Our first post....
Hello I am excited to be starting this blog. Our family made this move to Maine at the end of January 2013 and it was the best thing we ever did. It was not an easy move for us. We lived in the small state of Rhode Island near a lot of our family. So saying good bye was not an easy part for sure. We are now about five hours away from them all. You might think, what would make a family move away from extended family to a strange place? Well it was a few different reasons. I will explain. We have two children left at home, one son that is 13 years old and a daughter that is 9 years old. We had been looking at our lives and them growing up the last few years and found a lot of stress and money problems. We were always working hard to get by and never getting ahead. I am sure, like everyone else in the world, always trying to give our kids everything they wanted. Always trying to keep up with the Jones. But really not being happy just being more stressed. We thought, there must be more to this. Well then my health gave us a problem and it turned our two family income household into one. We had to really look at things. That is when we said, wait we are doing this wrong. There has to be a better way. We want to give our children what is most valuable to them, us, our time not material things. They will treasure that more. They might not think that at first but they will get used to it.
It was kinda drastic for us at first but we had some money saved so we were able to live on a smaller budget. I was a single mother years ago and knew what it was like to rub to nickels together and make a family live off a small amount and get by on love alone. lol. Thing with that is you have to get everyone in the family to agree on the living on Love thing. They might fight it cause children always want things. They want what their friends have but they have to be told those things are not important. Us being together is more important.. Not the reality of me not being able to work because of my health but they were to young and didn't need to know that. I take my health issues as a blessing of getting my family back together. Back to being a happy family with a real future of being together forever. So we lived on a small budget and saved what we could. We decided we would start looking for a home of our own instead of renting and giving our money to someone else. With a small income, not wanting to be in debt for 30 years, we found out what we could afford on a 10 year mortgage. With that amount we new we could not find a home in our area in Rhode Island. The home prices were just to high. So we opened our search out, to about five hours from all of our family and just looked and looked. We new we were not going to live beyond our means anymore. We did not want to spend more than a certain amount and that we didn't want to pay for more than 10 years.
That is what brought us to Maine. OMG all we heard from family and friends is why Maine. But why not Maine. We found a home well within our budget, within a great school system for our children. We took the risk. We do not know a sole. We needed to make this change for the sake of our family and to make a better life for us. Our home has 10acres of land, which we hope to do some farming. We will start with chickens. We would like to try pigs after that. And we will go from there. I would love to build a guest tree house near the river. The home is an older home and needs alot of work. That is an understatement. My husband plans to do most of the work himself. I will blog about that. My daughter, many times has said, I am so glad we made this move. Even my son who was so scared of this whole thing has said he is very happy with the way things have turned out. He does say he is not quite sure about becoming a farmer but he will try anything. Well this is the short and simple version of our reason for coming to Maine lets hope you keep up with our blog and maybe make a life change of your own.
