My Family’s Story // My husband Brock & I are high school sweethearts who have been inseparable since we were 17 years young. At age 19, we were planning our wedding { 5.21.2005} , built a tiny neighborhood house & started our wedding & portrait photography companies. As a married team, we have always dreamed big! We knew however that ultimately we wanted a simple slow paced life where we could raise a family, own land with a farm, live in a farmhouse & grow old while rocking together on a large front porch.
Fast forward to our late 20s, when we had THREE babies in diapers & cribs at once. Our 1st sweet baby boy { Rhett Easton } arrived in 2012 & captivated our hearts! Shortly after, we had the surprise of TWIN girls only 2 years later { Hazel Rose & Emmaline Ruby } in 2014. Those sleepless baby years felt like wild chaos with 3 littles close in age, however looking back it was a beautiful fleeting time. I often wish I could go back to simply breathe in my babies & realize just how fast those days really go by! We’ve realized how much of a GIFT parenthood is, because it changes & grows you in ways nothing else can. Watching your spouse rise as an incredible nurturer is a sight that will make your heart burst with pride too. Our kids are our world & we want to make it the best possible place for them to live!
Brock & I spent a decade in a blur of working our small businesses & raising a family. We renovated/flipped homes in neighborhoods while also living in them, chasing little kiddos around & editing photos in our home office. Our love of photography & serving clients continued to grow through being hired by thousands of wedding/portrait clients. Brock has always been a huge outdoorsman & was able to travel the world documenting Signature Club Outdoor Adventures through the sportsman store, Cabelas for a couple years. His work appears in outdoor magazines & the nationwide storefronts. A truly once in a lifetime experience for him for a few years! So he could stay close to home, he was hired as a creative video producer at a large local christian church, where he worked for a couple years on staff. We continued to shoot weddings together & I captured family sessions solo. In 2015, Brock discovered a passion for filming/shooting real estate with a close friend. Together, they grew The Home Aesthetic which has led to endless success & growth for the past 8 years.
In 2016 I cast a vision to open a women’s boutique in downtown Zionsville, IN with a darling upstairs photo studio. Curating easy to wear clothing, accessories & home decor for mamas was my goal! The business quickly grew from online sales in my basement to a brick & mortar storefront along the brick street of our historic town. It was a fun experience that was filled with constantly changing excitement & opportunity! I was able to serve thousands of customers for over 4 years, have a team of employees. However retail is filled with ups & downs. Once the pandemic of early 2020 hit with forced shutdowns for months & quarantine restrictions, there was simply no way to keep my building, inventory & employees afloat. We made the hard decision to close the boutique & studio storefronts. That meant the loss of time & money that we couldn’t get back, which was heartbreaking.
Our little family & life with our kids has always been our top priority. Through all of the ventures with photography, the boutique, photo studio, businesses & house flipping, we knew we wanted something different. Our high-school dream of owning land & having a small farm was still important to us. The twists & turns of life seemed to keep distracting us from our long term goal. In 2018, we found a 1940s white brick farmhouse on 1 acre of land in Zionsville. At the time, we thought we wanted to stay close by the suburban lifestyle yet be enough out in the country to feel a separation. We enjoyed where we lived & bought our 1st farm animals; Chickens, barn cats & ducks who lived along side our silver Labrador named Gunner. Gardening had always been something I also loved, since watching my mom & grandma tend to theirs over the years. We gardened & raised our birds, however 1 acre filled up quickly! Brock & I knew we couldn’t expand the land or have livestock. The old home needed many repairs that we didn’t want to invest in because it’s style wasn’t what we truly envisioned in our “Forever Home”. As we crept towards 2 years in that country home, we knew we wanted more acreage! We decided to list that property for sale & it shockingly sold in 24 hours! Skip to Spring of 2020. The covid-pandemic was in full force & the housing market was insane. Brock & I simply couldn’t find another property that seemed to be the perfect fit for our wants, budget or farm vision. One night while scouring Zillow listings with broadened search parameters, we stumbled upon our current farm! It was further out than we originally thought we would look, however it fit the wants/needs of our checklist!
