Wood cook stove, oil lamps, baths using a garden waterer, canning, gardening, wet firewood, no windows, and plenty of dirty cloth diapers! Add really big spiders, rattlesnakes, cougars, wild blackberries, several kids, and no ice cubes and you've got the Wallace family living along the banks of Blair's creek, deep in the Missouri Ozark Mountains. Doug and Amanda chose to begin their family in their newly built 16x20 ft cabin off the grid and with no indoor plumbing. It didn't take them long to fill their nest with three children. With water to haul by hand, laundry done in wringer washers, wood to split in order to cook meals on the cook stove, and an income to somehow bring in, there's no downtime on the homestead. And if making cedar post beds complete with homemade rope all with antique tools isn't fascinating enough, combined a reality show to the mix and there are no dull moments, period! Tripping over cameramen and explaining one's reasons for doing every little step in daily chores to a director can really cut into one's day, but in the end, the whole adventure was worth it. The Missouri Mountain Family got to experience life in the spotlight at least for a very short time. Every week Amanda will write a short story on the excitements of that day or recall days gone past to forever preserve in her books. Most stores are submitted to the local newspaper for her column, but some are saved for the books alone.

Each year all the stories are combined into book form and published.