Green Acres...It really IS the place to be!

It was about 4 years ago to the month when Pete and I decided to dig up our roots and move to the country. I grew up on a farm, and Pete grew up on various Air Force bases. I thought I wanted to live in a subdivision and I had wonderful images of my children playing with other neighborhood children in the backyard. That's not really how it worked out at all. We moved to the golf course and since Pete loves golf, we thought he'd be able to play more often. That's not how it worked out at all. :)  

Our house was on a quarter acre. It was a nice brick home but it was almost cookie cutter like the next house.  Teenagers drove golf carts so fast down the road that I didn't dare let Ali ride her bike. The neighbor's yappy dogs barked constantly if we ever grilled out in the backyard. It was time. We were hearing the call of the wild! We put our house on the market and sold it right before the bottom fell out of the real estate market. We lived in a townhouse the last 6 months we were in Effingham, and finally moved to "our little patch of heaven" in the early summer of 2007.

Truly we loved Effingham County. I still miss it a lot of days. I made wonderful friends there and deciding to leave was one of the hardest things I've ever done. I had a great teaching position there and Pete was teaching Agriculture, his first love. We would have to take one heck of a paycut to move here. But, we started to realize how important it was to raise the girls in the country, or at least at a slower pace in a smaller town. Even though it took me a couple of years before I didn't have spells of homesickness, we have never regretted moving at all. In a culture full of plasma televisions, cell phones and xboxes, we feel the importance of small town living is more relevant now than ever. Yes, we miss being a hop skip and a jump away from every restaurant imaginable. We miss taking day trips to the beach and the convenience of having a wal mart literally within sight. But the bucolic setting of our current location is just what the doctor ordered for most of society's ills I think. The girls love digging potatoes in the summer. They think swinging on the farm gates are akin to a ride at a theme park. We love it here. And while this area is not without it's problems, we feel so blessed each time one of the children says, "can we walk over to nanny's and make tea cakes?".  It is worth it. Verily.