2011- The year that changed everything.

2011 will be known around here as the year that everything changed.  It all started with an email.  “A long email.  I’ve been thinking.” It was titled. 

But let me go farther back than that.  My husband and I had been looking for a new home for at least 4 or 5 years.  Yes, years.  Our little house was getting too small now that we had two kids, two dogs and a nanny squished in.  But it was extremely difficult to find something that we both liked.  He wanted space to spread out.  He’s a mechanic so ample outside parking and garage space is a minimum requirement.  He would joke that he was looking for an acereage in town.  In town because I refused to move to a real acereage – you know, the kind where you’re isolated and spend your weekends mowing your gigantic lawn and driving kids places.

And then one day I woke up.  I started thinking about what I wanted in an ideal life.  I had been so busy trying to figure out how to shoe horn my husband’s long term vision into our current life (it didn’t fit) that I’d forgotten to dream for myself.  And just for fun I let my imagination run wild and be as idealistic as possible (I am usually trying to rein in the idealism!).  And this plan started to form that fit exactly into an acereage.  In fact it blossomed into an even bigger plan – a homestead – with chickens and bees and gardens and children running and playing in the woods, and that’s what we’re working on these days.

And so the conversation began with the email titled “A long email.  I’ve been thinking.”, and my poor husband had no idea that my entire perspective had shifted.