Brock & I are not flashy people. At the end of the day we simply want to savor the memories of our children’s joyful presence, a peaceful marriage & living around our cozy safe home. We desire for our family to know that we have done our best to glorify God, work hard & that we had the chance to slowly breathe in nature without a rushed lifestyle. We never wanted to be surrounded by other houses & people right outside our windows, rather longing to soak in views of rolling fields with endless skies. Sitting under the bright stars with complete silence is perfection to us in the evenings. Being able to slowly wake up by sitting in rocking chairs in our bathrobes each morning sipping coffee, watching the quiet sunrise. Raise healthy animals as food. Nourish our bodies with plants grown in our own soil. This property we discovered had an old 1930s farmhouse with an enormous front porch simply waiting to be restored! We had the vision & the drive to make it everything we knew it could be for our family! Brock & I were able to snatch it up quickly because it seemed God simply had it waiting for us to discover. We moved to our forever farm in May of 2020 & began the process of of major restorations. The land & farmhouse had almost been abandoned, so it needed every ounce of tender love & care that we could muster up.
Brock & I have always been fascinated with all things farming, learning history & raising livestock! For almost 2 years, these have become a genuine passion for us! Knowing exactly where our pasture raised meat comes from, while ensuring we raise healthy happy animals, is the coolest experience for our entire family! We’ve been students in the process of learning to raise cows, meat chickens, turkeys, egg laying hens, pigs & goats. Brock & Rhett are hunters & fisherman too, who harvests venison, wild turkey & plenty of fresh caught fish. Our goal is to eventually never have to rely on purchasing meat from a grocery store. Our crew hopes to sell a portion of our home grown meat & produce to family & friends too. Last summer we planted our first large garden which provided us with fresh veggies to devour & share. The pride you feel is unmatched when serving your family a plate of food that came solely from our own farmland. Building a large greenhouse would be a DREAM come true in the coming year in hopes we will have fresh organic veggies year round! Our hearts for sharing homegrown goodness is strong. We love having our dinner table filled with friends enjoying our farm-fresh meat from our pasture raised chickens, pigs & turkeys. My daughters & I have began to create homemade Elderberry Syrup Elixir which is a powerful wellness tonic. Sourdough bread starters, kombucha scobies, essential oil candles are other healthy goodies we have been making.
2021 was the first full year of living at our farm. During those 12 months we completely gutted the exterior of the early 1900s farmhouse & brought it back to gorgeous life! The entire galley kitchen was also demo-ed, then expanded by removing walls. 7 weeks of not having a kitchen was ROUGH however well worth it! Before/after photos are coming soon because the difference is truly shocking! We went through GALLONS of white paint, laid flooring & repaired almost everything in sight. Oh & our well went DRY in the middle of the summer which meant we had NO water during the house reno…that was a COSTLY surprise to have to dig a new well. However the blessing in that is that we now have the cleanest well water we could ever want! Brock & I started to slowly clean out & restore the 100 year old wooden barn too. We purchased 5 cows to pasture, butchered 2 pigs & 5 turkeys that we raised for meat, had kittens born from our barn cats, enjoyed fresh eggs from our 21 hens, brought home a new yellow lab puppy after our silver lab sadly passed away, got our girls lop eared bunnies to play with & added 3 goats.
August of 2020, we chose to became a homeschool family! We desire to preserve our kid’s childhood, cultivate creativity & their precious minds. Brock & I have cherished the time we now have to cultivate lasting meaningful relationships with our 3 babies. We aren’t shipping them off all day, rather choosing to live life with them side by side. Allowing our kids to develop into the amazing creations they were meant to be without the harsh reality of the world stomping out their creativity, purpose or innocence. Rhett, Emmaline & Hazel get to run free through almost ten acres of open land & breathe fresh air daily. We’ve surrounded ourself with the blessing of a large homeschool community, weekly Co-Op gatherings & constant field trips for learning through exploring the world. I could go on & on about this topic, so stay tuned for a devoted blog post all about our homeschool journey!
Below are some of my our favorite images that our dear friend Jennifer Soots Photography took of us at our farm last summer. It was a special time for us as we were finishing up our major house reno, the land was in full bloom & it was right before adding cows to our pasture. We will treasure these forever! This year Brock & I will celebrate our 17th wedding anniversary, we will both turn 37 years old, our darling son Rhett will be double digits as a TEN year old & our twin girls Emmaline & Hazel will be 8 years old by late November. Life simply becomes sweeter with age! – Stefanie & Brock Childs
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