Wilder Home Lifestyle

Family photos are very special to me, I hoard them like little golden nuggets. I am slow to sharing them with others, but quick to planning and getting them taken. When I was pregnant, I knew that I wanted to make sure each stage of our child’s life was professionally photographed. So, every few months since giving birth, I have planned out photo ideas. Thankfully, our photographer is always lovely, and for the first year of our child’s life, she did mini sessions a few times. After that first year, I tried to figure out new creative settings I wanted for our photos at each developmental stage change. One day, it occurred to me that I wanted to have a toddler sized hay bale maze for our fall pictures. Fall is mine and my husband’s favorite season, so we never miss fall pictures. So, we decided to step it up. It took planning and budgeting to figure out how to make it work. But we did. We used our child’s legos to figure out how many hay bales we would need. Then we had to find a local place to get the hay. About halfway through this process I learned that hay is actually quite expensive because its more useful than straw, so we shifted gears and decided to have a straw bale maze. Even though hay bale maze sounds better when conversing about it with others.

Although we wanted the maze for fall pictures, we did not want to waste money. We needed to find multiple ways to use the straw bales after the pictures were over. We thought about it for a while and made a plan. So phase one was straw bale maze. After we took our photographs, we had a family fall day. Then soon after began using the straw in our garden and chicken coop/run. In the garden, I used the straw throughout fall and winter to help the soil in my garden beds. Then fed the grass to our chickens after pulling it from the garden beds.

This was our family fall day. Which included crafts, tractor rides, and festive kid friendly drinks.

During phase two, we used the straw for our chickens. Our chickens love scratching the straw and building nests with it. We also take the straw after we clean out our coop and use the straw and the chicken manure to help with the grass growth in the yard. We wanted to see if it made a significant difference, and even during some of the harsher months of winter, our grass was still growing well in the spots where we used the chicken manure straw.

Phase three was using the straw bales to build an ice skating rink for our winter family photos. This proved to be slightly challenging because straw kept flying into the water, thus, sticking out on the ice. However, it all worked out. This ice rink lasted us about two months and we got to show our child how to ice skate on a tiny rink. Which was very ideal for me, because I cannot ice skate at all, and had no desire to go to a public rink to learn with a toddler.

For the ice skating rink, we filled it twice a day for about an hour each time. The tarp ripped the first attempt and because the part of the yard we initially put it in was too uneven, it did not work out. So, it had to be moved. Once we got the hang of things, it was not too hard.

It was also nice because we were able to do fall and winter family pictures with all of our dogs, and a few of our chickens because we did them at home. The dogs had a fun time running on the ice rink.

As it is currently spring, the straw bales are in their encore performance. We have been spreading the straw a few days prior to every heavy rain to help the straw seeds help our grass growth. All in all, this was a great way to make lasting family memories, take great themed family photos, and help supplement products we would have needed to buy anyways.