New Year New Beginnings

Wow a new year 2014! I am always amazed at how fast the last year flies by!  I'm not sure why that is...  I guess I think it should slow down somehow, but it never does.  

This was the first holiday season in our new house. Yay! We'd been in a house in town with neighbors all around for the last 10 years. We liked living in town for the most part. We had nice neighbors and the kids enjoyed playing with all the neighbor children. Plus I like paved streets/no rough and dusty country roads. But it's just not the same as living in the country.

Before town we were out in the country in a small house with our 2 older boys and 2 little ones. We had a few dogs, a couple horses and a herd of cows. It's where we began our journey with foster care.

We loved the country life and the older boys enjoyed playing in the hills behind our house and swimming in the pond. We even had ducks!  The boys have fond memories of that place. Feeding cows in the winter, branding calves in the spring with friends, playing cowboys or whatever boys do in the woods, riding their bikes up and down the county roads, playing with cousins, and swimming in the pond. It was great!

We eventually had to sell our cows, and we moved into town as the boys were entering high school. As our family grew, we knew we needed a bigger house.

Now we are back in the country but sort of close to town, too. It is a really nice combination of country but close to the conveniences of town.  We finally have our horses back with us which is really exciting! The boys love to ride and can literally walk out the front door and grab a horse.  And as soon as it gets a little warmer, the girls will be doing more riding as well.

Ok well I didn't exactly mean to get off on that tangent.  Ha! But it was fun to go back through the old pictures! 

We are just really excited to now be where we believe God has opened the door toward a dream He gave us years ago. We were never in a position to put it all together before. Well I take that back, it just wasn't His timing. He gave us the vision...call it a sneak peak into the future.  We didn't even totally understand it all back then. It's always in His time that these things happen, and that lesson is a hard one to learn sometimes.  We had to go through a whole lot of refining and growing (literally as a family).  Only God knows what our next steps will be. But I'm here to tell you we are open and ready and listening for His will and waiting for His direction and timing.

And that makes things all the more exciting! 

God gives us dreams a size too big, so that we can grow into them!  But more importantly, we learn to trust Him and His timing, so we begin to understand that we can't accomplish those dreams without Him!