Oh My Gosh...A Whole Month? Really??

I honestly have no idea where the last entire month went! I know that time seems to fly by faster the older you get but...sheesh! Oh well, on to the updates...

You know, I realized just recently that I have never really gotten around to explaining the name of the blog. Our land, where the animals are, was raw when we bought it. It is only semi-raw now. Is there such a thing? Ok, maybe not but the land is coming along. Anyway...the name....it has a creek. A really nice one right at the bottom of the driveway. Actually, it had 2 creeks but we changed all that...*Appropriate time warp music inserted here*

Here's our land when we first looked at it a year ago:

So after the slight stroke my husband and I both experienced we went to work.

We had to actually get ON to the land to see what we were dealing with so:

We started clearing....and found rock.....ticks, chiggers and rocks. My dreams of huge sprawling gardens was crushed. But did we get discouraged? Well, of course! We may be adventurous but we are not insane. We expected the incredible amount of trees but the quality of the land underneath sort of spooked us a little. So we continued:

We now have a stone driveway. The truck....now don't laugh at it, it's very sensitive.....is actually sitting right over the creek.
 We put in a 20' galvanized steel culvert pipe and had the stone delivered. The fun continued:

Then we got electric! Now we're really livin! Ya, I know, some homesteaders really go the total Green route and this step would not have been so important. But we are definitely not that brave...yet. I do think that Green energy options such as solar and wind are in our future but we are taking this whole homesteading thing one step at a time. Oh ya, just as a novelty we took this:

Amazing, isn't it?!?

Now, where to go from here. We, of course, put together all the necessary areas for the animals but what about us? We had no idea. We had an idea before driving all the way down here about a year ago but it changed along the way. We got comfortable living where we are...typical 3 bedroom home, nice yard, great neighbors. But were we doing what we came here to do?

We were doing some soul searching this last month and we realized that we weren't. We wanted to experience homesteading. It's why we came here. Instead we were running back and forth to the farm-in-the-making at least once per day to take care of the animals but we were not making anymore progress towards our goal. To be sure, it was the path of least resistance, the kids are comfortable, all utilities available, etc.  But it wasn't....exactly....right. And we sort of knew it all along. We kept saying "we'll get there" but we were doing nothing more to make it happen. We got wrapped up in the aspects of daily living.

So, The Epiphany: We do not want to turn our backs on this chance. And we won't. We wanted to homestead, period. And this is what we are going to do. We are moving. Away from the house and to the land that we should have been on by now. We are looking at it as a temporary setback and we getting back on track towards where we want to be. This is what we've done so far:

We bought a house trailer and put it on the land. This will be our temporary home until the house is built. It has 2 bedrooms so enough rooms for the kids to have their own space. Not huge by any standards but very livable once it's totally cleaned up. That pool in the back.....not for swimming. It's actually the start of our water storage. Don't Panic! We are not going to drink the creek water! I say this cause I know at least one of our older boys will have a heart attack otherwise. We have the drinking water thing under control. We are only using the pool temporarily to store large amounts of general use water. Filtered and treated with chemicals it will serve it's purpose for now, until we get the well drilled anyway.

We did sort of have a snag with this little project. Check this out:

This is what we call Old Creek Road. It is a dry creek bed about 12' past the creek at the bottom of the drive. We actually created it by diverting the flow farther up the property so that it funnels into the main creek. Boy, did we think we were clever. But we created a little problem as we found out....once we got the trailer stuck in the old creek bed. Yup, we did! And, it's funny now, but it was not funny at all then. Thank God my husband is really a genius with getting us out of trouble. I do not believe our truck will ever forgive us. It took us 2 days to get that trailer up where it is. And it's staying put.

We have so much more to do. But we are not dragging our feet this time. We will be living on this land by Mid-May the latest. We better be ready because it's going to be all up to us to make the kids OK with this. There will be adjustments for them but I think they'll do well if they sense that we're OK. And maybe, just maybe, even with their difficulties, we are worrying way too much. Kids are so resilient and they learn to adjust to what we expect them to. We'll see. No matter what, as long as we're together, things will be just fine.

And so, back to the original point of this post. The name! One of the first things I was awed by when we checked out the land was the sound of the creek. I loved it! And I still do. It's such a perfect sign of life in an otherwise raw and barren area that it takes my breath away. We intend on making the most of it...digging out larger areas further into the land and, maybe, creating a small pond.  It was the thing that struck us most about the property and we knew, even at the beginning, that it defined it. For us, there could be no other name but Our Little Creek Farm. :)