Looking back over old posts and photos and just what a nice way to chronicle things this has been, I regret the massive gap in time where I quit posting.
Life has been crazy. Life has been, well...life. That's how it goes sometimes.
But things are beginning to settle down a bit. Or at least I can see the light at the end of the tunnel. So I thought I'd revisit my old blog and see what I might do to dust it off and polish it up a bit and put it back into service.
I have several things currently brewing, so I'm hoping to make this a point of contact for a few things I'd like to take on in the near future. I went ahead and bought a domain name!
First thing of note, take a glance up above and you will see I changed my blog's name. Sunny Side Acres. Note, plural, acres! I am taking on my dad's 45-acre farm as my portion of the inheritance. Once the house in town is sold, we'll be signing the deed for the farm too.
[Edit 3-21-19: I've taken the blog title back to One Sunny Acre for now. I couldn't get Sunny Side Acres for my herd name. Oh, well. I am happier with my new choice -- BrightNBeautiful. So I will probably call the whole farm BrightNBeautiful Acres. This came from a poem I love, All Things Bright and Beautiful, which I read to my children (and memorized) when they were little. I like this name much better actually! When I get things rolling, I will be retooling the whole blog for a point of contact for the farm. Not a huge priority for me right now, but I have a lot of things going on that I'd like to talk about/chronicle. I want to keep this blog's info too as it is all one journey for us and I like looking back.]
It has been a long haul: helping my dad try to fight Glioblastoma stage 4 brain cancer, losing him even yet unexpectedly, no will, I had the nightmare job of administratrix, family problems holding things up, on two different fronts at that, mountains of paperwork, many phone calls, several back-and-forth trips to three different county courthouses to sort things out, a couple of break-thrus, a fire, lots of theft, lots of cleaning up, still cleaning up... It's getting there. Moral of the story: don't die without a will!
But things are starting to look better.
I felt Sunny Side Acres was the name that best wrapped it all up. That best conveys that there is still hope and a pressing on toward the future. My eldest daughter, Ava, is a budding artist. She had done this phrase as calligraphy: "Keep on the sunny side of life and the light will reflect off of you." It just struck me as perfect. It plays off my old blog name for our one-acre micro-farm which contains as much as we've been able to neatly squeeze into it. And it envelopes the dreams we have for moving forward with the new property and the hope we have to make it all that it should and could be.
I haven't any nice recent pictures of my Dad's farm a the moment. It has fallen to neglect and will require lots of work and quite an investment of money to get it up to where it is something productive. It is basically undeveloped land at this point, with one usable outbuilding on it. The 226 year old farm house was burned down just before Christmas by arson. This has started the ball rolling, I guess. There is a little relief and closure to this for me. We were going to tear the house down anyway, but we had hoped to salvage the materials. I can only imagine there were some awesome timbers underneath, maybe even chestnut! That leaves me sad. I wish I could have used them in building a new house. But at least we are well on the way to getting things cleaned up. Here is a pic of the fire:
I have a lot to update here on the blog. A LOT. For now I'll leave you with a couple pictures of the kids so you can see how they've grown.
Ava's going to be 12 in June. Savannah just turned 7 this month. We're still homeschooling.
And this is my two with their cousins at Pandapas Pond in Blacksburg, VA.
And this little girl here will hopefully give us a couple of kids in mid-May! We bought two older Nigerian Dwarf does back in January. They are registered, so her kids can be AGS registered too. I'm hoping to build up a nice herd. For now, they are the most precious and comical little members of our family and they bring us so much joy. They really brighten my day. That's something we needed more of around here. <3
