About Sallie Schaaf Borrink

Welcome to my online home!

I’ve created this to be a beautiful, thought-provoking, helpful, and encouraging place for women who desire to increase their knowledge, understanding, and wisdom.

My website is centered around a few key themes so everything I write or create revolves around these ideas.

Cozy is a word you see a lot on my site. What do I mean by that? Cozy is living simply and purposefully according to our deeply held beliefs. It is what I call the coming together of purposeful living, simple living, and faithful living.

• Purposeful Living – Making deliberate and thoughtful choices rather than going with the flow, even if it means being different from the crowd.
• Simple Living – Including only those things in our life that bring real value.
• Faithful Living – Making choices that align with our faith and core beliefs.

When we choose cozy living we bring greater peace, understanding, joy, beauty, and faith to our homes and the lives of our loved ones.

This website is my home online, where I devote my time, and where I base my interactions so I can truly get to know people. For that reason, I do not utilize social media accounts. So I welcome and encourage conversations in the comments of my posts (no matter how old they are) and do my best to respond to every comment in a timely manner. Many of my popular posts have excellent comment threads so don’t miss those!

If you are looking for a boring, predictable, formulaic niche website that follows the ever-changing and soul-crushing “expert” rules of internet writing and marketing in order to make everyone who stops by happy and never offend anyone, you are in the wrong place.

This website is not like that at all and that is a deliberate choice. This is for women who like to think, learn, and discuss.

I honestly think this website I’ve been creating for the past fifteen years is far more interesting, more helpful, more thought-provoking, and more fun than any marketing-centered and Google-appeasing website can ever be.

I hope you discover this as well.

Meet Sallie

My degree is in Elementary Education, but my passion has always been writing and helping others find answers to their questions and solutions to their problems. Because of this passion, my site is full of:

• stories from my own life related to my quest for a quiet and simple life
• ideas for how to bring cozy to your home
• thoughts on how to make big decisions in every part of life
• thinking out loud about big ideas

Other miscellaneous things to know about me so you understand my site a little better:

• My happy place is to sit by the fireplace and read
• I’m a former perfectionist
• I’m an INFJ
• I’m saved by Jesus and of the Baptist persuasion
• I like old-fashioned things and so I’m a reader of Grace Livingston Hill (such as The Christmas Bride, The Prodigal Girl, The Substitute Guest, Beauty for Ashes, April Gold, and The Honor Girl)
• I’m a gifted woman with an intellectual overexcitability
• I have Eosinophlic Esophagitis which has radically changed my life

My Family

David and I met online via AOL back in the days when no one knew anyone who had married someone they met online. We met and married in nine months to the shock of many. Twenty-three years later we’re still best friends and happily married. Not only that, we like each other enough to work together from home.

Caroline is thirteen years old and every bone in her body is filled with creativity and imagination. She especially enjoys painting, drawing, and computer games that allow her to use her creative skills. Caroline was a long-waited for child as we were married nine years before we discovered we were finally pregnant. We’ve progressed through an interesting journey with her as an only child, high need infant, highly-sensitive and spirited child, and now understanding after two rounds of testing (round one and round two) that she is a twice-exceptional gifted child.

My Homeschool Philosophy

I taught in a variety of schools including private, Christian, Classical Christian, and charter. My educational philosophy has evolved a great deal radically changed, especially since becoming a mother to the creative, right brained child I have.

Our homeschool approach is some form of parent-influenced, interest-led, collaborative relaxed homeschooling.

Welcome! I look forward to getting better acquainted in the days ahead!