Our Journey to Full Time RVing

I thought I'd explain a little of where we are today and then I will go back to catch up on how we got here. lol

I will flesh things out as they come up. But for now, I felt stuck, like I couldn't move on because I hadn't done all the writing I had intended when I started this blog. Because there was a huge gap in our journey that kept me from moving forward, a large valley between the old and the new that I somehow couldn't get over. So, this post is meant to be the bridge that gets me from the past, to the present so I can move forward. Hope you enjoy the abridged (no pun intended) story of our journey.

We are full time RVers now. We made the transition, wow that is such a nice word, we didn't transition at all! We made the leap to full time about 18 months ago. Just after our car accident. We had always thought this was something we wanted to do. It was my grandparent's dream, although they didn't get to live it. And my husband's parents lived this life for 16+ years.

Sixteen years ago we had planned to take our homeschooling family on the road in an RV, but life got in the way and plans got sidelined. Five years ago we moved from our large, approximately 2500 sq ft home into a fairly small townhouse. It was small but it had a lot of things on my wish list. A built in pool, actually two, in our complex, an attached two car garage, three bathrooms, a dishwasher. Our landlady was a dream and we couldn't have asked for better neighbors. That's where we were when I started this blog. But shortly thereafter life got in the way again!

I had to have surgery and would not be able to climb stairs for at least 2 months following the surgery. Well, that was going to be very difficult living in a two story townhouse with no shower on the first floor. We laughed a little about setting up a kiddie pool in the garage where I could hose myself off for a couple of months. But seriously we needed to look at finding somewhere I could recuperate. We found a great house just a mile up the road from us! A nice big 4 bedroom, 3 bath home on half an acre of agricultural property. Now, I should say that for the past 16 years my heart has been torn. Part of me wants to travel and the other part wants to settle down and live off the land. Basically if I'm not going to be doing one, I'd like to be doing the other.

So, here at last was the place we could put one of those dreams into motion! We had raised chickens for years before moving into the townhouse so I wasted no time finding us some chickens again! I love raising chickens! We love the fresh eggs. I love the sound of the cackling that sounds like laughter to me. We found a nice little family of 5 Rhode Island Red Hens and a Rhode Island Red Rooster. Here they are:

I also hurried up and got us two goats, Mama Goat and Papa Goat. What an adventure that was, but I will leave that for another day. Here are Mama and Papa Goat.

Mama is the dark brown doe standing, and Papa is the cream colored buck laying down.

I had my surgery and we prepared to settle into our little farm as soon as I had recovered. Our daughter set about learning how to be a horse owner since that has always been her dream and I had already decided that the last two years of high school for her would focus heavily on that.

And then, there it is, my glider sitting gracefully under the beautiful weeping willow tree where I dreamed of days spent sipping tea and relaxing with my Bible.

However, once again, life had other plans for us! First I had to have another surgery just three months after the first. I hadn't fully gotten on my feet from the first one, and here I was having another. Then, before we could even unpack we had to move again. Good-bye to our beautiful little farm. But the good news is we were moving to a bigger house on a bigger lot where we could have our goats, our chickens and add horses! Sounds like a little bit of heaven right? Um, well not so fast.

First off, the new place was in the desert, in a place I had vowed I would never live! Second, the house was a fixer upper, definitely on my NO list when we had first moved. But life has a way of taking us places we never thought we'd go. So, off we went on a new adventure.

Again, I will leave those adventures for another time. We had added two horses and a dog to the family, and Mama and Papa Goat blessed us with two new kids. Well three but one didn't survive.

Here is Samantha's first horse Tinkerbell:

Then we added Princess, a Welch Corgie Mix puppy a little less than a year old:

Then came Danny Boy, a rescue Arabian about 25 years old, he is such a lover!

And finally came the baby goats, Angel and her brother Buddy! We knew Mama Goat was expecting and had her penned in her little nesting area, but we woke up one morning to find new surprises waiting for us!

They were seriously two of the cutest little things I'd ever seen in my life! We just couldn't get enough of them!

But once more, before we could settle in and unpack, life had another twist in store for us. Things were not going well at our new farm. I won't go into details, but it was not the situation we had bargained for when we rented the property.

Then in a whirlwind came the decision that we could no longer stay where we were so we set about finding another place but before we could, we were in a major car accident and our lives were turned upside down!

We made the decision to move into the RV for the remainder of the summer while I was undergoing intense physical therapy and then decide on a new place after I was better. We didn't anticipate that it was going to take months, and months and three surgical procedures before I got to the place where I would be released from Physical Therapy. Or that once I was released there was no getting me back on my feet. After spending 7 months in bed in constant excruciating pain, I was so weak I could barely stand, let along do any kind of rehab on my own. But on my own I was. So I spent another 5 months in bed, too weak to do much else. Barely able to stand long enough to shower, let alone do any kind of exercise.

