It's been a while since I've blogged. But I knew this would happen. I don't know how people keep up with new baby's and blogs, for me it's just impossible!! James is 6 months old now and a lot has happened in the past 6 months, but ill save that for another blog.
The house we were living in was starting to get a bit small for our medium sized family of 5 so we decided to start looking for houses. We never like the town we were in, I'd been there for 8 years and had been wanting to leave ever since I got there. Tom grew up a few towns over and swore he would never live there, but his love for me saw him living with me, in a town we both hated for the past year and a half! Awww shucks!!
So where would we go? We could live in a brand new modern brick house in an estate, full of brand new house that were built so close to each other that you could hear your neighbour chewing their breakfast each morning. A concrete back yard the size of a bedroom. Don't get me wrong, if I was by myself or REALLY liked my neighbours, these areas would be fine. It just wasn't for us.
How about sunny North? Beautiful weather, tropical plants and a fun loving life. Only problem is the plane rides every month so the girls could see their fathers. Too far.
So how about in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by trees, grass and the occasional person. I'd dreamed of living on a farm since I was a little girl and Tom has always been a cowboy at heart. So we began to look.
And what do you know?! A brand new 4 bedroom, 2 lounge room, GIANT brick house smack bang in the middle of 750 hectares of beautiful fields, bulls, and rustic sheds was just begging for someone to move into it. Perfection! We visited this house (and town it was in) every spare day we had while we waited to be approved. It was straight out of a picture book. A loving fiance, 3 amazing kids, a beautiful house set on a beautiful property. What more could you want? Well a job would be nice but we will get to that in a minute.
WE GOT IT!!! Yep, We prayed and prayed. I had made myself sick with anticipation but the overwhelming joy I felt when I heard those words made it all worth it. We'd already been packing while we waited for an answer. So moving should be easy right? WRONG! I totally underestimated how much (crap) very useful stuff we had and just how on earth were we supposed to move it? This is when I realised the strain that would be put on our poor car and the price of fuel meant the car was had to be crossed off the 'ways to move' list. So we booked a truck. And we packed it. By we I mean Tom and I. Yep, just us. We're tough like that lol, we like to be independent.
I bet you now have this vision of a perfect pair, smiling a lot, with perfect hair, not breaking a sweat, lifting the feather light furniture with ease. Standing back, hand in hand, looking at a perfectly clean empty house, reminiscing on all those wonderful times had in that house.
Hahaha well lets just take out a sledge hammer and shatter that vision in to thousands of pieces, then jump up and down on those shattered pieces. Then maybe the neighbours dog can come over and poop on those millions of pieces of shattered vision... Ok maybe it wasn't that bad but there was a lot of swearing, nasty bruises, shut-up's, and then to top it off we got to sleep on the floor (mattresses were packed away of course) for two lovely nights. Oh and to top that top off, we realised the night before that we weren't going to be able to make it in 1 load so we would need to do 2. And then we realised we couldn't make the 8hours of driving, 2 hours of unpacking, 2 hours of re packing and get the truck back in time. So to make this possible, we had to leave at 5am. We had spent all day packing and then all night cleaning the walls, the windows, the floors. Any surface you could possibly clean was cleaned. We put on loud country music and danced around the house all night long like a pair of delirious idiots. Our night sleeping on the floor began at 2am. By 5am we were pulling out of our driveway to our new life. And by 9pm we were spending our first night together in our new home :)
A few weeks went past, Caitlin had started at her new school, we began to meet the locals and life had really slowed down, in a good way. Things just move slower in the country. I spent my spare time sitting in a sunny window crocheting and the kids spent their time on the play equipment outside. But Tom spent his days driving from town to town looking for a job without any luck. Every one wanted experienced farmers. By the third week he finally hit the jackpot. What he had been waiting for his whole life. He'd had opportunities to work on farms before but they were always at the wrong time or in the wrong state. The dairy farm owners asked Tom to come for an interview but specified that they wanted his family there too. We figured things just worked differently in the country.
The interview lasted 2 hours. We talked about the obvious things like what experience he had, his work ethics, how much he wanted this job. But we also talked about the responsibilities of owning a farm if Tom ever decided to, family priorities, and most importantly, if we were accepted for this job, we were to live on the farm (in a separate house of course) and consider ourselves as one big happy family. Now we understood why they wanted the whole family there! I've got to say, I've never felt so welcomed into a job in my life. We were taken for a drive around the farm and shown through the house we would be living in. A partially renovated 3 bedroom farm house. Defiantly not the worst house I've lived in but not as luxurious as our current house either. The brand new kitchen and giant walk in robe had to be my favourite part and then I realised how much character the house actually had. Very French provincial style. And the gardens were gorgeous. I had a fight with myself, the house of my dreams versus the job of Tom's dreams. An isolated house with no work versus the nicest township and LOTS of work. 4 bedrooms versus 3. Materialistic versus suck it up princess.
We were asked to think about the opportunity on offer and get back to them but we instantly knew what our answer was going to be. "YES!!". When the time comes our dream house will be built with our own 2 hands and we will work hard in the mean time to get it.
So its time to pack again. We hired a truck 4 days later, slept on the floor AGAIN, and 5 days after the interview, we were living and working on a dairy farm :)
Tom loves his job and I love this farm and the community were surrounded by. We share meals every now and then, our neighbour are all lovely and far away enough that I can sing at the top of my lungs and no one hears me ;) and our new 'family' are incredibly genourous and caring. The house has grown on me immensely. I've started planting my own flowers to add to the beautiful gardens and we've been allowed to do any work to the house that we want (which we haven't started yet!). Caitlin's been at her new school for 2 days now, so far so good, and I've started playgroup with Mary and James. Our new life has only just begun but I'm already inlove with it and the best decision we ever made was making the move from the city to the country :)
