Fast forward two and a half years after the last post...
Life throws totally unexpected changes at you sometimes, and sometimes plans get put on hold because of it.
In January 2008, while picking up the boys for a visit, their dad asked me if they could come live with Greg and me "for awhile." He said his current job contract would soon be up and he was having trouble finding another one. I told him I'd talk to Greg about it and let him know. Somewhere along the line the "staying for awhile" became "staying permanently."
So land searching went on the back burner. The school system we lived in was one of the best in the area and moving away from it didn't make sense. Moving on top of adding a teenager and a 9-year-old to our household didn't make sense. So it took almost two years to get back on the land search.
Fast forward to October 2008. Greg finds out that his employer is going to be cutting tens of thousands of jobs sometime in January 2009. He doesn't know if his job is going to be cut or not. Skip ahead again to January. After the cuts, he still has a job but his team of 150+ engineers is down to less than 10. There's no longer any requirement for him to go into an office since all his work is done online and on the phone. We start talking about land again. We also decide to go ahead with a tubal ligation reversal for me.
Thanksgiving weekend 2009 we were 8 weeks away from the birth of our son. Greg goes to Chattanooga, TN and Huntsville, AL to look at potential farms. Chattanooga was a bust, but there were several interesting properties outside of Huntsville. One in particular everyone said "felt like home" when they drove up the driveway and I should see it. So I saw it, and I agreed. Long story short, we closed on that property on March 31, 2010 and moved from Durham, NC to the exurbs of Huntsville, AL the following weekend. Driving two 26 foot Uhaul trucks, one of them pulling a minivan behind and the other with a 2 month old in a car seat, is an experience we hope to never repeat. But we made it and in the almost-3-months since have been working on unpacking and settling in and stocking the place with livestock.
We have +/- 20 acres here, about 17 of it fenced and cross-fenced pastures. We have a small pond, a 9 stall barn and a work shop. The house is a 3 bedroom 2 bath ranch, with a large two car garage. You can't see our house from the road, but you can see a small section of the road from the living room windows, the office windows, and the front porch.
So that sort of brings us up to the present day. I will make posts about each animal/type of livestock and hopefully include pictures, then you'll be acquainted with all the denizens of our little farm. Said farm is still nameless, but we'll think of something to call ourselves one of these days. :)