So, there in a nutshell is how we ended up here. :-) During many of those moves we were without internet connection and for the past 18 months we have had no interenet and no computer. I am using our son's laptop now to try to get things going.

So, now that we've made the leap to living our "dream", there are days I am sure this is our dream. And there are days I'm certain we've found our way into another nightmare! lol But we made this decision to do this as we seek God about where He wants us and what He wants us to do, so, we continue to seek where God wants us, and what He wants us to do, and we stay nice and cozy in our little trailer while we do it. :-)

I hope you've enjoyed catching up on our little journey. Now we can move forward!

Be Blessed!

Life On The Farm, and On The Mend

Well, after my last post I had to have a hysterectomy and repair surgery. I was told that recovery would take 6-8 weeks but I'm not really sure what I heard when they said that because I really thought it would be a couple of weeks of recovery with a couple of weeks of taking it easy and then BAM, I'd be back to my old self, only better! Well, I could not have been more wrong. When they said 6-8 weeks, they meant 6-8 weeks! I realize now that I didn't take the surgery seriously enough, and if I could do it over again, which I hope not to ever have to do, I would take it much easier than I did. I would take advantage of laying down more and I would insist on much better pain management. A lot happened with this surgery, and I don't really feel up to going into that now, but I may later so that anyone who reads it may avoid the nightmare that I went through with pain management issues. The good news is they left my ovaries, the bad news is that I seem to have been thrown into menopause anyway! Major hot flashes since the surgery. But enough about that for now.


Because of that I have not been able to unpack or decorate our new farmhouse at all and it gets more irritating every day that goes by. We have added assorted rabbits, two more roosters and a baby chick to our menagerie. I know, two more roosters? Why? Well, it wasn't exactly on purpose.

Daniel and Charlie during their morning routine.

First came "Charlie" the rooster. He came from a neighbors flock that practically lives here, his mother attacked and tried to kill him. He escaped and came running to our son, Daniel who happened to be sitting in the backyard at the time. Daniel gave him some grass and he adopted Daniel as his Dad. He would follow him everywhere he went and when Daniel came inside he would run around the sliding glass doors and cry and peck at the window. We got him a cage and would bring him in at night and put him back out during the day. Because of what happened he is an outcast to all the neighboring flocks so he lived on his own in the front half of our backyard. Our kids are very protective of him and chased away any of the other chickens that tried to come into that area so they stay away from that part now. It was so much fun to watch him develop his routine. The way he followed us around whenever we went outside. The way that he would come to the door at bedtime to let us know it was time to put him inside. At first we thought he was a chick, but as time went by we realized we had another rooster. Oh well.


Then we found two baby chicks at the feed store so we bought a Rhode Island Red and a Plymouth Barred Rock. Unfortunately the Red died after a few weeks, but the Barred Rock is thriving and growing and is very close to Charlie. In the beginning Charlie was not very happy and felt more than a little displaced by the new arrivals, but with the death of the Red, he began to grow closer to the other chick. They even got to the point of sharing a cage.


A few weeks ago a friend called and asked if we could take in their rooster. It seems that they bought a bunch of baby chicks and one turned out to be a rooster, which they are not allowed to have and a neighbor was complaining and they were desperate to find a new home, so we brought home Topol. He's a Russian Spangled Orloff, and we are musical lovers, hence the name. We watched them closely and he and Charlie seem to be living peacefully enough together. It is very funny now to watch the three of them follow each other around the yard.


The only one not very pleased with the situation is Elvis, our cockatiel who lives on the back porch and who's cage has become their favorite roosting place. At first she, yes she, I'll explain in a minute, at first she put up quite a fuss, but now she has resigned herself to the fact that the three of them jump on her cage at night and settle in for a good night's rest.


