Our journey as a family of coming from residential Connecticut to rural Oklahoma has been wild and woolly. Learning to trust God when it feels like we are walking on the water...on the ocean. Discovering His character in every moment. It's been good and so very hard.
There are seasons in families. I recently realized that I had left one season and moved to the next. The first season in a family is one of babies, toddlers and young children. Parents learn to function without sleep. One minute they pour out love on their little angels, the next they are trying to erect boundaries between them and the tiny sucking sounds of need. You fight for that date night, you fight for bedtime, you are creating structure in your home to help you survive and love well.
The next season is the one that we are in. The kids have gotten older, and all the seeds you planted have started growing. Lovely. ;) Now is the time for more character training, but even more important, learning to do life WITH the kids.
Looking back at Ct is easy to see what wasn't working. It's always easy to look back and see. :) Our lives centered around Church and finishing the work on a house we'd been working on for eight years. Other than that, we were bored. How to does one do life with family? What is family?
It was time for my husband and I to define who we were as a family. What was our family culture? What made us tick? It wasn't about Adam and I and little kids any more. It was about creating culture with three little people. What did we have that we could pass on? Who were we and was it worth expanding on? Our dream was to have a family culture that could build multi generationally. But we were clueless how to do it.
Becoming farmers was an accident. At least, we didn't see it coming. Our plan was to move to a certain part of Texas/Oklahoma and begin a new season there. That didn't happen. So what do you do when you move to rural Oklahoma and have two acres vs a tenth of an acre in Ct?
You buy a goat. ;)
We just bought nineteen acres with a huge 60x40 shop, another small insulated shed and a double wide trailer. The trailer needs work, and we plan to replace it with a 'real' house someday. But for right now it's perfect. Financially we are finally in a position to save, to build, to repay some debt, and to have fun.
We are doing life as a family. It takes a lot of training the yuck out of our kids and some out of our selves, because we had deceived ourselves that we were still in that first season. Our current season is even harder, if done well. Less about bedtime and more about quality time. Less about boundaries and more about pastoring little people. We can do this! We are strong. Because we are weak. :D
