A Little About Us.....

I decided yesterday that I don't want this blog to just be about all of the redoing we will be doing on our new home but also about the lives that are led inside these walls. We are a conservative Christian family. We have not always been, but God eventually brought us around to this path we are now on. My husband and I met when I was 16 and he was 21. We have been married for 18 years and have 3 children, Katherine 16, Lindsey 13, and Peyton 11.

We started our lives and marriage chasing the "American Dream", that all mighty dollar. My husband was a licensed Contractor and built custom homes. For the 1st 16 years of our marriage we lived in 13 different homes. He would build a new home and if it didn't sell right away we would live in it and decorate it and then it would sell. It was a fun life but very high stress for my husband and very 24/7. We lived in nice, new, and sometimes pretty large homes. However, they were always in a subdivision. Which is not a bad thing in itself but during all of this, our 16 year old Katherine, had been taking horseback riding/jumping lessons. She longed for a horse of her own. We, of course, were no where near that path or lifestyle.

Anyway, fast forward over the next few years we would come to grow closer to the Lord. We hadn't sold out 100% to Him, and I don't even know if we are there yet, but we were walking more and more with Him. I had been teaching in a small Christian school where my children went. My youngest was 4 and he was in the K-4 program there. I loved the job and the children but I felt like I was loosing a closeness to my family and my children. At this time, we started researching homeschooling and by the next year we were all home. It has not been an easy road but it has been the most rewarding road. I share a relationship with my children that I could not have even imagined.

Now, we will come up to May of 2004, my husband had been in the Army or Ms. National Guard since he was 17. He joined to get the GI Bill for college and stayed in because he loved it. Well in May of 2004 he got the call for activation to go to Iraq. He would be leaving in August. We had 3 months to finish houses, dissolve the business, and get settled. I can not tell you how heart wrenching and stressful this time was. We really didn't have time to really mourn the fact that daddy was going to be gone for 18 months because there was so much mourning of the life we were changing from. I know how selfish that sounds, but in keeping it real, that's where we were. Anyway, Ronnie left in August and I finished up the contracting of his last house, which was a nightmare of its own. Then we started our new chapter. The kids and I slowed down, and really got to take note of our life, and how we were living, and what was really important to us. For Ronnie and I it was a big time of reflection. We were renting a house in a subdivision in town and when Ronnie came home for his 2 week leave in June of 2005, we moved to another rental home in the country on 10 acres. We loved it. I would never have thought we would. Ronnie came home Dec. 28, 2005. He had no idea what he was going to do career wise. We did not want to start the business over from scratch. You do those things when you are young and stupid.LOL So he stayed on full time with the guard until he could get a job with a big construction firm as a Construction Manager. As he was full time, we really started to enjoy the fact that when he came home the job was over. He had a ton of time off and when he was off he wasn't consumed with the job. We were really enjoying life. We got Katherine her first horse and we got our middle daughter a few chickens. We were really seeing the life we wanted, unfold before our eyes. It just kind of fell in our laps.

So now to the present. My honey works full time for the Ms. National Guard. We make much less money. We are still homeschooling. We moved an hour and a half from our childhood town,so that he could take this job. The house we ended up buying is 20 mins. from a small town with a WalMart and about 40 mins. from a town with a Lowes and Hobby Lobby (the important places). We now have 3 horses, 24 chickens, 4 guineas, 1 rabbit, 3 barn cats, and 3 dogs. We see a chicken we don't have and just seem to keep collecting, it may be a problem. We live on a small acreage and hope to put out plenty of fruit trees and bushes, this next fall. It's a very slow and simple life, we are now living, but we love it!!!

So if anyone can come turn 180 degrees, we did and it was great.

There is so much more that I could fill in like all of the many, many things the Lord has shown us on the way but it would be so long and you would never make it to the end. Which you probably haven't now, but if you have, here is a glimpse of our life.