Who is writing, and why

I am Olivia Burgman. I have been a mother for many years, and I have experience in home births, homeschooling and fashion. I have a natural mindset, and I am always looking to connect with like-minded people.

Our family is focused on keeping the peace and upholding biblical values. We are passionate about raising our children in a way that will bless them throughout their lives, and about having fun while we do it. We live on a farm, which means the children learn the value of hard work, of taking care of the land, and of trades, from being watched doing them rather than from a book about them.

I am the mother of three children, all born at home, and of two babies I did not get to keep. All three of them were born at home. Karis came in May 2018 after seventeen hours of labour in our own house. Hezekiah came at 9:43 in the evening in July 2019, in that same house, in a much louder way. Liberty came in 2023 at a birthing house on our midwife’s land — a building we had never seen before, and we slept in it afterwards. It was the most relaxed I have ever been while giving birth, and it was still a home birth. She is very happy. And there are two who did not arrive. Khai, at nine weeks and three days in the summer of 2016, who is written about here. And one three inches long, in 2025, born at the birthing house and gone without any complication at all except how sad it was. Neither of the two losses has been written up yet. They are the reason this blog exists, and the two who are missing are the reason it has the shape it has.

I started writing these down because I kept telling the same story to different women and losing the end of it, and because several things I was told about my own pregnancy turned out to be wrong. None of it is advice. I am not a midwife and not a doctor, and the only credentials I have are three births and two losses, which is not the same thing at all.

School

All three children are schooled at home, on Abeka, on a screen at the kitchen table. It is a whole subject rather than a whole blog, so it has a page of its own: what we use, how the digital part works, and the material we make for other families.

What this blog will not do

It will not tell you that fear is a character flaw, or that a difficult pregnancy is a failure of faith. I have believed both of those things and they are both untrue. It will not rank methods or declare a winning way to give birth, and it will not ask you to be brave on my account.

Where a post describes something I did, I have tried to say what the conditions were, because the conditions are usually the part that matters. And where a post is about childbirth at home, it carries a short note from me about when to call an ambulance. Please read those. They are the least interesting thing on the site and the most important.

Write to me

The most useful email I receive is a description of what happened when you tried something from a post, especially when it did not work. I read all of them, usually late, usually with tea. You can use olivia@happyheartsathome.com, or subscribe to the monthly letter and reply there.