand where the term "hen pecked" comes from.  Our second batch of chicks began cannibalizing each other from the start.  We probably made the mistake of buying too many, but their home was still bigger than the recommendations laid out in any of the livestock books we had.  The children were shocked when they would go out to the garage to feed these little chicks in the morning (by the second year, new chicks no longer started out in my house,) only to find one or two of them dead with their eyes plucked out and pieces of them nibbled on.  No matter how much food we gave them, how spacious of a pen we put them in, nor how small the flock gradually became, the remaining birds would single out one and peck it to death within a few days.  If we removed a few, they would still repeat the same behavior.  We still aren't sure if it was the breed (Golden-laced Wyandottes) or the fact that there were 50 of them initially, and once they began this horrible practice, it became a habit.  Regardless, we never purchased such a large quantity or this breed again.  We eventually let the few survivors free-range to spare their lives.  It was a morbid learning experience for us all.

While I am on the subject of free-range birds, let me state right now that I love the idea of it.  To see the chickens roam free, happily scratching and pecking away does my heart good.  The above four year old rooster is still alive and well; although, he has moved uphill to our Amish neighbor's farmstead to hang with their hens.  He makes an appearance at our place once every few months and struts around the farmhouse as he crows under the windows.  But free-range birds come with a price.  Our chickens have always migrated to our porches.  They have acres of ground they could cover throughout the day, but they end up on our porches, patio, and flower beds to steal the cat food, children's snacks, newly planted seeds, and ripe strawberries from the strawberry patch.  Not only are they thieves, but they peck the cats' noses and leave unwanted chicken "fertilizer" everywhere, including the welcome mats in front of the doors.  I have no idea how people entertain friends outdoors in the summertime with chickens free-ranging because they come right up to the picnic or cookout to eat the food and drop their chicken splat.  As long as the chickens are free-ranging out in the pastures and barnyard, I am fine.  But that's not what our chickens do, which is why we end up putting them in chicken tractors most of the year and the barn or hoophouse in the winter. 

The other problem with loose hens is that you literally need to go on egg hunts daily to find their eggs unless your hens go to their nesting boxes to lay.  Ours do not.  We have found clutches of eggs in all kinds of high grassy patches, under bushes and porches, out in the woods, and numerous other places.  That's fine if it's spring or fall and temperatures are mild, but if it's in the heat of summer, I don't feel comfortable eating eggs that might have been sitting in 90 degree days for who knows how long.  I like our chickens and eggs as long as they are in their designated chicken-friendly areas.

Aside from the hassles which we have learned from, chickens are a neat species to have around---even on a potentially preppy property.  This spring we'll only purchase about a half dozen chicks since we don't need over a dozen eggs per day.  Once they start laying, you quickly fill up your refrigerator with lots of cartons of large, fresh eggs.  You'll start digging out every egg recipe you can find, and you'll still be giving them away.  One thing I did try one spring when we had an overabundance of eggs was freezing them for the winter.  You just crack them and stir them up, then freeze them in plastic containers.  These work great for scrambled eggs or for baking in the winter when your hens won't lay again until the sunlight increases past twelve hours a day or so.

Since it's been four years since we've had chicks, I have a feeling there will be growing anticipation around here for that box of peeps to arrive at the post office next month.  Can't wait for spring!

100th Blog Post!

Today I sit and write post #100 for the Preppy Mountain Farmhouse blog.  I came across the above book Blogging for Writers by Robin Houghton when I was at Barnes & Noble one day last month.  How I wish I had read this before I started blogging.  Most of what I learned was through trial and error and researching on the Internet as I encountered problems or tried to understand the tech jargon.  Much of the blogging information I found online was really directed at business owners or people trying to make money in some way from their blog.  For me, I just wanted a creative outlet, a place to write, and a way to share with the world our life on a preppy mountain farm.  Blogging for Writers is geared for people like me and the more serious writers who might be trying to promote their newly published books.  By the time I discovered this book, I had already established my blog and found solutions to most of my issues, but it was reassuring to see I had done most things right.  The one part that really hit home, however, was to avoid giving too much attention to my stats.  I am a person who likes looking at statistics, numbers, demographics, but getting caught up in page views, unique visitors, subscribers, followers, fans, etc. can easily make me obsessed with them.  If my stats look great, I feel good about my blog, but if the page views are down one day, I wonder why people didn't like my last post.  The numbers can easily set the tone for my day.  This Lenten season, I am seriously trying to cut way back on the amount of time I spend looking at statistics or numbers of likes on social media.  It's a hard habit to break.

So to celebrate this milestone of 100 posts, I thought I would share what the Blogger stats reveal were the top 5 viewed posts for Preppy Mountain Farmhouse.  These are the rankings as of this morning.  Each post has a link to it, so if you missed the original, you can easily go right to it and check it out.

Top 5 Viewed Posts

1. Pink Zebra Birthday Bash.  This featured the decorations and food used for our daughter's 13th birthday party last June.  Pink and zebra print were her requests, and these types of items were in abundance at a number of stores.  The Nutella ice cream cake was a super easy creation that was Pinterest-inspired.  The rest of the ideas were thought up by our daughter or myself.  This was such a fun party/sleepover, and I'd do it again in a heartbeat.

2. My Pinterest-Inspired Successes & Flops.  I've had so much fun with Pinterest over the past year since I first started pinning.  Many things turned out great; some were so-so; and others were complete disasters.  I continue to be inspired by what I find on Pinterest, but I find it a humbling experience as well.  On my personal boards, I have beautiful images of what I would like our house and farm to look like.  These pins motivate me to try harder to create what my heart yearns for, but these pictures can also stress me out when I don't have the time, talent, or money to do or have what I really want.  This is a post I could easily update seasonally since I go to Pinterest quite a bit for new ideas and then adapt them to fit our life and budget.

3. A Primitive Preppy Christmas Farmhouse Tour.  I must admit this is one of my favorite posts too.  I love decorating for Christmas, and I had so many ideas this year to go with this theme.  I did end up spending a little more money than I usually do, mainly for burlap or plaid materials, but I'll use them again other years, I'm sure.  That is, if my family isn't totally tired of rustic preppy.  I actually still have a few winter-related items out and all of my snowmen are still sitting around the house.  I guess I'll give them another week before I move on to spring decorating.

4. Fall Porch Makeover.  I was surprised by the amount of traffic and comments on here and Facebook that this post received.  I really thought people would be bored by our painting and decorating project.  The completion of the porch makeover heralded in fall for me, my second favorite season of the year.  I love the autumn colors.

5. Casual Summer Attire for a Middle-Aged Farm Mom.  OK, this one perplexes me.  I was actually really apprehensive to publish this post, and I almost deleted it because I am definitely no fashion blogger.  When my hubby read it, he said he would never post pictures of himself modeling clothes on the Internet.  Sometimes I wonder if it's still a fluke that this received the fifth highest page views.  Or maybe there are a lot of middle-aged farm moms out there looking for casual outfits?  I don't buy new clothes all that often, so there won't be many of these types of posts, I can assure you.

So that wraps up this 100th post on a gray slushy February morning here in the Alleghenies.  I'll save my thoughts on blogging for when Preppy Mountain Farmhouse hits its one year anniversary, which will be in about two months.  If you want to cast your vote for your favorite blog post, I'd love to hear about it here, in an email, or over on Facebook or Instagram.