A little history about us.

It's been impressed upon my heart, to share some background history with you. Mike and I have been married 25 yrs. this March. We had a courtship of four yrs., while I finished high school( yes, we're high school sweeties) and a year of college( Cosmetology). I worked for 5 yrs in the cosmetology field and then experienced pregnancy problems( placenta previa). This made us look at the fact, of me becoming a fulltime SAHM. This is when the Lord laid on my heart the gift of thrifty/ frugal living. At the time our son, Jon, was born we owned our first home( the bank and us) in a older city neighborhood. I grew up gardening, so to grow and learn to preserve the blessings of the garden was an easy and natural step for me. I started with basic canning, pickles, relishes, fruit, all items that required only waterbath canning. At this point we didn't have our eyes fully open to the Organics/ natural food. We lived in our first( 2 bdrm cottage) for 8 yrs. We then upsized to a 3 bdrm, split level home alittle over a yr. after our Dd, Cortney was born. The new home had 1/2 acre lot. This ment a larger garden for our family. When hit with a very serious medical situation with our Dd, this is when the good Lord really opened our eyes and placed questions on our hearts as to what could have cause this genetic disease, which followed from generation to generation and yet no one on either side had this. The Dr. said it must have spontaneously mutated at conception. We began researching and reading books,( hundreds of them), with the Lord's guidance. This is also about the time both Mike and I started to feel as if we needed to move our family to a farm where we could raise not only our produce but our meats and dairy all natural.Our primary source of meat was wild game at this point. We in fact did begin, to raise a small portion of our meat in the form of backyard chickens and were blessed with eggs as well. We passively looked for land, but the prices were outrageous. When we finally decided to truly search for a homestead was when the city accepted the bid for Walmart to build on the whole block right in front of our home. I'll say it here, WE ARE NOT A WALMART family. After over a year long search and not feeling led by the Lord on any of the properies viewed we decided that the Lord had other plans for us. Several months passed and we were trying to deal with the whole Walmart concept, when I picked up a real estate magazine in the grocery store. Mike worked late shift, so after the kids were in bed this was my free time to read, catch up on letters, etc... I thumbed through the magazine and came across a listing for this little homestead. I called Mike on his lunch and we decided to take a look the following morning. We looked and loved what we saw but wanted to see the inside of the house, so... we called our realtor. The next day we met with our realtor and viewed the inside of the house. The kids ran upstairs and picked out which room would be theirs, our realtor looked and wasn't impressed and Mike and I were overwhelmed with feelings of, "This is it!". We laugh now, because the realtor said," Yep, yep, well.. we'll keep looking." to which Mike and I replied, " We want to make an offer!" He looked throughly shocked. We made our offer and in short they counter offered and we agreed contingent on the sale of our home. Our home was listed and sold, all within a week( the good Lord at work). After a month of packing, we were set to move into our little homestead. The owners had agreed to let us move in the weekend before the actual closing( in part because buyers of our home needed to move in early) We've now been here for 6 years,December 08, and we feel so very blessed. I'll post pictures of "before and after", of several projects we've finished thus far. It's been a long road, but this little homestead is shining bright once again.