Finally

So, I have been wanting to start a blog about my life as a farming/ranching mother of four boys for a long time. The irony of course is that with this life I have very little time to do extra things. Since it has taken so long to get this going, I am going to have to write some of the posts in retrospect because there are so many neat things that have happened and they need to be shared. We bought this property two years ago to the day...June 18,2010. My youngest son at the time had just turned one year old 2 days before my husband signed the papers for our new life. We had been wanting this for so long. We were living in suburbia Fort Collins and not completely happy. Every spare minute we had, which in retrospect was a lot more often than now, we were at the farm and ranch store or looking at our books on how to live a self sufficient lifestyle. Almost every children's book we read was a farm book. That's just what the boys asked for. So when it came time to start looking for the perfect place we came across this one and said, "no". It was on the wrong side of town, in the wrong town, and on a major road! Then I would look at the pictures of it and think, "but it has everything I want...." I wanted an old house that felt like my grandmother's house and looked like the ones in old town. This one was built in 1900. We wanted chickens...this one already had a chicken coop and fully enclosed run. It had an adorable old barn with two fenced pastures. Oh yes, and a garden that was fully fenced 100 ft by 50ft and the soil had been gardened for at least 50 years. So we finally went to look and it felt like home right away. We spent the first year renovating the inside in order to bring it back into this decade. All white walls were painted and all the baby blue carpet was immediately ripped out. The carpet is now being used as weed block in the garden. We put down bamboo floors, tile and beetle kill pine flooring. A lot of the work we did ourselves. Some of it was done by professionals. We have finally reached the point in which the inside is almost perfect and the outside is beaming with life. We moved our young chickens in a week after we signed the papers. We had been secretely brooding them in the garage in suburbia. Our two rabbits were moved in at the same time and then we picked up our golden retriever puppy as well. Life was flowing and we were adjusting to the new life and the new commute to what we used to know. I fought it all for a while, the change I mean. I kept taking the boys to parks in our old town and slowly I realized that they have really great parks here....that we can even ride our bikes to. We have a pool down the street with a huge slide and it is a 5 minute walk to the recently updated library and recreation center. As for the property, we were overwhelmed with an abundance of fruit from our own fruit trees that first summer. We were so busy with the inside that we barely had time to plant in the garden but the fruit trees produced. We would sit in the grass beside the pasture and eat our own apples and peaches. It was heavenly, but we kept looking at the barn and pasture and wishing there was someone in there. It took a while before we convinced Ben to consider animals. We, of course, wanted horses but Ben settled on alpacas and went to work adding tighter fencing and cleaning out the barn for them. We also needed water out by the barn so we had a company come drill and lay down pipes to bring a faucet out to the barn, garden, and chicken coop. When we were ready the alpacas came. We started with three mamas, three nursing crias and one male. We have added a lot since then and it has been a wonderful journey that we continue to experience every day. I am so grateful that I had the courage to take the plunge and consider something outside of my comfort zone. I have grown so much since living here and my boys have witnessed so many amazing things. There are so many fabulous stories to share in this blog.