Hello from Minnesota

MNnative

In the Brooder
Jan 25, 2021
22
47
46
Hi my name is Kari. I live in a first ring suburb of the Minneapolis/St. Paul Metro area. I have lived within 30-40 miles of here most of my life. The only exceptions are when I went to college and when I lived in Iowa when my husband got his first job out of college. We have been together since the mid 90's and married about half that time. We moved around rural areas of Iowa for around 6 years. While there I completed education to become an RN and began working in rural hospital setting. Around 20 years ago we moved back to Minnesota. We have been in the same spot since then. We have 2 children and DS who is 12 and DD who is 8. I worked as a nurse in hospital setting for a total of 17 years or so. I cut back to mostly weekend hours and part-time work after having children so we could limit their time in daycare. But that meant long hours away, limited family time on weekends and most annoying to my husband me having to work holidays. He tired of long weekends with the kids and minimal adult interaction and virtually no "down" time on his precious few days off of work. Also as they got older they started to have more weekend activities so the combination of factors led our family to reassess things and we came to the agreement that me leaving the hospital setting to be able to focus on caring for our kids was probably the best choice. I worked PT in homecare setting for a few years but for the last 5 years I have been a stay-at-home mom. Attached family photo from about 4 years ago, the most recent one I could find easily on my computer. 15095691_10209967895147883_8096879668528765959_n.jpg

I had dogs as a child, had a cat in college who lived with us until my husband was having trouble with his allergies at which point she went to live with his sister until old age took her after something like 19 years. We have allergies to dogs and cats in our home so our first venture into having a family pet has been the addition of a bearded dragon to our family. He is just over 2 years old. Along with him came the introduction of the indirect hobby of entomology (which I never expected to embrace) since having feed for him on hand is less expensive and easier than frequent orders of live bugs (especially in Winter when we have lost more than 1 order of food due to improper delivery of live insects) as a result I now care for Dubia Roaches and Black Soldier Flies. I even had at least 10-15 BSFL mature into adult flies over the years. Some people's pets are intrigued by them flying around and eventually chase and eat them. Our pet, Hagrid, is too lazy for that. Recently I had some mate and lay eggs. Soon Hagrid will probably be going into brumation (sleeping for awhile) when he wakes up we will have plenty of his favorite worms on hand. Before having children we had aquariums of fresh water fish for many years. Most consistently we had a large variety of African cichlids in our tanks. We briefly had a fresh water fire eel and a few other random finned friends along the way.

I have yet to convince my husband about starting a small flock but have been doing research in hopes of eventually selling him on the idea. A friend of my daughter's from Girl Scouts started a small flock last Spring that sparked the kids' interest too.

We do some gardening in our super short season. Some flowers, some veggies, started our own compost bin a few years ago. I think I found BYC thru Pinterest, if I am remembering correctly, not sure when though (probably in the last 3 years - I do much more random browsing of the internet since both our kids started school a few years ago).
 

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