An Oklahoma mom who swapped the classroom for homesteading life says she’s never looked back.
Laura Ressel, 34, spent 10 years working as a preschool teacher before becoming a stay-at-home mom with her own small business making goat milk soap—and she’s more content than ever before.
Proud parents to five beautiful children, Mrs. Ressel and her husband, Tony Ressel, a 35-year-old electrical engineer, have rejected modern ideas of parenting, instead favoring principles of faith, hard work, self-reliance, and traditional values.
“I’ve been humbled to my core over the last 10 years,” she told The Epoch Times. “I was a single mom to my first son [Joseph]. I was young ... and so lost. I did a lot of drugs and partying and somehow found my way back to the faith and sanity, once I got pregnant with him.
“My husband is the best guy I’ve ever known. He’s honest and loyal and extremely hard-working. He loves me, and he loves our kids, and he loves God most of all. ... God has blessed me tremendously and I want to do all I can to spread those blessings to others.”
Mrs. Ressel says that modern culture has done a huge “disservice to young girls”; she feels pity for those who “live hyper-sexual lives or young mothers that feel isolated or young women that have had abortions.”
Beautiful, Faith-led Life
Meeting her future husband when Joseph was a year old, Mrs. Ressel says she’s “always been grateful” for being able to give her first son a family. She had prayed to God for “a good man and a good dad” to come into her life and was almost about to give up hope when Mr. Ressel appeared. Little Joseph was the ring bearer at the couple’s wedding.Besides her “honest, loyal, extremely hard working” husband, Mrs. Ressel has always been especially thankful to her father, who she says was always there for her and gave her support that she was able to fall back on in times of need.
While the couple’s homesteading, homeschooling existence can be hard at times, the life they’ve carved for themselves is beautiful.
“The small moments, like giggling toddlers or a pretty sunset or an edifying conversation or that feeling of true friendship, those moments make it all worth it,” Mrs. Ressel said.
Mrs. Ressel says they didn’t consciously decide to homestead, but after buying 20 acres of land, the next natural step was acquiring a few animals. Now, the family has “dozens” of furry and feathered friends, a “giant” garden, and plenty of chores for the children to get involved in.
“We love our property,” the busy mom said, “because it has a little of everything: pasture, a year-round creek in the back, a big hill to go exploring, and some woods around our house.
“After we bought our land we started with chickens and goats, and now we have ducks, geese, turkeys, a dairy cow named Molly, and a whole herd of Nigerian dwarf goats. We also have two beautiful Great Danes and a few barn cats running around.”
A Busy Mom and Entrepreneur
The Ressel family follows the traditional ethos of extending hospitality and sharing what they have with others. Mrs. Ressel enjoys cooking, baking, and preserving food as well as guiding her children towards healthy behaviors.“We’ve immersed our children in the natural world, raising them to appreciate what is good, true, and beautiful instead of the fake world that surrounds us,” she said, going on to explain that neither she nor her husband grew up farming and are first generation homesteaders.
“It’s been a huge learning curve, and there have been a lot of ups and downs.”
Mrs. Ressel says she homeschools her young children “very imperfectly,” allowing them to learn and play flexibly.
A typical schedule involves waking up every morning, spending over an hour on chores before breakfast, and then completing routine tasks throughout the day. The children learn reading, writing, math, history, science, and music. However, if her boys spend the odd day building a tree fort in the backyard, that’s also good enough for their mom.
“I’m sure that will change as they get older and need more intensive schooling,” she said.
Mrs. Ressel considers her approach to be “somewhere in the middle. I don’t crack a whip each school day, but it’s also not a free-for-all.”
The thing she loves the most about her homeschool set-up is getting to be with her children:
“I love that I can be so close with my kids. They tell me everything, and we all have a really good relationship.
“I love watching them all at the breakfast table each morning, chatting away and building friendships with each other instead of random kids at school that they won’t even know in three years. These relationships last a lifetime, and I’m glad I get to have a front-row seat.”
Despite being kept busy with chores in the home, the creative mom established her soap business in 2022. Utilizing the family’s abundant supply of goat milk, Mrs. Ressel blends up nourishing, gentle soap formulations using the nutrient-rich milk mixed with olive oil, coconut oil, hemp seed oil, castor oil, and cocoa butter. She then adds clay and colloidal oats for skin health, followed by lye, color, and essential oils before setting the bars and adding dried flowers and herbs for a pretty finish.
Everything is made right on the farm in a little house converted into a soap studio.
“The goat milk goes straight from the goat to the soap, sometimes the same day. You can’t get fresher than that,” said Mrs. Ressel.
As much as she loves spending time with her kids and in her soap studio, Mrs. Ressel also relishes the opportunity to get out of the house and meet people on weekends, going to craft shows and farmer’s markets to sell her handcrafted soap.
‘Wholesome Family Culture’
Though the preschool teacher-turned-entrepreneur has received encouraging feedback from her customers, for a while, she assumed that people might reject her products due to her spiritual faith.“I thought they could cancel me, but it’s been just the opposite,” she said. “The culture at large is desperate for wholesome family culture right now, from what I can see. I think it’s turning around—the pendulum seems to be swinging back the other direction.
“People are waking up and realizing that their life is vapid and vain and shallow, and they want more. They want families and friendship ... and they are starting to realize that God loves them.
“I want to tell everyone to go outside, live in the real world, and stop searching for something you will never find in your smartphone. Bring back tradition, bring back family life, put down the phones, pray with your family, love God, be hospitable to your neighbors, and be a true friend. That’s what’s important in life.”
