(1) How my adventure started…

A little about me to start off my new blog adventure. As you can gather from my blog title, I’m not a lifelong country girl. I grew up in the city of Topeka, Kansas.  Let me stop there and clear a few things up:

1.) Yes, Kansas has cities… and the crime, violence, and sludge that go along with any city.

2.) No, we do not ride horses from ‘ere to there.

3.) Yes, I’ve heard of The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy, Yellow Brick Road, Ruby Slippers, “There’s No Place Like Home”… I’m aware. Yes, the same Kansas that novel was set in.

4.) And lastly, NO, we do not all live on farms and drive pickup trucks.

Anyway, I grew up in the city, not like a loft apartment in a high-rise city, but a more “suburbia” America city. The house I grew up in was a modest ranch style home. In the time I grew up (80’s & 90’s), we were a typical suburban American family: 3-bedroom house, 2-car garage, big backyard, dad worked in an office, mom stayed home with the 3 kids (she’s a teacher, stayed home until we were all in school), had a dog and a cat. It was definitely the city, not an ounce of country about it.

We had asphalt and concrete, not dirt and gravel.  We had a dog and a cat as pets, not chickens and livestock. We had a very meager garden during a few summer months, not rows of crops yielding food we could eat year-round. We bought all of our food at the grocery store, never raised it ourselves. We were aware of where our food came from, as in beef came from a cow, but how it went from “moo” to saran wrapped on the shelf was something of a “magic trick” no one talked about. We washed our car when it had gotten a bit “dirty” from the occasional rain and not out of necessity when the dust from our gravel road had rendered it unrecognizable. We went to an air-conditioned gym to get in a little cardio, or played basketball on our concrete driveway, we didn’t have to haul hay, harvest crops, clean out animal pens, or mend/build fencing in the 100-degree 70% humidity Kansas heat. We walked 10 yards to the neighbors front door to see if our friends wanted to play. We did not hop on our quad and ride a mile down the gravel road to see what the neighbors were up to. We helped our neighbor capture her pesky little poodle that escaped her yard again. We did not help the neighbor coral the runaway horses that had decided to pay us a visit.

We were taught to be wary of the street, that was a mere 10-yards from our front door, and always look both ways for oncoming cars. We did not have worry about the oncoming semi-truck on the already narrow gravel road during harvest. We were taught to be wary of strangers, always lock the door, and call the police if anyone threatens to enter. We did not learn to shoot a rifle at an early age to ward off coyotes, or any person for that matter, who came onto our land and threatened our livestock or property. We were not allowed to run around outside after dark unless an adult was supervising as it was the city and there were many safety risks that come along with living in the city. We did not have the freedom to roam about our property after dark finding frogs and fireflies until it was time for bed. We didn’t learn to drive until age 14 when you could get a learners permit, and we learned how to parallel park as that was a necessity in the city. We did not drive quads at age 5, drive a truck around our land at age 10 to help with farm chores, or learn to back a trailer even before we could drive alone on the highway.

Anyway, I’m getting a little long winded, I’ll get to the point behind my blog now…

My husband and I both work in the city and wouldn’t change that for anything. But living in the city is a whole different story.

I work in the insurance industry. My office building is state of the art and luxurious. As such, the attire in my office is business professional for the most-part. Works great for me because I love shoes. Especially my stilettos! So for me, I don’t mind that attire a bit. I get to wear my stilettos everyday!

My husband is a firefighter in the city and thrives on the action he sees in the city. He could not imagine trading in this career, his true passion in life, for anything in the whole world. However, he loves hunting almost as much as firefighting and living in the city stifled that hobby.

And our boys… Well, our boys, all three of them  (ages 10, almost 7, and 4), are a rough and tumble bunch loaded to the brim with testosterone… like their father… So you can imagine the excitement exploding from our house on a daily basis.

My husband, my best friend, is the one who opened my eyes to a way of living I had never considered. Country living. Mud.. Dirt… Gravel Roads… the works. Although, to be fair, he knew little more than I did when we began this adventure as he is the product of a suburban upbringing himself. His dream had always to been to live in the country and have the ability to enjoy nature and go hunting far more often than we had the opportunity to living in the center of the city.

I say “his” dream because I had never given much thought to where we would live. Like exactly where our “forever” home would be. I liked the city, it was all I had ever know. The city was the only place I had ever pictured myself living until one terrifying night. At the time, we’d only been married a few years, I was only 25 years old, when an intruder came into our home while I was home alone with our (then) 2-year old son. It was one of the scariest moments in my life. The full backstory of that night will be coming in a post later on. At that point I began to imagine living ANYWHERE but the city!

Our adventure started with a little, abandoned, 3-acre property in foreclosure, about 10 minutes South of the city.  When I say abandoned, I mean, the owners were arrested two years prior and it had been sitting vacant for two years. It was overgrown, rotted out, and beaten up. It was a disaster! This blog is going to be snippets of our adventures going from the city, to “a little bit” country, and to a full on farm where we are now. And… why we’ll never go back to city life!

Trust me… you’ll want to sick around for some of our adventures… I couldn’t make this stuff up if I tried!