We had a cockatiel named Clyde that we got from a friend when his mother attacked him and tried to kill him. He was hand raised and had a huge bald spot in the back of his head from where his mother had attacked him. Clyde loved my husband more than any of us and loved to snuggle up on the back of Kevin's neck and play in his hair. Well one morning the kids came running into our bedroom waking us up with a chorus of, "Clyde laid an egg, Clyde laid an egg!" My husband and I looked at each other through bleary eyes and asked, what could be in the cage that looks like an egg? Kevin got up and went into the other room to investigate while I stayed in bed wondering what in the world could have gotten into the cage that looked like and egg! What could have gotten in the cage at all? Could the kids have maybe put something in the cage? When my husband returned to fall back into bed I asked him, "Well, what is in the cage that looks like an egg?" He said, "An egg." hmmm, okay so Clyde became Cleo and went on to lay many eggs in her time. My mother loved Cleo so much that for her birthday the next year we bought her a cockatiel of her own whom she promptly named Elvis since she loved Elvis Presley so much. He lived with her for 5 years until she passed away, then he came to live with us. We were hoping for some baby cockatiels with Elvis and Cleo. Cleo was in the process of laying so we had high hopes for some babies! Soon we were being deluged with eggs! Tons of them! More than we had ever had before, surely there would be babies soon! But then we began to suspect that perhaps Cleo wasn't the only bird in that cage laying eggs. Well, actually the kids suspected, I was still sure that Elvis was a male since he had lived with my mom for 4 years without laying a single egg. Surely he wasn't laying now. Surprise! One day we found Elvis with an egg stuck to him, err her. Sometimes when birds lay too many eggs they lose calcium and can become egg bound. Luckily for us we had gone through this with Cleo before and luckily in both cases the eggs became attached outside the bird. If they become bound inside, the bird usually dies from it. The only thing I could figure was that Elvis moved in with Cleo, saw her lay an egg and said, "Oh is that all there is to it? I can do that!" And then she did. lol I tried to change Elvis' name to Priscilla but Elvis just stuck and so Elvis she remains. Cleo passed last year after 9 years with us.

We have yet to name our flock of 4 Rhode Island Red hens and 1 Rhode Island Red rooster who have to be kept secluded because their beaks have been cropped so they have to be kept in their own area away from the other chickens. I expect that we will always have to keep them separated for their own safety. It seems that now we will have to have at least 3 different coop areas for the 3 roosters. Although we also hope to get some arachonas so that means perhaps 4 different coop areas. I guess we'll see how well Charlie and Topol get along as Charlie grows.

The goats, who remain unamed also, continue to neglect the weeds in the backyard in favor of the various fruit trees which they are destroying! I am about to fire them! We had been watering the back area to make the weeds more desirable to them but the only part of the weeds they would actually eat was the dead part. And they only eat the weeds if we pull them out of the ground and feed it to them!! I don't need finicky goats! At that point they're just a disposal system. When the weeds got almost waist high I made them stop watering! My hope was that the rabbits would take care of the weeds but I have been unable to build a run for them so for now they live in the front area with the chicken and two roosters and are pampered. This whole farm thing is just not starting out the way I thought. lol


One frustration of this long recovery has been that I have been unable to build my chicken coop that I have been dreaming of, and that my garden never got planted. So many plans, so little achieved.


Well, that's it for now. Hopefully I will be up to writing more frequently, but the recovery continues to be a roller coaster ride so time will tell.


Be blessed!

Moving Day

So, in the time I've been missing we have found a new home to rent, moved out of our old home and into the new one and started a whole new facet of life! Something we've always wanted to do, we've gotten a little farm started right in the midst of the big city. Okay, so not really the big city, but the city. For the past couple of years we've all been crammed into a very small 3 bedroom townhouse which was a true blessing to us, but which was way too small for us. We were used to having a large home on a large lot and we missed that more and more each day. But God's timing is not our timing, so while we were thankful for the townhouse, we longed for the time when God would move us on to something bigger with a little privacy and our own little spot of ground. And preferably with no stairs! :-)

This year when our lease was up the opportunity suddenly popped up for us to move up the road to a wonderful 4 bedroom ranch style house that sits on 1/2 an acre! We've wanted to live the country lifestyle for many years, when we were in our old house we had chickens, a rooster, ducks, rabbits, turtles, and various "normal" pets, dogs, cats, rats, hamsters, assorted birds. When we moved to the townhouse we were basically pet free except for our cockatiel. Now we are beginning to gather a menagerie again! We now have four chickens, a rooster and two goats to begin our little farm.


So, life continues to change each day and as we journey we marvel at how God weaves things together to form this tapestry we call life. Our days are full of settling in and getting things in order. The back 40, or livestock area, has been neglected for the past couple of years so there is a lot to do. We're hoping the goats will take care of a lot of that but since they can easily reach the grape vines in the back they are much more interested in munching on those than the 1/4 acre of weeds waiting for them. I guess I can't blame them, as I told my husband, if you had to choose between grapevines and dried out dead weeds, which would you eat?!


There is a pond in the mid yard area that we are working on cleaning out and getting up in working order. I look forward to that as I have longed for a pond for over a decade! I have many vegetables started and awaiting transplanting once we get an area fenced off in the back area so the goats don't neglect their weed eating duties to feast upon the delicacies of all those vegetable plants!


I love how God works things. In my impatience I often forget to just wait upon Him and His timing, but when He works it out His way it is always so sweet!


Well, there are chores waiting for me and a nice warm bed calling my name so I close for now to enjoy life on the farm. :-)


Have a blessed day!